How long should a wedding video be?

Couples usually ask this when comparing packages, where one line says five minutes and another says twelve and it is not obvious whether twelve is better or just longer. The honest answer is that a wedding produces two different objects, and they want opposite lengths.

One is the film: the thing you put on for a friend who missed it, and watch again on your anniversary. The other is the record: every word of the vows and every speech, uncut, which you will watch rarely and be very glad to have. Most of the confusion comes from expecting one of them to do the other's job.

The film should be short

A good wedding film is somewhere between four and fifteen minutes, and the lower half of that range is harder to make than the upper. Short is not the cheap option. Every minute that survives has to beat everything that was cut, which means someone watched all of it and made choices.

The reason to keep it short is the rewatch. Five minutes is something you will show people. Twenty is something you will mean to show people. Length that is not earned reads as padding, and wedding padding has a recognisable shape: the same slow-motion walk three times, drone shots of a venue, long stretches of music with nobody speaking.

The record should be complete

The ceremony and the speeches are the two parts of the day where every word matters and nothing can be re-staged. They should exist somewhere in full, unedited, with clean sound. That is a different deliverable from the film, usually called a full ceremony edit or a speeches edit, and it is worth knowing whether a package includes one before you choose on film length alone.

If it does not, the fallback is the raw footage, which contains everything but is not cut together. And none of it helps if the vows were recorded from the back of the room, which is why ceremony audio matters more than any length on a package card.

What length actually tracks

Longer films are mostly a function of more material, not more ambition. More hours of coverage and a second camera produce more moments that genuinely earn a place, so the natural cut gets longer. Asking for a twelve-minute film from one camera and six hours usually gets you the six-minute film with the gaps filled.

It is also why guest footage changes the arithmetic. The best minute of a reception is often shot by a guest at a table no hired camera was near, and a film with access to that material can be longer without being padded.

What we make, for reference

• Our commissioned packages run 5, 8 and 12 minutes, over 8, 9 and 10 hours of coverage. The middle package adds a full ceremony and speeches edit; the top one adds a full day edit.
• The Loaner, where your people film and we edit, gets a 3 to 5 minute cut from one camera or 5 to 7 minutes from two, and every raw clip comes back with it.

Those numbers are the length a day's worth of that material honestly supports. We would rather send a tight five minutes you show everyone than a loose fifteen you watch once.