Hello all,

I just finished shooting my first wedding. It was for a friend and I just made this wedding recap to see how things turned out and to share with you fine folks. Some of the shots are a bit shaky but im working on it. Overall, I was very pleased with how things turned out. Thanks

http://www.brickroadvideo.com/profitceremony.wmv
Song: The Rose by Bette Midler
Size: 34MB
Right Click and Save Target As.

Hello all,

I just finished shooting my first wedding. It was for a friend and I just made this wedding recap to see how things turned out and to share with you fine folks. Some of the shots are a bit shaky but im working on it. Overall, I was very pleased with how things turned out. Thanks

http://www.brickroadvideo.com/profitceremony.wmv
Song: The Rose by Bette Midler
Size: 34MB
Right Click and Save Target As.

I see the shakiness you mentioned, but that aside, I really liked it! Even the song fit really well (and I'm no bette fan). The shots of each of the bridesmaids coming in seemed quick, but I know you were trying to fit it all to the music. For the first one, I say you did very well. Best of Luck!
Cara

Congrats on filming your first wedding. The wonderful part you did it for a friend. Easy way to get your feet wet. One very distracting element is that your slow-mo killed my eyes. It's like it was shot at a high shutter interlaced and then you slow-mo'ed it and it was just to distracting. I guess the best way to say it is that it was like two images on top of each other. Besides that good job on your first attempt and keep pushing yourself practicing and viewing others clips and get some training material (it helps (helped me)). Take Care thanks for sharing

Monday

John:

For some reason, the aspect ratio seems off, and everyone seemed a bit "squished" to me. Did you do some fooling with the aspect ratio, or am I just imagining things ? It was showing in about a 16:9 format on my Real and Media players.

It was 16:9 and I dunno whether its when I captured it in Premiere or when I rendered it but its like super huge. Maybe that can explain it. The only other thing I can think of is im doing something wrong with the footage.

Also, on initial exports the interlacing was awful. I applied a Field Interpolate filter but now it makes the slow-mo all blurry. How can I go about fixing it?

"It was 16:9 and I dunno whether its when I captured it in Premiere or when I rendered it but its like super huge. Maybe that can explain it. The only other thing I can think of is im doing something wrong with the footage."

When you brought into premire did you have the settings right for the project? Try importing it into another timeline with different settings.

Yeah I will try that. When I set the footage into the timeline on a widescreen project it doesn't fit. I have to "interpret" the footage from Square Pixel's to Widescreen. I assume thats not what it's supposed to do. I will keep trying with different things. Thanks for the quick feedback everyone.

John:

What are you shooting with ? Looks to me like you are shooting in with a 4:3 format, and squishing it into wide screen. If thats the case, you will have distortion. You would need to crop if you are doing that.

I shoot with a Panasonic DVC30.

It's wierd because it shoots 16:9 but when I do a widescreen project it imports it as 4:3 so I have to interpret the footage which is where I assume I get the "squished" look. It all fits fine in a standard project. I checked the camera and it was in Normal so I don't know.

Nice work there. The clip of the empty church could maybe be left on the cutting room floor--there are people standing around and a man walking upstairs. I like the song and the overall speed of the clip. Maybe at the very end you could add in the live audio of "Mr & Mrs whoever" and the crowd clapping.

How many cameras did you have going and where were they located? Are all your cams DVC30s?

One DVC30 and one Canon consumer backup. I moved around quite alot during the ceremony. There were three balconies so I took advantage of it. I see what you are saying about the church shot. I have another church shot but I liked this one better for some reason. I'll keep the announcment of the couple suggestion handy. Thanks for the reply.

It's wierd because it shoots 16:9 but when I do a widescreen project it imports it as 4:3 so I have to interpret the footage which is where I assume I get the "squished" look. It all fits fine in a standard project. I checked the camera and it was in Normal so I don't know.

Upon further review I realized that Normal IS 4:3 on a DVC30. That's why it's all messed up lol. Oops...I'll just redo it in a 4:3 project. Squeeze is the 16:9 mode. Chalk this one up to experience.

One DVC30 and one Canon consumer backup. I moved around quite alot during the ceremony. There were three balconies so I took advantage of it. I see what you are saying about the church shot. I have another church shot but I liked this one better for some reason. I'll keep the announcment of the couple suggestion handy. Thanks for the reply.

Glad you got the format issue resolved.

As with others, I don't think you need the empty church shot. I would lose it. And the church sign is a bit strange for what looks like a beautiful building. You can stretch this particular piece by putting bride entering in slow motion. As it is now, she looks a bit jerky as she is coming in. Slow motion would make her more graceful. Take it down to something like 60% of normal.

I found a better church shot actually with the stain glass windows in the background of the first church clip. I'll probably use that. I don't have any of her before the wedding. I made a final cut of the video. The link should be updated tomorrow. I appreciate all the comments

John,

Just a few more questions...did you also shoot the reception? Do you have a longer cut that you are giving the couple? If so, how long is that cut going to be?

Thanks for sharing your clip!

Did not get to see it. Takes forever to download. Must be a slow server:(

It was nice and the pace of the editing and slow-mo matched the clips, however, if this is suppose to be a highlight piece of the wedding, why don't you include the reception and dancing as well? It would add so much more emotion to it. You would have to re-edit everything a bit faster to fit other footage into it though. You could also try to have everything black and white to represent the highlight piece as a more nostalgic emotional fell to it. If you really want it to be more moving, you should include more close-up shots too, if you have any. But good learning experience.

Just a quick note. This isn't what i'm giving the couple. This was just a demo I made for my website. This would be something that would maybe go between like after the ceremony but before the post-ceremony (guest greetings, photo shoot ect.) if that makes sense. I should of said a ceremony recap not a wedding recap. Anyway the server is running just fine. You probably hit a time when 23 people were downloading it at the same time. Also my final edit of this is now up. I fixed the aspect ratio and fixed a few things based on some suggestions. Any other comments will be for when I make the real ceremony video for the couple.

The shaking is fairly minor, so you might use something like 2d3's SteadyMove video stabilization plug-in. It will soften the picture a slight bit (zooms in for correction) but will smooth the footage. It is just a suggestion. I used SteadyMove Pro for a wedding I shot last year because after an hour and a half into a Catholic wedding the camera started moving more for some reason...:-) The results were quite nice since I used a minimal amount of correction on most shots.

Quite good John. Well done. The pacing was smooth, and most of the shots were very good. The biggest distraction to me was the sequence of shots showing the bridesmaids and bride coming down the aisle. A better tripod and/or more practice panning would definitely have helped those shots. Otherwise I rather liked it. A few of the shots were dark and you could tell that the gain had kicked on to compensate, but most of them were well exposed. Nice work. Keep it up.

I know exactly what you're saying. I was so nervous when things started that my hand was shaking lol. As the ceremony went on I relaxed a bit. I got another wedding coming up at the end of August. I'll practice a bit before then. Thanks.

I didn't read all the posts before mine, but to say the least it looks very good for your first time.

Now for a bit of criticism (remember this was your first time, so it was good):
besides the whole resolution thing, I noticed you tended to chop off the tops of people walking up the aisle - I would try to avoid that, just zoom out if you are afraid of cutting off body parts (lol) The slow-mo stuff got a bit anoying after a little; while It's good to use it in some places but it combined with the slow zoom was ...well weird. I personally like showing more people and more actions over stationary things. But this was a re-cap not a highlight? or are you calling a re-cap a highlight video? sorry got confused on that one. Hope this helps a bit and I am not repeating (much).
~Matt

I originally put a wedding re-cap and that confused people I guess as they wanted to see the reception as well. I was probably being redundant in my description but oh well. As far as slow mo stuff is conerned I thought it worked well with the pacing. In the first cut of this I had some things not in slow motion and it looked awkward. The resolution thing is fixed so I don't know what you mean by that. I put a letterbox on the footage to make it look widescreen so I assume thats where the "chopping" stuff occurred. I was thinking about taking that out but I've been working on the DVD and haven't had time. Thanks for the comments.

I think it looks good. I to am starting out and hope I will be brave enough to post one of my first clips for critique.