There are only two wedding services that can last the whole day and leave you with products that continue to be used after your wedding. These are photography and video. However, only a professional wedding video producer can capture more than just the moment. They can capture the sounds, action, and emotion of your wedding day, before editing and be authoring your story to DVD for you, your family and friends to enjoy whenever you like. it is really all about just one thing. Your wedding day is about publicly making promises to the one you love, everything else is just decoration. Nice, expensive, stylish decorations, but decorations all the same. A professional videographer is the only one who can capture those all-important vows for you to relive forever, including the look in your partner’s eye as they professed to the world their undying love for you. The joy of watching your wedding video is that you can see the real emotion and hear what was said and how it was said at the moment.
Plain and simple – view their work. Look at whole previous productions, not just ‘demo highlights’ or fancy website pictures. Look at the final product. What do the video or DVD covers look like? How good is the quality of sound? Look at more than one wedding video and more than one video producer! Now, you’re not expected to sit through five entire wedding videos to confirm a video producer is up to scratch, but when they’re showing you an example ask to see the vows or credits, or request an example of a particular style or event. If the video is on DVD then it should be a fairly simple task to select certain chapters.
- Do they use broadcast quality cameras? Broadcast quality digital is the way to go. 3CCD (three chip), one third inch CCD chip DVCAM with separate manual sound levelling is the minimum requirement for digital to really be classed as broadcast quality.
- What about broadcast quality audio equipment and discreet microphones? The video equipment and its use is only part of the story. What about the equipment and expertise used to capture the sound? This is one of the most important and difficult tasks facing the video producer. Ensure you listen to the quality of the sound recordings of previous productions before agreeing to hire a videographer.
- Do they use lights or can the cameras handle low light ?
Sit down with your videographer and go through your wedding plan with them. As they will be with you for the full day, it’s important that you feel comfortable with your videographers. This is one of the most important criteria.
Ask whether the person you’re seeing is the same person who will be filming on the day. If not, ask to meet with the person who will, or at least see their personal work.
Ask to see testimonials from previous customers – and if you can match a letter to a production, all the better. If you know anyone who had a professional video of their wedding, ask them what they thought of the service and if they would mind showing you their video. Unsolicited praise is the best recommendation of all!