Skype ceremony

[David Schuurman]

Hey folks,
Just want to share.

Today I shot a wedding with a canadian gal and an australian bloke. His family back home wanted to watch the ceremony live so I coordinated with them before the wedding and we set up a live skype convorsation for the entirety of the service, we even had the grooms sister do a scripture reading over skype and projected onto a screen. It really was quite fun to set up and figure out how to do. Downside of that was I had to shoot in 4x3 SD so that skype recognized the camera I was feeding to it.

This was also my first wedding where I went to the Bridal prep, that was pretty neat.

Anyway, just wanted to share something that I found to be really cool and worked out really well.

Anyone have any stories of cool things they're doing at weddings?

[Matt Barwick]

Good story Dave - very cool. Nice it went off without a hitch too!

One of the last weddings I shot there were a few people unable to attend for a variety of reasons, so the couple had some good friends film it with their 3G phones and stream it live to those people. A really nice gesture.

Who would've thunk it 5 or so years ago?

Matt.

[Wee Seng Tor]

I think it's a refreshing idea to me !!.. Indeed a website could be setup to do live conferencing type like skype.... since the technology for video conferencing is available. and make it like a permanent feature ? Like a live streaming in the CNN news ?

Then you could tell your customers to log on to www. to watch your wedding live.. wow.. how much to charge them for the service ???

[David Schuurman]

Wee Seng,
I looked into cheap/low cost options for setting up a live webcast and Skype just seemed to be the best option for a 2 way broadcast. Especially since it's free. Skypes resolution is pretty good too.

I forgot to mention a mistake I made. When the grooms sister and brotherinlaw came up on the screen, with their audio, to do their scripture reading the metronome from garageband was clicking away (because I was recording the feed form the soundboard onto my computer) in the background. I had realized this would be a problem the night before at the rehearsal but I forgot to turn it off on the day. Oh well I fixed it for the next time they came on.

[Wee Seng Tor]

Could you roughly describe how do you setup this skype live broadcast ?? I have some thoughts of it when I saw your title.. but would like to know in more detail..

I don't think it's easy and it should not be a small crew to do all this ..

[David Schuurman]

I don't think it's easy and it should not be a small crew to do all this

It's not particularly difficult at all, but I would reccomend having a dedicated person only doing that and not shooting for the wedding video.

I set up an internet connection at the church, ran ethernet cable through the back of the organ and around the other side of the church to my macbook pro. I ran a dvi-vga to a projector in the corner and I had an audio feed coming into the computer form the sound board and and audio feed going out to the soundboard. I had an HV20 connected via firewire to the computer and used it to feed skype. When the officiant announced the scripture reading from australia we brought up their audio and brought them up on the projector screen.

Reason I suggest having a dedicated crew member doing this is because
a) you have to shoot in SD for skype to recognize it.
b) you can't move your camera from it's one position
c) your camera moves have to be very slow and deliberate or else it'll chunk up the signal and they won't be able to see much.
d) really detracts from shooting for the wedding video as you have to put so much thought into it.

hope that helped.