Edit old wedding videos - anyone do this?
 

I just had this idea, I don't even know if it's a new idea, or if it's already being done...

There are lots of people out there with "Uncle Joe" videos of their weddings from the 80s and 90s. I've seen plenty, and I know they are almost unbearable to watch, even for the bride and groom. They drag on, they're poorly shot, etc. But they have great sentimental value.

How about offering a service to take that video, and create a 5 to 10 minutes edited version set to music and made a bit more watchable?

What do you think?

Could be done, but most of those videos were shot on VHS - and they will suffer from generational degradation if edited and put onto a new VHS tape.

Overall, unless you can get the original raw master tapes and hope that they are still in good quality (VHS tapes degrade over time) - then perhaps you can make a good quality re-edited tape.

Ryan

We've done something similar a couple of times. We had one couple with two VHS tapes of the ceremony which we edited down as a multi-cam edit.

In another case, the "professional" videographer taped the ceremony and reception on three tapes: VHS, VHS-C, and Hi-8 which was handed to them at the end of the day. The family had a VHS player and could only watch one of the tapes and it just so happened that it was ceremony footage that ended right at the "I do" so they never saw the rest of the ceremony. We pulled in all three tapes and did a three camera edit (which was made more difficult because the VHS was stopped and started several times and the Hi-8 was on a tripod that was just a little too low - top of the grooms head was in the safe area!) However, the end result turned out alright.

Interestingly we just received a request about including some 16mm film of the grandparents wedding into a wedding.

It will be expensive to telecine that stuff but think about how cool that will come out.

Not sure about your market questions though, I don't think people will pay much for it and I don't know that you want to try to edit that stuff. Might be way more effort than it is worth.

We tried to edit "uncle joes" footage once for a friend and it was a big mistake. i will not try that again.

Mike

I'm doing this right now for my sister-in-law as a favor. She had an "edited" version of the wedding and reception, but the guy had rather shoddy camera work. But he did include all of the raw footage, so that made it possibly to rework things into a much more satisfactory video. It's taking some interesting editing, but it's coming along all right. I've thought about doing this for people, but I'm not sure if there is a whole lot of money in it. Could be fun to do though. I've had 8mm film transferred to video and used that in projects before too. Turned out pretty well, and only cost me $40 to have 30 minutes of footage transferred to DV.

I do it sometimes.
 

In my area the market for it is very small. But I think it is because most people dont know it can be done.It takes alot of time and is very touchy because its hard to know the value of some clips.It may look worthless and be very important. The money that I have made from a straight transfer with custom titles is much better than the editing route. Weddings are about the only thing I will re-edit because it is much more simple to keep the good parts when you know what they are. But it has not paid very many bills.....

i've done it, editing together about 8 different angles from different cameras and sources... it was fun, but there's not a lot of people that look for this kind of work. also, i'm afraid someone will see it and think that we shot it as well.

One downside to editing this stuff is that if you put your name on it...anywhere, meaning......edited by "ABC Videography"......then viewers may think you shot it, etc........they may think that it is your quality, oibviously NOT a good thing.

I've done it once but did not attach my name or company name to it.....and won't do it again, the video and audio were beyond horrible and it was very challenging to just cut it.

You can put lipstick on a pig, but now it's a pig wearing lipstick.....get it?????

After more pondering and this discussion, I think I'll only do it if asked, and won't advertise or suggest the service.

1. My name is on it, and the poor shooting may reflect bad on me.
2. Clients may get unreasonable expectations - after all, I'm working from their crappy old video.

Yeah, hey Chris...if you do these...my advice is to not place your name/company name on it.....but you could still do the edits and charge accordingly.

I did this very thing to my own wedding video, but I don't think it would be much fun with someone else's.

By the way, mine was on VHS, and after capturing with a relatively new vcr, edited and compressed to DVD, I thought the quality was darn near equivalent to the original VHS. I saw very little degredation myself. That's not necessarily going to be the case for every tape though... just my experience.

Good luck!

Dan

I understand the issue of being unable to place the company name on the piece - but you could always increase your fee because your name won't be included in the footage. In another words: how much is it worth to you that your name is not included in any of the footage.

I think I would include the company name in the "edited by: ..." part in the credits then that way you can give the appropriate folks credit for the footage (or pictures) that they shot.

Regards,
-Michael

I know there is at least one UK company that specialises in this. It is hard enough to work with another pro shooter let alone an amatuer that makes every mistake in the book and then some.

Point is to provide a service that is needed
 

I think the point being made here is that is this a legitimate service to consider providing. I have taken 8mm and Super 8 film and video taped it while projecting it on the wall. This was stuff 30 years old and more, and the clients were tickled when they got a new video tape. While the quality of the shooting is not what you would shoot, it still may be as important or more important than anything you can shoot contempraneously for the client.

I did a memorial video for my own mother. All we had, other than still photos, were a few feet of 8mm film, and some VHS tapes taken in the 80's and early 90's. The resulting memorial was precious to the family, despite the less than perfect initial shooting...

As to the wedding idea, All it will take is a bit of imagination, some well placed music to make a nice project out of one that was originally a disaster. Preservation of what there is, and improving it for the client is invaluable to the client.

Chris Barcellos

Hey Chris,

You may want to think about telecine the 8mm footage to your native medium such as dv cam or whatever you use. It would look much nicer than shooting the projection. Yeah, telecine costs more but it looks much nicer.

I think Chris makes a valid point, especially if you're trying to run a "profitable" business......projects like these generate income and if you're slow with other projects, why not tackle some of these. You could have two weeks of nothing coming in, but a few of these edit projects could pay the bills.....and yes, money is important when you are doing this for a living.