There’s more to wedding video than you think

Making a wedding video isn’t an easy project. Yet it seems like many people, brides in particular, think the prices for wedding video should be extremely cheap.

Case in point: an acquaintance who does professional video for a living was asked to shoot a wedding video. This bride wanted a full day’s worth of video coverage. This acquaintance quoted her a price of $1,000. She declined, saying that was too expensive.

My hunch is that these brides don’t understand what it takes to put a video together. All they see is you show up at the wedding with your cameras and shoot video. That is the easy part.

If this bride would have realized what actually went into a video she would have realized that the $1,000 price quoted her was a bargain.

Editing process

Here’s just a brief synopsis of what goes into making a video. First, you take the small memory cards from all the cameras you use. In our case, this could be three, four or even more cards. You have to find the video on the cards and download it to your computer.

This leaves you with, oh let’s say 20 to 30 hours worth of video. A video editor needs to go through that video and decide what to include in the final video and what to throw out. That video must be lined up in a video editor and carefully put together.

Then the audio has to line up so that it perfectly matches the video. This sometimes needs to be done by hand in a painstaking way. Then the entire video must be put through a rendering process that can take hours.

This is a very simplistic process, but suffice it to say it takes hours and hours and hours to put together one small video.

When you consider that our wedding videos consist of several components, those hours can be multiplied. There is the wedding ceremony. There is the wedding reception. There is a video trailer in which short clips from a variety of different places are carefully weaved together. Here is an example. There may be a love story video.

Wedding video is expensive

Professional video editors are very expensive. If we charged what a corporate video editor would charge to do a project, our wedding videos would be out of reach for most brides.

So we do our best to keep our videos as affordable as possible.

If you are a bride and groom considering wedding video, I urge you not to ask a friend or a relative to do it with their iPhone or camcorder. I promise you that if wedding video is important to you you will definitely regret that. Hire a professional who knows what they’re doing and can give you a quality product. You want someone who knows how to capture the emotion and sound of your wedding. Moments in Time Images can be that professional for you.