This is a cut-n-paste from the article I posted on
my website. I'll leave off my list of few of the many reasons to hire a pro, as the story sorta lays it out on it's own.
This is a true story. Some names and details have been changed to protect the innocent (or guilty, depending on your perspective).
My wife and I were at a coffee shop, meeting with Lynette about her upcoming wedding. She had seen our demo, looked into our services, an she absolutely loved what we had to offer. There was just one problem - she didn't want to pay anything remotely close to our regular rates. We offered some options to her, such as our affordable payment plan, but she had her mind made up: There was no way she would spend over $1000 on her video, especially as she put it, when Uncle Lenny offered to record her wedding for $50.
We politely explained reasons why we felt skipping a professional videographer would be a mistake, but Lynette's mind was made up. Uncle Lenny was going to do her video and save her piles of cash.
About four weeks after her wedding, Lynette gave me a call, asking for help. Apparently her uncle Lenny had let her down in a major way. He was smart enough to use two cameras, but he couldn't figure out how to work his free editing program. After about a month of trying, he gave up and delivered her "video" to her (which by the way was also her wedding present!). The "video" was two miniDV tapes, completely unedited, with labels written in pen stating "Wedding video by Uncle Lenny!" (yes, with the exclamation point.) Especially sad was the fact that Lynette didn't even own a camcorder that could play those tapes! She had paid $50, didn't get a wedding gift, and now she couldn't even watch the unedited raw tapes!
She asked me if I could take Lenny's videos and edit them into a watchable program for her, and I agreed. She brought over the tapes and we reviewed them. The video quality was poor, and the audio was terrible. To make a watchable DVD, I told her the least it would take me was nine hours of work, and at that I started on the job.
In the end, my labor costs came to about $975 to fix Uncle Lenny's mess. Between that, what she paid Lenny in the first place, and not getting a gift from Lenny, she wound up spending more money than if she had just gone with us in the first place, and her final product wasn't nearly as good.
It's a sad story for her. She was actually lucky I was in a benevolent mood - her bill should have been about $150 more, because I actually went down to a friend of mine who masters audio for a music studio in the cities, and had him do a cleanup on the audio to make it at least listenable. But since she hadn't asked and I hadn't quoted her on that, I ate it.
The funny thing was that she was only looking for the most basic package we offer, which is only $999. In the end, she wound up spending $25 more, and lost out on a wedding gift (though if Uncle "Lenny" gave gifts like he gave videos, she probably wouldn't have wanted it!). Plus, while I think I did a pretty darn good job at making those crappy consumer camcorder-shot tapes sparkle, her final product was still nothing like what it would have been. Both cameras were so zoomed out you could barely make out any details, and if I hadn't had the audio tweaked it would have been intolerable. (Even with mastering, the audio was only barely tolerable!)
So if any brides stumble through these forums, take warning. You'll either hire a pro before the fact or after the fact. Either way it will cost about the same, but your video will be infinitely better if you start out on the right foot.
And in closing, yeah yeah, I know a lot of you guys charge way more than $999 for your base package-We're in a 100,000 pop. college town surrounded by 50 miles of farmland in every direction. There ain't no money up here.
