Paul R Johnson
April 4th, 2016, 03:50 AM
I don't do weddings - ever (apart from this one)
My son used to work with me. While we were away one year, he met a girl working on the same show. They got married in January.
They were adamant they did not want a wedding video - and getting them to agree to a photographer was hard enough.
I tried really hard but failed. They're both into unusual ideas, and I came up with one. Apart from my shoulder mounting cameras I use for my video work, I've also got lots of gopros, small handicams and smallish cameras I use for conference work, that does have point and shoot auto settings. So my idea was to hand out cameras to guests - gopros for people who knew little about video, Chinese gopro style ,4 of them, for people who might be, er, less than careful), and progressively more clever ones to people who fancied them. In the end I had 13 cameras. Instructions were simple.
the wedding, the reception, the evening - shoot as much as you can. Please don't zoom, just leave the cameras on wide angle.
The results have taken months to collect. The final camera having arrived back this week after being lost in luggage and forgotten about. The big problem is simply the amount of footage and loads and loads of duplicates. worse still is that somehow, we've also ended up with so much mismatched formats - somehow we have NTSC at 30fps, PAL at 25, then some weird mixes of HD formats - so a few clips at 720 followed by 1080. Others discovered the zoom, and a few found out how to digitally zoom and we have 30 minutes of wobbly cam. I decided the best way was to do a time line, start to finish, then lay each usable clip down in sync. Premiere needs each sequence to be a consistent format, so I picked 720 as a useful compromise, converting each clip. It also required various cropping and stretching.
Now the damn thing won't render out - unknown errors stop the process, so I'm now breaking the whole thing down into chunks. the wedding clips rendered, but the next bit, the reception is really playing up. I'm gradually shortening each clip until the render error doesn't happen, then, I'll have to bring them back into a new project. trouble is while a few of the errors I'm finding occur at edit points - usually the ones where theres a short crossfade, other errors creep in into what look like trouble free sections.
The video certainly has a fly on the wall flavour, but is an editing nightmare. I still have, even with this many cameras, a few missing sections that nobody got, plus the colour balance between clips is absolutely dreadful - gopro to gopro even looks different.
What appeared a novel approach is logistically something I never want to do again. Cutting between shots of the same event really means cutting out wobbles - and really, only the very extreme ones - few people seem to appreciate how to hold them steady, and one person shot all their material in portrait!
If anyone suggests you try this approach, be wary. I'm struggling to find 1 minute of useful material from maybe an hour of recording - and one person had nothing I could use at all - nothing! on a full card!
My son used to work with me. While we were away one year, he met a girl working on the same show. They got married in January.
They were adamant they did not want a wedding video - and getting them to agree to a photographer was hard enough.
I tried really hard but failed. They're both into unusual ideas, and I came up with one. Apart from my shoulder mounting cameras I use for my video work, I've also got lots of gopros, small handicams and smallish cameras I use for conference work, that does have point and shoot auto settings. So my idea was to hand out cameras to guests - gopros for people who knew little about video, Chinese gopro style ,4 of them, for people who might be, er, less than careful), and progressively more clever ones to people who fancied them. In the end I had 13 cameras. Instructions were simple.
the wedding, the reception, the evening - shoot as much as you can. Please don't zoom, just leave the cameras on wide angle.
The results have taken months to collect. The final camera having arrived back this week after being lost in luggage and forgotten about. The big problem is simply the amount of footage and loads and loads of duplicates. worse still is that somehow, we've also ended up with so much mismatched formats - somehow we have NTSC at 30fps, PAL at 25, then some weird mixes of HD formats - so a few clips at 720 followed by 1080. Others discovered the zoom, and a few found out how to digitally zoom and we have 30 minutes of wobbly cam. I decided the best way was to do a time line, start to finish, then lay each usable clip down in sync. Premiere needs each sequence to be a consistent format, so I picked 720 as a useful compromise, converting each clip. It also required various cropping and stretching.
Now the damn thing won't render out - unknown errors stop the process, so I'm now breaking the whole thing down into chunks. the wedding clips rendered, but the next bit, the reception is really playing up. I'm gradually shortening each clip until the render error doesn't happen, then, I'll have to bring them back into a new project. trouble is while a few of the errors I'm finding occur at edit points - usually the ones where theres a short crossfade, other errors creep in into what look like trouble free sections.
The video certainly has a fly on the wall flavour, but is an editing nightmare. I still have, even with this many cameras, a few missing sections that nobody got, plus the colour balance between clips is absolutely dreadful - gopro to gopro even looks different.
What appeared a novel approach is logistically something I never want to do again. Cutting between shots of the same event really means cutting out wobbles - and really, only the very extreme ones - few people seem to appreciate how to hold them steady, and one person shot all their material in portrait!
If anyone suggests you try this approach, be wary. I'm struggling to find 1 minute of useful material from maybe an hour of recording - and one person had nothing I could use at all - nothing! on a full card!