Pretend it's spring.  The air is warm, inviting, but you know the water is still "brisk".  You've climbed up the high-dive and having second thoughts, but everyone is watching so you suck it up and dive..

That's how it was for us, "diving" into hi-definition wedding video production.  We'd bought an FX1 two years ago, but have mostly used it in standard 4:3 mode as a fourth camera to our three Sony VX2100s.

Yes, hi-def has been "out there" for several years now, but for most of the country, the market hasn't exactly been beating our doors down demanding hi-def videos.  In fact, we haven't gotten a single request for a hi-def wedding or corporate shoot and very few standard widescreen requests.

But people have those widescreen hi-def televisions now and we're just starting to get a few request for 16:9 wedding videos.  You lose so much resolution doing those with 4:3 CCDs, that I just couldn't bear doing another, so we took the plunge and after careful research, we bought a Canon XL-H1A and a Canon XH-A1 so we could do three-camera widescreen shoots (with the FX1).

We decided that if we liked the Canons enough, we'd buy one more A1, otherwise we'd wait for the '09 new camera rollout.

We only had three days to acclimate with our new cameras.  These Canons give more customization control than any cameras we'd ever used, so the myriad of manual and menu choices seemed somewhat daunting.

Our biggest concern was light.  Hi-def CCD cameras want more light than our VX2100 workhorses.  At the rehearsal, we had them set the lighting the way it would be at the ceremony and our hearts sank.  Even our old Sonys would be gray and dismally grainy in this light!

Suddenly, the sound/lighting guy says, “Oh, I forgot the altar lights!” and with a single “click”, the world is right again.  The overhead lights created a mild “raccoon” effect where eyes are in shade, and I ask about spot lights and whether they have a dim mode that would just fill in those shadows.  Talk about luck!  He answers, “Sure!” and the lighting becomes perfect.  The processional and recessional will be tough, but the main “show” is lit just fine.. (click the 'Read more' link below)

They have a guitarist providing the music.  I mean ALL the music!  That was a surprise, but it makes my audio job a bit easier as all I have to do is setup a mic on a stand, run its xlr cable to my digital recorder, and the music is covered.

The next day (wedding day) we headed out to the reception area as we always do, ever since we were once given a wrong address for a reception.  In the past two years since we started using a camera crane for receptions, we generally use this visit to setup the crane.

We’d shot at this venue (a country club) before, but this time they’d crammed more tables into the room and there was seemingly no place for the crane.  I set the crane up along a wall between two tables in the tightest space I’d ever had for the crane, but somehow it worked out.

We were scheduled to start shooting setups and preps at 4:30 and the ceremony is at 7.  Plenty of time and no stress. Or so we thought.  I’d left my clothes in the car, but Jean had carried hers in to the motel.  As we finished a late lunch and prepared to drive to the church, she realized she left her clothes at the motel.  No problem, there is just enough time to drive back to the motel, change, and get to the church.  Well, there would have been if not for the accident that delayed us half an hour.  As we exited the highway, we were trapped in what looked like a very long parking lot.  It took thirty minutes to move the next quarter mile, as police, wreckers and hundreds of cars all stood nearly motionless, as if someone had “paused” a video.

As we finally fought free of the tangled mess of cars, Jean called the bride and told her we would be a half hour late.  In all our years of shooting wedding videos, this would be the first time we were late to a wedding (though we were a little late to a reception once when we’d been given the wrong address).

I setup the mic for the guitarist, hid my digital recorder behind a vase and ran the power cord around the piano leg to an outlet bar.  The coordinator frowned.  “We can’t have any wires showing.”, she declared.  I smiled, “Oh, don’t worry about that little wire.  You won’t even notice it after the guitarist plugs in his amplifier and runs his wires.”  “Oh. OK.”, she replied.

The shoot went fine.  I found myself wishing I had a 10w light, dimmer switch or barn doors for my 20w, a few times.  I may check out the new Litepanels LED lights.

At the reception, the lady who sat directly under our craned camera, seemed concerned, so I tried to reassure her, “Don’t worry.  We’ve never had a camera fall on someone’s head.  Can’t afford to, these things are just too expensive!”  That got a big laugh and she seemed to relax.

The shoulder-mounted Canon XL-H1A, though twice as heavy as a Sony FX1, didn’t wear me out because my shoulder took most of the weight.  Trying to do the floating-camera moves were tiring though and I found myself doing shorter, fewer float moves.

I’d asked the best man to be sure to come and get me if they decided to “decorate” the couples’ car, but at the exit I saw that it had indeed been “decorated” without the requested notification.

Too bad.  Video can tell the story of this mischievousness so much better, during the actual act instead of after the fact.  The best man’s excuse was that they weren’t sure they had the right car.

The next evening, we watched tapes from our two manned cameras.  We were ready for the worst.  We’d read that the Canons can be bewildering to new owners, especially under the pressure of a live event, but we felt fairly comfortable with them and were hopeful we’d done well with them.

Our hi-def television screen came alive with wedding scenes.  The difference was amazing.  You could see not only eyelashes, but the radial lines in iris’s, all the detail of the wedding gown, everything was breathtakingly “real” and colorful.

Well, most of it was.  There were a few parts with grain, mostly the processional and recessional, but those merely fell to the category of “ordinary video”, as the grain was so fine it seemed to knock the detail of hi-def down to everyday video resolution, without being distracting.

Jean relied on automatic focus throughout most of the reception, and despite the knock on the Canon A1’s auto-focus, we didn’t find any problems.  The reception would not have video’d well without our on-camera lights, but even VX2100s or PD170s would have had a hard time with this dim venue.

My next hurdle is the edit.  I’ll be updating my Intel Quad-core 3gHz computer from Vista 32bit to 64bit, and my editing software from CS3 to CS4, before starting on this project.  I’ve done a few one-track hdv edits before, but this will be my first 3 and 4 track project (we used a hi-def Vixia on the parents for the ceremony).  Stay tuned.

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