My Wedding Trailer

[Michael W. Niece]

Since the wedding teasers are becoming more common, here's my first attempt. It's short; 55 seconds.

http://www.svpcolumbus.com/videos/BernardTrailer.wmv

-Michael

[Ben Lynn]

I really liked it Michael. I've seen some of your trailers before and the voice over you use is solid. I also like that it's clean, simple, and to the point.

A few tight and wide shots may have broke up the mediums that you had.

Ben

[Michael Nistler]

Hi Michael,

Very nice teaser - it should be very powerful once you've added the music and perhaps a few of the B&C voices. Congratuations on the story-telling approach, editing so it's not in chronological sequence. I'm curious on what type of edit shot you were trying to use. It wasn't a flash-back, wrap-around, or punchline as far as I could tell - what was the emotional effect you were seeking with the non-chronological sequence?

The one thing that caught my eye was that you used disolves on ever scene change - most would use simple cuts with only an ocassion dissolve.

Again, great work and be sure to share the final with the music.

Warm Regards, Michael

[Michael W. Niece]

Michael, I'm not sure what you mean by adding music... there was music, and a cut of the groom vows. As for the emotional effect, I used the music to determine what type of shot to use. It's easier to rearrange the clips instead of the music. I wanted the teaser to make them feel like they couldn't live without seeing the rest (and it worked), and I've found that getting them to feel "sad" or at least "mellow" is the best way to control just about any crowd. The two parts where they weren't dressed up were from a love story shoot, by the way.

So there wasn't any planned timeline jumping; it just sort of happened. But I think it worked great because they are bounced all over the place. If you're going to drag someone's emotions around, take it everywhere.

For the transitions, I never use a hard cut in a wedding video. This is especially true if I'm expecting them to be mezmorized by the voice and music. Hard cuts are distracting in any wedding scene, in my opinion. A 10-frame crossfade is better than a hard cut, to me. If I was trying to be more light-hearted and wanted them to laugh or not sit still then I'd use simple cuts, probably, because they are drawn into the fun and excitement and are willing to accept a fast-paced scene jump.

Also, I used Twixtor for the slow motion. That plug-in works wonders, although it eats every last cycle my CPU can dish out. When I'm rendering that 55-second clip (which takes almost 2 hours for a 2-pass WMV at 2MB bitrate with 128k MP3 audio) I literally cannot even check my email while it's working. Sad. I need more power.

Thanks for the feedback so far. I was worried that 100% of the responses wouldn't like it. At least from here that cannot mathematically happen. :)

-Michael

[Michael Nistler]

Hi Michael,

Odd, for some reason my Media Player was muted - duh, no wonder I didn't hear anything (can't recall I've noticed that lately before watching other media). The audio track was awesome!!! And the voice complemented the music quite well. Personally, I'm picky about the audio track and see too many focus on the video but overlook good audio. The audio quality was excellent, voice pitch perfectly emulated Hollywood, great pace and cadence, I could go on but suffice it to say you've got a Bingo!

BTW, the video quality was excellent. Tell us more about the compression setting, etc...

Happy holiday, Michael

[Sean Seah]

Wow I'm really impressed by the VO! Could u tell us more on the equipment and software knowhow?

[Michael W. Niece]

I can't explain anything about the VO equipment and software; it was hired help from another state. For professional voice artists, the quality was far superior to what I could do with my iRiver or Fisher Price microphones. The voice is not very deep, but it has that certain bass depth that carries it very well. I wanted a voice that would sound commanding enough to control the audience perception of what they're seeing, yet caring enough to sound like it was there at the wedding and still moved by the day's events. I'm beyond impressed with the voice track that I was sent back. Plus, the turn around was very fast.

As for the compression settings, I used Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 to edit and compress it (using Adobe Media Encoder). The WMV is 720x480, 2Mb average bitrate, 128k MP3 stereo audio track. The "allow interlace processing" is turned on to eliminate the sheered effect seen in Twixtor; it's a very strange artifact that happens, and extremely distracting. It's almost like the "badly deinterlaced frames" effect, but each deinterlaced frame looks about 10 times thicker. Big bands across the screen when there's lots of screen movement... bad news.

Much like Michael said, I'm very picky about how the audio sounds. My process for editing is I scrub through all the footage while listening to wedding songs. Eventually a song pops out and matches the wedding day's mood, so that's the starting point for me. I like the audience to experience a lot of different emotions throughout the DVD I make for them, so it's not uncommon for me to edit the DVD way out of sequence because different songs come to mind at different times of editing. It's taken me as long as 8 hours just sitting there trying to find the right music for a given segment. Then, the music makes the edit happen. They say that artists don't see faces and eyes and noses when drawing portraits... they see curves and lines and shadows. I'm like that with editing; I don't see the raw footage, I hear the emotions of everyone (even the background people). They're paying me to re-create the day, so accuracy is priority for me. If the bride cries during their ceremony, she needs to be Niagra Falls when she sees my work. If she's not, I didn't do a good job. That's my vision, anyway.

So, Michael, yes audio is important. Timing the words and music is crucial. The quality of the audio track is equally important as the moodiness of it. Pops, clicks, rises or drops of sound volume or muffled words... they kill videos, no matter how subtle. I probably spend 1/2 the time tweaking audio tracks as I do editing the video.

-Michael