Sunny Outdoor Event Shoot

Handheld, No Tripod, 60fps Ultra HD

After working on a few videos about the different scene files for the Panasonic HC-X1, I decided to actually go out into the world and test one of them out to see if it would be useful.

I had an outdoor festival I would be filming for fun, so I decided it was the perfect opportunity to test out "Spark", a color profile Panasonic suggests you may want to use for events like weddings.

According to Panasonic "Spark" is:

"Suitable for recording with richer color level and sharper contrast. The picture will be showy with vivid colors and give a bright impression."

While it wasn't a wedding, this event fit the same type of bright and vivid mood, so I switched my HCX1 over to Spark and filmed the entire day of events (you can watch the video below).

The main thing that I noticed when filming with this profile is what it does to the sky. It really whites it out even when it is exposed correctly. After recently trying so desperately with a CPL filter to make the sky blue I thought I'd hate it, but really it kind of adds a heavenly look to the shot as you can see in the sky below.

When the sky isn't in the photos, the shots are even better (as usual on a sunny day), but I really like the vivid colors of this profile. It really captures the bright colors of the facepainting, balloon animals, moon bounces and other children's activities at the fair. Vivid blues, pinks and greens.

One of the other reasons I filmed with this color profile is because this video needed a really quick turnaround time. I didn't have time to do ANY post production color corrections or color grading and I wanted to capture a bright look. Bam. Job Well done Spark.

Bonus: For every event I cover, I like to film a time lapse to use for my YouTube end screen version of the video. In this case, I thought balloon animal guy would be the best. I didn't want to lug my tripod around all day, so I used what I had. The old "wallet tripod".

If you have any questions about Panasonic HC-X1 scene files, or about how I shot this video, please leave a comment. Keep in mind these blogs are also valid for the Panasonic AG-UX180.