Wedding Video Styles

There are countless styles of wedding videos, but most can be broken down into two main categories -

Journalistic style wedding videos tend to portray your wedding as it actually occured. Generally, the entire ceremony is recorded by multiple video cameras and the tapes are edited together into your wedding video. Often, wedding videographers will include your preparations and even the photo shoot, but these segments are often "Romanticized" by artfully editing short clips together and using background music instead of the actual audio. The reception may be shot in either journalistic or Romanticized style or a combination of both.

Journalistic style wedding videos tend to run between forty-five to ninety minutes but can even run up to two to four hours.

Romanticized style wedding videos (aka stylistic wedding videos, or short form) show highlights of the wedding, short clips edited together largely with background music and little of the actual audio, often with a lot of time-shifting. Romanticized wedding videos generally run from as little as 10 minutes but on average 30 to 40 minutes.

Romanticized wedding videos may be more palatable for friends and distant family who would prefer a shorter, faster-moving video. Brides who don't want to miss a thing, will prefer the longer journalistic style of video. Often, a good choice is to get both. That way you have the full-blown "theater version" to enjoy and keep for posterity and a shorter "made for TV" version that friends may prefer.

You may occasionally hear the term documentary style wedding video. This is similar to the journalistic style, but without intermixing romanticized scenes and with a more strict adherence to the timeline of events.

One style is not necessarily "better" than the other, nor should one style necessarily cost more or less than another. It is important to note, however, that most wedding videographers are more adept at one style or another, so it is important that a prospective bride receives a demo video that accurately portrays the style in which the videographer will be shooting her wedding.