Every wedding we capture memories in motion at is unique and even moving. It never grows commonplace. Please take 4 minutes and view highlights of Katie and Merrick Miranda’s wedding from May 16th. This has moved some to tears!
Please feel free to leave your comments after viewing.
There are important distinctions that exist between house audio or public address and cinematic.
House audio must be optimized for understandability in a room that has dynamic auditory characteristics. Sometimes people are coughing, children may be excited, someone may be sitting next to sound absorbing curtains while another may be sitting against a bare wall reflecting sounds, and the list goes on. To optimize understandability a public address system will therefore have a narrow band of frequencies it will put on the loudspeakers usually centered around 3,000Hz, optimum for the human voice. Cinematic audio, or audio for television, serves an audience of just a few people in a relatively small room. Under these conditions the audio is much easier to understand. This leaves room for a much wider band of frequencies enabling a more natural and rich sound.
Capturing audio from a variety of church sound systems we have noticed the practical effect of all this. The sound we typically capture from a house sound board sounds fine in a video until you compare it with audio we captured at the same event with our own microphone systems.
Please view below a sample video illustrating the differences between a typical house audio system and audio for cinema. In the video you will see a pastor delivering a wedding message to a couple during their wedding ceremony. The pastor is double miked wearing both a house microphone and one of our wireless microphones.
The video is in HD high definition so if your bandwidth is too slow click on the HD icon to switch to standard definition. Please bear in mind that this is raw video and not necessarily representative of the quality we release.
It is extremely rare that a wedding or event can transpire from beginning to end without somebody making a mistake somewhere. What is worse is when something unfortunate happens during a significant event that you had wanted to cherish for a lifetime. Your videographer can only capture what transpires and cannot turn 
the clock back to have your wedding party perform their part again without the mistake. After all, your videographer is only human. …or is he? Maybe he has abilities far beyond those of mortal man, is able to jump across tall buildings with a single bound, faster than a speeding bullet, etc.
Technology allows us to do amazing things in the edit room that just might persuade you that your videographer has abilities far beyond those of mortal man. In the example to follow we captured the lighting of a unity candle by mothers of the bride and groom. The mothers made a mistake. They were not supposed to actually light the unity candle. Their task was to light two individual candles which the bride and groom would later use during the wedding ceremony to light the unity candle. For the plain and simple video of the ceremony we will just show what happened at the wedding. However, when we develop the music highlights video, artistically composed from events of the entire day, we want to avoid triggering unfavorable memories and center on developing those which warm the heart and will continue to warm the heart ten or more years down the road.
So, what are we supposed to do? We could simply leave out the mothers lighting the candles which would be ashamed as this is symbolic of families joining. What we did was not change the story but simply remove a part of the image which would draw attention and the viewer’s eyes to a mistake. Viewers will still know what happened but at least the showing of the candle lighting in the music highlights video will not be highlighting a mistake.
Please watch the twenty-seven second video below where you will see the actual footage of the candle lighting and then you will see how a portion of that same footage was used in the music highlights video.
One of the skill sets videographers acquire is an ability to capture memories in motion at weddings and events such that the photographer does not get in the way. When you interview potential videographers you might consider asking them how they deal with photographers with respect to keeping their presence in your video at a low profile.
The optimum you are looking for is a set of vendors for your wedding or event that will work together for your benefit. The people you hire need to have a sense of urgency that they must communicate between themselves insulating you from various anomalies of the day. Your vendors need to have a concept that helping other vendors to succeed is part of their job.
The answer you are looking for from videographers you interview can take a lot of shapes. However, the answer that works is the one that does not center narrowly on videography but rather on a much larger perspective. Your videographer must express as part of his or her answer that part of a videographer’s job is accommodating the photographer’s needs. You also want to hear what the videographer does to insure that the
photographer reciprocates. Listen for specific words addressing what steps are taken to that end.
When there is bi-lateral communication between the photographer and videographer you become the winner.
Capturing memories in motion by videogrpahy at weddings, we see a variety of vendors serving a variety of functions. We take special notice when we see a vendor who goes out of his or her way to serve the client. Such was the case at a May wedding we did this year where Trilogy Band provided dancing music and entertainment at the reception.
We prepared a complementary promotional video (adapted from our client’s HD composition) for the band which you can view below. Often times portions of a client’s video can be easily adapted to serve as a promo as was the case here.
When we capture memories in motion at weddings we are careful to observe what memorable services vendors are providing at the wedding. One such especially memorable event was a horse drawn carriage ride at a wedding we did in May provided by Ann Arbor Carriage.