Bride Regrets Not Hiring a Professional

[osbornes5]

This is a copy of a post I made in the bride's section. If you want to add "advantages" to the list please do it over there (here is the link: http://weddingvideodoneright.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=293&sid=aaf21ae82cb215bf848ca3d1f9108e20) so they can benefit. If you just want to talk about the issue do it wherever you feel it is appropriate. It is a classic tale that is played out thousands of times a year in different ways:

I have done a couple of recitals for the owner of a local dance studio and though I already knew the folks beforehand, I have come to know them even better. Recently the sister of the owner, who is also an instructor at the studio, got married. I burned her a wedding demo of my work and gave it to her some time before the wedding. I am not a high pressure salesman and so I never asked about it again. Recently I spoke with a friend of the couple and the bride herself. She decided to let a friend do the videography. The friend said, "There's no need to go to that expense...I can do it for you." She had a brand new camera (Palmcorder or whatever they are called) and was confident she could do a great job. To make a long story short, it was a disaster. The lady got about fifteen minutes of the ceremony. No pre-wedding footage, no post wedding stuff. Only a small part of the ceremony. What she shot was all hand held...no pro tripod...no tripod at all. All shot from the congregation too...no face shots. Then the battery died and that was the end of it. The lady never charged the battery! Can you believe that? Of course there had been no pre-wedding footage (preps) to begin with. The bride is sick. She told me that she had thought about calling me but let it get too late. Then this relative offered to do her a great job and it all fell apart. I am posting this here to encourage you to consider a pro. We use enough cams that even if one fails, as they sometimes do, you still get a good shoot. The cameras are far far superior to begin with. The sound is far superior too with most videographers. The advantages are too many for me to mention right now. Of course this all depends on hiring the right pro, which is what this web site is all about. Maybe others can begin to list other advantages to hiring a pro.

[On a Roll]

I think a "regrets" link on the main page of the site might even be warranted. I've heard several stories like Osborne's myself, including my own.

I hear this one a LOT when I talk to people about what I do:

Them - "So, what sort of videos do you do?"

Me - "Well, I specialize in wedding videos, but I do a little of this and that too."

Them - "Oh, wedding videos? You know, I wish we would have hired a videographer to do our wedding."

And at that point they usually break into the story of how they thought it would be an easy way to save money, but now they really regret it, etc, etc...

And I have my own, fairly embarrassing story. Here I am, a professional videographer, and when I got married, not a one of my cameras was there. That's right, in all the hubub and insanity of our fairly quickly put together wedding, I totally spaced off getting someone to run our cameras, and it wasn't until we were leaving for the reception when I realized what I had done. To this day I still feel terrible about it. We rounded up a lot of the videos shot from other guests, and we'll see if we can put a half-decent video together, but you know, once that day is over, it's over, and you can't just re-shoot it. Most of my guests were from out of town, so even if we could have rounded up a posse for some retakes, all of my family was long gone. That just goes to show, even we pros aren't immune to a stupid mistake like this.

Seriously, I can't stress it to my clients enough, a wedding video that's done right is the most valuable possession you have. Cars and homes can be replaced, but those memories cannot.

Hope that helps convince someone to hire a pro to put their video together.

[Forever Endeavor]

Anybody see the Simpsons movie? I'm not a big Simpsons fan but I had to watch it just to see this part: The Simpsons house is burning to the ground and Marge runs into the burning house and unlocks her memory box to retrieve her most valuable possession. Her wedding video. That was awesome.

[HankCastello]

We once had a lady send us several tapes to edit.  It was the bride's aunt and she had assured the bride that there was no reason to spend "a lot of money" on a professional wedding videographer, since she had a really nice camcorder and could borrow two others from relatives.

This lady was a professional photographer, so the bride can almost be excused for thinking that this would work out.

Naievely, I told the aunt we'd handle the edit for her.  The camera positions weren't great, the framing was bad, auto-focus hunted a lot and exposure was terrible.  The images from all three cameras were so dark that I finally quit even trying to correct them, since the amount of correction required would actually end up making the images worse and I didn't want our editing work to be blamed for the bad images.

You won't believe how terrible the audio was!   You can't understand the minister, music sounds awful and you can't hardly even hear the couple's vows (and even  the CIA's gear couldn't make them clear enough to understand!)

The reception video/audio was no better at all.

But you know what I noticed even more than all these technical mistakes?  The video had no heart!  Even if everything had been technically perfect, it was just CourtTV video!   Even most of the poorer professional wedding videos we've seen had "heart".  Professional wedding videographers - even newbies, seem to know that they are telling a story and they need to get the audience involved.  But this photog lady didn't have a clue.  Her field works in an entirely different universe (I know - I used to be a photographer!).  It isn't easy to go from thinking like a photographer to thinking like a videographer. Though some of the photography skills do translate nicely, the basic philosophy does not.