Notes & guides
The Journal
Notes on cameras, formats and how we cover a wedding. Written to be useful before you book anyone, including us.
Guest book
Video guest book or audio guest book? What you actually get back
A camera that waits for people gets the brave ones. A camera that goes to people gets everyone.
Gear
Before you buy a vintage camcorder for your wedding
The camera is the easy part. The tape, the battery and getting the footage out afterwards are where it goes wrong.
Small weddings
Filming an elopement or a courthouse wedding
A wedding of four people still deserves a film. It just needs a different plan for who holds the camera.
Booking
Questions to ask a wedding videographer, and what a good answer sounds like
The best question is the one whose answer you could not have guessed from the website.
Short notice
Booking wedding video at the last minute: what is still possible
It is later than ideal, which is not the same as too late.
Coverage
One camera or two? What a second shooter actually changes
The question is not how much footage you want. It is how many places things happen at once.
Length
How long should a wedding video be?
It is really two questions wearing one coat, and the answer to each is different.
The weekend
Film the whole wedding weekend, not just the day
The wedding day is the most scheduled day of the weekend. It is rarely the loosest.
Guests
Are disposable cameras at a wedding worth it?
As a party game they are wonderful. As the way you remember the night, they need help.
Old tapes
How to save your parents’ wedding tape
It is probably fine. The way to keep it fine is to stop playing it until you know what you have.
Light
When the reception is too dark to film
Your eyes forget a room is dark within a minute. A camera never does.
Phones
Should your ceremony be unplugged?
Everyone who answers this sells the side that wins. We happen to sell both sides of the argument.
The wait
How long you should actually wait for your wedding video
The most common complaint in wedding video is not the film. It is the silence before it.
Raw footage
Can you get the raw footage from your wedding video?
The question videographers least like being asked, answered by one that gives it away.
Sound
How to actually record the vows
The commonest failure in a self-filmed wedding is a beautiful, silent ceremony. It is also the cheapest one to prevent.
Music
Why your film can’t use your first-dance song
It is the first request an editor gets on almost every film, and the one with the least honest answer online. This is the whole of it.
After the fact
You didn’t get a wedding video. Here’s what is still possible.
Almost every post here assumes the wedding hasn’t happened. This one is for the couple whose day is already gone.
Choosing
Photo or video, if you can only pay for one
Every answer to this comes from somebody who sells one of them. We sell both, which is the only reason this is worth reading.
What it costs
What wedding video actually costs, including the tier nobody lists
We sell at both ends of this market, which makes us either the worst people to ask or the only honest ones.
Keeping it
Will your wedding video still play in twenty years?
Not because the file corrupts. Because nobody can find it, and the thing it was saved on stopped being a thing.
Guest footage
Getting the video off everyone's phones without wrecking it
We edit what other people's phones recorded. The single most common way good footage is lost has nothing to do with the camera it was shot on.
The shot list
A shot list for the person who has never filmed anything
Hand someone a camera with no instructions and you get four hours of the dance floor. Six rules and a list fix almost all of it.
The Loaner
Filming your own wedding video: what actually comes back
We hand the camera over and cut whatever returns. After enough of those, the pattern in what works is not the one most people expect.
Weather
What actually happens when it rains on your wedding day
We are named after it, so we get asked about it a lot. Here is the unsentimental version.
The format
What a real camcorder actually looks like at a wedding
Not a filter. Not a preset. An actual tape camcorder, carried alongside the digital cameras all day.
A guide
VHS look, Super 8, digital: what each one actually is
Four words get used interchangeably in wedding marketing, and only one of them describes what you are actually buying.
The Crashers Cam
What happens when you hand your guests a camcorder
The footage nobody hired anyone to get, which is usually the footage you end up watching most.
Approach
Documentary wedding video, and what the word is doing
The most over-claimed word in wedding video, and four questions that get you a straight answer.