It can be sometimes difficult in our profession, to separate art from business. Yes, editing, like shooting video, is an art and yes, we want our artistic flourishes to show up and enhance our wedding video's story-telling. But wedding videography is also a business, and if it takes you two weeks to edit a wedding video - assuming you're not getting paid $10,000 per video - then it's not going to be a profitable situation for you and you may soon find yourself in another line of work.

It's not the intent of this article to turn your editing sessions into business-like speed editing sessions, but rather to save enough time on the more mundane aspects of editing wedding videos to allow you to spend more time allowing your artistic abilities to flow, and hopefully, to keep up with your workflow with profitable efficiency.

'd recently had a conversation with another wedding videographer who felt that time-saving techniques had no place in wedding video editing, that they would save little actual time and would detour the editor's thinking into a business channel rather than an artistic channel. I respect this fellow's opinion and did my best to put the two theories to the test.

'm quite mindful that techniques that work well for me, may not work as well for others and vice-versa. However, I would think that techniques that do work for me, just might work well for you also, so with that in mind - here goes..

spa shoot was chosen for our test video. This is similar to shooting bridal preps, or receptions, but perhaps just a bit more unpredictable - at least for a guy. My wife and I covered the bride and bridesmaids visit to the spa, using our usual shooting techniques. Jean shoots as though it were a one-camera shoot. This means she often shoots wide to allow for unpredictable movements, although she also dives in for the occasional close-up and super close-up. Her clips have more continuity since she is nearly always recording.

Meanwhile, I roam around looking for the "great" shots, unusual angles, different perspectives, etc.

Before editing, I separated clips into folders - opening; preps; ceremony; photoshoot; reception; exit; and spa. I started editing by looking over each clip in the "spa" bin from both cameras and selecting/trimming clips as I went. I found it difficult to keep continuity time-wise or even creativity-wise, and after three hours, I wasn't half finished. So much for my friend's editing style.

Next, we'll open a new timeline sequence in Premiere Pro and start over. This time we'll select all clips from camera #1 (Jean's camera) and click on "Automate to Sequence". I've already trimmed each "keeper" and cleared (removed) the others), then click the "Ignore Audio" checkbox because we'll be setting this to music. We now have twenty-two minutes of clips arranged chronologically on our timeline and the clock says one o'clock in the afternoon.

Let's go through these clips, starting at the beginning, using "Ripple Delete" to remove some clips and trimming others with the "Ripple Edit Tool". We'll use shortcut keys wherever possible - "Shift-Delete" for "Ripple Delete"; "Page-Up" or "Down" to move through clips, etc. We'll scrub through the clips rather than actually playing them, saving even more time.

Our thinking through all this should be that we're doing a "rough cut", merely removing clips or portions of clips we would not want to consider further and trimming the remaining clips so that just their best stuff (with a little extra for future editing) remained.

We're now ready for clips from Camera #2. We'll return to the timeline start ("Home" key), and double click the first Camera #2 clip you want to consider using. Trim it in the Source window, use the "Page-Down" key to get to the point you want to insert the clip, then "Insert" the clip ("Comma" key), choose the next clip from Camera #2 and repeat the process until you've gone through all the clips.

Choose an appropriate music piece or create one with Sonicfire Pro or equivalent software and lay down the audio track.

It's time for the final editing phase. Return to the begining of your timeline and play the sequence, stopping to trim each cut and set transitions to match the music.

By the time I'd finished this, barely an hour had passed. That's a dramatic time savings by anyone's calculations.

Note that unlike shooting a ceremony, this type of shoot doesn't lend itself well to Premiere Pro's Multi-camera functions since there is no relevance in synchronization and it might be quite possible you'll want to show two disparate clips shot at the same time, etc.

I used to burn a "beta DVD" of my finished wedding videos to make notes on the final "touches", audio tweaks, etc. Anymore, I save much of this time by running my video straight from the computer, through a firewire cable to the camera, then analog cables to a tv. I keep both a 36" standard tv and a 36" hi-def widescreen tv, so I'm ready for either format. This way, I can make any needed changes and immediatly see the results, again saving time.

Gotta problem with something here? Got some tips of your own? Please post your comments.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.