Lost Wedding Footage

[Taky Cheung]

Just want to share this story....

I lost the content of one memory card of a Mexican wedding. It has footage of prep and church ceremony. I have footage from the other camera but it does affect the church ceremony at the beginning that I have no front angle of the bride walking down the aisle.

I was panicked and fell into depression. I decided to edit the best I could with what I have. I use still photos (from my photographer) of the bridesmaids and bride walking down the aisle to replace the missing footage. I upgraded their package with multiple audio track feature and bi-lingual menus. Give them extra copies of DVD and BluRay. Then made a personal delivery to their house and apologize in person last Friday.

They are nice and easy going people. Very understanding of the situation. We watched the highlights together at their house. The groom is more concern about the bloopers. We had a good laugh watching it together.

Aura & Jose - Cinematic Highlights on Vimeo

[Noa Put]

That is one of my biggest fears, good to hear it turned allright for you. I was late at a wedding 2 months ago due to a traffic jam caused by bad weather but was lucky to be able to use the photographers photos to fill in the blancs. The couple was a bit dissapointed I missed the first part of the day but where happy with the results, I also trew in some freebies.

[James Manford]

Photos are a life saver ...

You can fill in the blanks with some smart editing using photographs of anything you missed or aren't simply happy with!

Glad the couple were pleased in the end for both of you. One of my biggest fears as well is the memory card failing on me ...

I wish the EA50 had dual SD Card slots I would always record to both!

[Noa Put]

you can add the pricey fmu128 :)

[James Manford]

You're right! But at the price point of that drive, i'm willing to take the gamble :D I already film on 16GB cards and with 2 cameras. But having DUAL slots would of been the icing on the cake :)

[Taky Cheung]

Its not memory card failing. To make the story short, hdd crashed. Dropped the backup hdd by mistake while trying to rescue. Tried to recovery from memory cards and hdds also. Still one particular folder content can't be recovered. All options and recovery process has been exhausted .

Lesson learned, now doing two backups as well as cloud backup. Sh!t happens in life.

[Kyle Root]

Even with the redundant FMU, the NXCAMs can still lock up and you'll lose footage because the camera is not recording.

It's happened to me 2x this season. Once at a wedding and once at a dance recital.

Fortunately at the wedding , it was at the very end as the couple was leaving the reception and going to the car. It took about 15-20 seconds to turn off the cam and get it rebooted and such... any other time, those 15-20 seconds would have been a make or break moment say during the ceremony kiss, cake feeding etc.

For the rectial, I was able to use a dance from the evening performance to replace the day performance that was messed up.

Bottom line is, for weddings and events, having multiple cameras is the answer.

For both of those jobs, I was a one man show. I have since raised my prices for weddings to include a second shooter for the reception and also bought a Canon XA20 to compliment my NX5U. I have an HV40 that I was using as a backup, but the XA20 gives me the same 20x optical zoom range, which is very important for weddings and events.

[Rob Cantwell]

I'm very aware of this too.
I was sorting out clips a few days ago after the weekend and as i was going through them with mounting panic, i couldn't see my A roll footage of the ceremony, i trawled through and thought maybe i hadn't hit record!!!! I felt sick!
i eventually found it tho, it was in large review but didn't show on the preview the church interior and in my panic i didn't notice that the clip length was 1:12:36 i though it was just another small clip a minute and 12 seconds long not one hour 12 minutes and 36 seconds. phew!

I always have footage on a external drive and a DVD and keep the cards untouched til editing is finished.

cant be too careful.

[Chris Harding]

Hi Rob

I know the feeling exactly and it's downright scary! I was logging the clips a few weeks ago from a Saturday wedding and the bride had an unusual lineup where she did a very special FD dance not during the dances BUT in between the speeches! Obviously it was an essential to shoot and I remember doing it!

It was on my B-Cam so I logged all the speech cutaways from the 1st speech which was the Father's one and then obviously expected a 4 or 5 minute clip to be there before I had the cutaways for the 2nd speech. All the clips were between 10 and 15 seconds and I even played each in turn to make sure I hadn't missed the dance clip but it had gone missing!!! Blind panic of course cos that was something one just cannot tell the bride .."I screwed up" I checked and double checked and nope the clip was not there!

I edited the speeches anyway and did the first speaker when suddenly I realise the guy in the shot was NOT the father of the bride but the father of the groom. I skipped to speech 3 and found her real dad and with great relief after the cutaways was a 5 minute clip of the FD dance ..all intact!!!

If you lose footage it's critical to make 300% sure that you just haven't missed it!!! I know it's petty but I set my Sony so they emit a beep when I hit record just as an extra confirmation that I'm recording. My Panasonics sadly didn't have the feature with the AC series but use as many prompts as you can to make sure you are actually recording!!

Chris

[Steve Bleasdale]

Well done for using photos, I did a stupid thing the other week, on the entrance I forgot to press record on the merlin and cam and did not have anything for the entrance but the photog gave me some shots of his and I used motion in cs6 and created a little sequence and all was fine...