Wedding Video Preview (30 seconds)
 

Here's the YouTube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52C4_OZ6rjM
(please watch the video and post comments)

I've decided to experiment with making a quick "coming soon" video immediately after filming a wedding. I then send the couple a link so they can watch the video and stay excited about it (in other words, keep talking about it). I'm also hoping they forward the link to friends and family to get them talking about it.

My goal is to increase awareness and desire in my market for wedding videography. I just got back from a wedding photography convention in Las Vegas and several of the top photographers create a quick slideshow of 30-40 pictures to post online right after the wedding. They claim to have had great success from it.

Here's hoping it does something for me.

Some nice shots and a good pace. The couple will love it and hound you day and night now to see the rest :)

Good luck

Dave

lol, I hope they do (I think). d;-)

Good stuff Travis....I liked it;)

I loved the B&W!

....and I would bet good money that the bride is showing it....and emailing the link to her friends and family, thats a given.

Keep up the good work.

Cheers- Joe

Thanks, Joe. Some of the timing is just a hair off, so I'll fix that for the next one. I wish YouTube had a bit better compression, but oh well, at least it's easy for people to use.

The bride wasn't exactly emailing everyone yet. I called her today to make sure she had gotten the email and it turns out she hadn't even checked it yet, lol.

Travis,
Very creative and a nice concept. Good work!

Thanks, Bob!

Nice marketing idea. Ties in with the photogs who are sending the digital "proofs" to the clients

Thanks. The trick that I'm trying to figure out right now is how to do something like this when I'm in the peak of wedding season. In order to make it I have to capture the footage, but I only have so much hard-drive space and that'll be gone fast when the weddings start stacking up.

I thought about just using a tape from the photoshoot coverage to make the "coming soon" videos, but it wouldn't be as good as having a variety of footage from the day in there. I don't know.

You could grab a firestore and use it throughout the day while recording to tape as well. You can then download it right away and you will have brief shots from different parts of the day, a quick capture and edit, and barely and disc space would be used.

I like that idea.

Cool Video
 

Hi Travis,

Excellent promo - loved the snappy pacing, ECU beauty shots, music integration and B/W with excellent shading. Thanks for sharing your creative work, right on!

Warm Regards, Michael

I'll have to look into that option. I don't know much about firestore's. Thanks for the idea!

Thanks. I wanted something short, with quick pacing so you only got glimpses of the wedding day (making you want to see more). I also wanted to make it like a template, so I can quickly do it again with the next wedding using the same audio and cut marks.

Thanks again for the kind words.

Personally
 

I can't stand 1 sec. 2 sec. cuts... drives me crazy. At the third cut I was getting dizzy and lost me. Just personal opinion. I noticed that a lot of wedding "previews" are doing the MTV, Truck Commercial, TV Show 2 sec. cut (because if they didn't the dailog and action of the lame amatuer actors can't hold the scene) thing and just wondering if... this approach is working? I prefer yes, a decent pace but longer, smooth cuts with good camera work. I had a promo vid for weddings a year ago and thought I'd try the "quick cut" style and one bride actually said, "I can't see what's happing, the camera keeps cutting all over the place. Do you have a demo that shows the real wedding?" Just my input... but willing to change my thinking if the buck stops there.

First of all, thanks for your honest opinion. I appreciate that more than you know.

Now, to start answering your questions, no, I don't show a quick-cut demo to a prospective bride. I pop in an actual wedding video and run through it with them. The pacing of an actual wedding video is much slower than that.

Now, something to keep in mind is the age of your clients. If they are fairly young, then they are more than used to seeing the quick-cut, MTV-style of video, as much as it might not appeal to the older crowd. In my experience people like to imitate what they see on TV, and that applies to how they want to see themselves on video. That doesn't mean I'm going to make a "quick-cut" wedding video, but I will definitely incorporate that style into portions of it where it applies.

Now, the intent behind this 30-second trailer that I did was to give a series of short glimpses from the wedding day, and leave the client (and whoever the client showed it to) wanting more. The pacing was intentional, both for the reason I just explained, and for the fact that I wanted to build an easy-to-replicate template for future "trailers". My couples aren't currently paying for this little feature (in fact, they don't even know I'm going to do it), so I needed to create a trailer that was both effective and easy to edit again and again.

Hope that explains where I was coming from.

Travis, I watched your promo trailer again (still loved it) and wondered why nothing I've ever posted to YouTube (or Google for that matter) ever looked that good .. mind you, I've only tried a couple of times

What's your secret?

That's funny, I didn't think it looked all that great. I don't really have a secret, I just export a Final Cut Pro movie from FCP, then pull that into Cleaner 6 and use the "medium" setting for the WMV export. I then upload that to YouTube and they do their own compression.

My WMV file looks MUCH better than what's on YouTube, but YouTube is just so easy for people, and it's more likely to get forwarded on I think.

If you have any other questions, just let me know.

youtube says what format will produce the best quality onto youtube...
* MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format
* 320x240 resolution
* MP3 audio
* 30 frames per second
i assume the compression wont be as dramatic if you upload with this format

Great info. Thanks for posting that!