I don't shoot wedding videos, but I do shoot stills. Lighting is probably the biggest factor in getting good video OR stills, and each wedding has different requirements and constraints. I've had some where I could not use flash during the ceremony and could only shoot from in front of the altar, and others where I could set up a bank of strobes and go anywhere I wanted. That's why I rarely shoot wedding anymore. Too much headache. The cheaper HD cams (CMOS and single CCD) will struggle in low-light conditions, that's for sure. On the flip side, when the light is right there is no comparison betwen SD and HD. It is that stunning when displayed on the proper equipment. The future is HD and even if you're not yet ready to make the leap equipment-wise, start educating yourself on it now. It is quite a different animal from shooting SD. Good luck. :)

I know it is different and am moving extremely slowly. I have one HD cam and rendered out short HD clip and it was a terrble process. My friend who does the huge volume did one HD wedding and then turned around and sold his HD cams, I got one of them. He has THE latest 8 core macs and hated everything about the process. Actually he didn't sell all of his HD cams, but he is stilly buying the SD ones.

I want to shoot HD, I really do, but oh my god the rendering time alone is terrible. Next year I'm buying an 8 core machine, hopefully that will help.

Well, I am working on just a dual core machine fine, but you're right that render times can be exasperatingly long. Fortunately, it can be done while you sleep so if you tailor your workflow around it you can do it relatively painlessly. There's no denying that HD demands a lot more in terms of hardware and time, but once you get your workflow down it is worth it. I love it when my customers see my work and drool all over the checks they write me. ;)

Rick, for some reason you don't seem to understand that I agree with you. :)

I'm just saying that since no one in Jeff's market is shooting 16:9, he's not being left behind--by definition. The point being that he can probably squeak by for a bit longer until he can move up to HD, but that in the best of all possible worlds, it would be best to do so now. Since he can't afford it at the moment and HD isn't necessary in his market right now, he can probably afford to wait a bit if he absolutely must.

Jeff's right though, that's about enough of this. :)

I was just talking to my friend who does all the weddings, (he also does corporate stuff, but mostly weddings) and we agreed when you do any kind of volume epecially weddings, HD is not ready for prime time.

When you have 4-10 projects per week it simply isn't do-able right now.

We are not unaware of the how great the stuff is, but we are wedding videographers and HD sucks in low light.

We have a friend who flys all over the world doing corportate stuff with a high end cam, and yet on occasion he will shoot a wedding for my friend. His footage borders on unusable much of the time just due to the light.

So if you're doing single cam corportate stuff, HD is great, but not realistic for us yet. I'm looking forward to having a second HD cam soon so I can at least shoot widescreen in well lit conditions.

I do understand that. I'm just a believer in staying out front of the competition. He could be shooting in HD and outputting to 16:9 SD with excellent quality and little of the workflow hassles of HD. I know because I'm doing it. My customers require me to provide both since they are the ones distributing and need the widest compatibility possible. I might be hesitant to change anything if I were doing 4-10 projects a week and had to depend on freelance shooters, though. At that level any switch needs to be considered extensively. HD multi-cam shoots are still pretty labor intensive, both in shooting and putting the footage together.

BTW, for the record, I personally am lucky to have 2-3 projects in any given week, (was referring earlier to my friends) but I do get behind especially in the coming months. I can't even imagine the nightmare of my backlog of work with HD...wow. That truly would be scary.

I gotta say that rendering out SD in 16:9 it came out just great. It has black bars on the sides, but it looks just like all the show in SD should look on a widescreen set. I will use that as a temporary solution for customers that want it. I loved watching one of my videos without having to adjust the screen size or having it squished. It's not glamorous, but it is certainly a nice to have in the arsenal. I know if I shoot anything for myself, which I rarely do, I will use that method if I shoot in SD.

Just be aware that if your clients ever watch the DVD on a 4:3 television--say, at grandma's house this Thanksgiving--the image will be both letterboxed and pillarboxed; the image will be a small "postage stamp" surrounded by a black border on all four sides. This is not really a viable option. I strongly advise you to re-render at either 4:3 or cropped for 16:9, but you can do what you like, of course.

Also note, again, that you are throwing away a substantial amount of (already limited in SD) resolution this way.

I tried everything to get my dvd to fill up the screen with out being stretched, If I make a dvd as 16x9 or wide I have bars at the top and bottom and looks stretched, I rendered a mpeg2 from vegas 8 for DVDA as just NTSC video stream at 4:3 and put them into DVDA, when previewing in architect it has side bars, but when I play the dvd on my HD 37 inch tv the complete screen is filled, no stretching, perfect. I tried every other combo and this is the only one that works for me, my tv is set for 720 p.

Yes, but did you ever try watching it on a 4:3 monitor? You have to keep in mind that there are still a LOT of them out there.

The ONLY ways (only!) to acceptably format 4:3 material for DVD's are: 1) Render as 4:3 just as you always have, or 2) Crop your footage to 16:9 as I've explained, and then render as 16:9 anamorphic. Anything else will look very bad on at least one type of TV. Trust me!

Hugh, I apologize if I didn't quite understand what you were saying. Your post is a little difficult to decipher, to be honest with you. :)

No haven't tried on an older tv, but will, seems to me that if its 4:3 to begin with it should play fine, I guess my hd tv might be converting it. all I know that when I made a wide or 16x9 dvd thru architect it was stretched out, and had the black boxes top and bottom. now my mpeg2 is 1440x1080, I am going to try these dvd's on other tv's to see

Hugh, NTSC DVD supports ONLY 720x480, so there's no way you could burn a 1440x1080 MPEG-2 file to a DVD without recompressing. Something is odd about the scenario you're describing, but it's hard to say what it is, because I still can't understand exactly what it is that you've done.

Something shot in 4:3 will not necessarily play back correctly on a 16:9 TV simply because it started out as 4:3--if you render it as 16:9, it will play back as "squished" 16:9.

If you want 4:3 to retain the 4:3 shape on a 16:9 TV, you must render it as 4:3 and then set up the 16:9 TV to play the video with pillarbox (i.e., bars on the sides). If you want to cut off the top and bottom sections of your 4:3 video so that it will fill a 16:9 TV without "squishing," you must crop your 4:3 to 16:9 as I've described above (meaning that you have to manually cut the top and bottom off of your video) and then render to 16:9.

Again, these are the only two ways to deal with 4:3 footage. Any other process might look good on a 16:9 TV but not a 4:3 TV, or vice versa.