If the DJ says he's going to wait, then he should. A DJ shouldn't be self-centred. How's the client going to feel if the ceremony flows perfectly, thanks to the DJ, but the best moments are not captured for posterity?

This made me laugh!

I don't do weddings and events but as a documentary videographer, I ALWAYS know how much tape is left in the camera and if I've finished shooting something and only have 4 minutes left, I change tape. Tape is cheap and with 60 minute loads in DV and HDV, tape is even cheaper than when I paid $30 for 30 minute BetaSP loads.

Hindsight is ALWAYS 20/20 but in future I'd be a little more proactive with tape changes.

Once again, this is only my opinion, in hindsight, without full knowledge of exactly what happened so please take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Bummer. I've been there. Live and learn is what i say. Like many, i personally would not re-stage and re-shoot anything.

An on the spot solution for the missed soundbite, after the reception, take the time to do a candid interview with the bride asking her about what she thought of the wedding and slide in "i know tonight's kinda special for your dad, what's something you'd want to say to him right now?". Grab her dad, and have him say something to his daughter. Slam those two together, and end it with the brides soundbite at the podium. Cover the soundbites with a nice edit of the father daughter dance backed by a nice soundtrack and you're free and clear.

For the future, it's a great idea to get a compact flash sound recorder for your audio. This will free you up to make a tape change that you can easily cover up with a cutaway in the edit.

One thing I've always done is: 15 minutes left on the tape, is tape done unless its something where I am shooting more than one camera.

But this is one of those things where the bride and groom will never notice, and if they do just simply tell them what happened and if they would like you will shoot some interviews and use the audio as a dub over a cut away shot. As everybody else has said here though, its really important for you to get some kind of audio device, you would not have had to worry about it if that was the case. Also as others have suggested the second camera on a tripod as a safety shot would also greatly improve the quality of your work.

Belgian weddings don't have that many speeches and tradition is always the same, I usually know when it's time to change tape, ony 2 weeks a go I had a wedding according to English/Norwegian tradition and I can tell you they speech a lot. Because I noticed that their speeches were quite long (the best man talked for 25 minutes) I think I used 3 cassettes, sometimes with 15-20 minutes left on it because I didn't want to take the risk of running out of tape. At the cake cutting part they surprised me, I just had about 4 minutes of tape left, which I thought was plenty. After the cake cutting they moved the cake and instantly the music started for their first dance, now that was not what I was used to, with about 2 minutes left on tape I only had one option left; take my backup camera which is always ready to start shooting.

It helps a lot if you know what the traditions are, otherwise you need to be in eagle eye mode all the time and calculate any risk in, a backup camera is in most cases sufficient to help you out of difficult situations.

You've got to make mistakes before you can learn from them.

From now on, every time you stop filming, you'll have a little heart attack, wondering how much tape you have left. That's the great thing about problems - they really improve you as a result of having a problem.

There are a million lessons to be learned like that, and each one makes you a better film maker.

I can't close my front door without jingling my keys now, ever since I locked myself out!

That's funny, I have this habit whenever I leave my house or car. I always pat my pocket to make sure I have my keys, lol.

I chew through tapes like crazy. 4 tapes for a one camera event.... minimum. But 2 of those tapes are going to be 1/3 used or less. Because I shoot one tape (or more) for everything before the ceremony), one for the ceremony, and many for reception. No matter how long the pre-ceremony footage is, I always start the ceremony with a fresh tape. I haven't gotten bit yet. Then reception Always starts a new tape, or sometimes (if I can find it) I'll put that pre-ceremony footage tape back in to finish it off. But I rarely do this because of your example, I don't want the important part of the ceremony to hit with me being in the middle of a tape swap. The April Epic wedding did bite me on that, but only because there was so much footage to shoot pre-reception and post ceremony that I thought there was no way it would chew through a whole tape (it did). It chewed through almost 11 full tapes for all three cameras, but at least the footage looked good.

I could not agree more, and as a matter of fact this happened to me about 2 months ago, where I missed a speech of an old family friend of the bride due to the fact that she refused to meet with me before hand to discuss timing etc....all this because she was too overwhelmed with the prep of her wedding!

Anyway, she blasted me for not getting the old fart's speech, but I had reminded her that we had not talked about anything before hand, and that I was basically filming "blindly". She promptly hung up the phone...lol