TAGfan wrote:
Honestly people who go that route probably are doing it for the novelty of it, not because they want awesome wedding videos. The $99 must be a starting price - with lots of up charges.
I'm not suggesting it's this because I don't like their quality, but do appreciate the concept as I've piloted the concept with great results
So what happens when the novelty, which moved forward by the ubiquitous low cost technology ( iPhone and Elph), what happens when this medium becomes the necessity
I'm almost ready - took me a year. It will be encouraged for all my future weddings because of the emotive response I had from my first one and because there is money to be made if one figures it out
ryantimm wrote:
Honestly, I can not see someone who has any sort of manners or common sense to just stand in the aisle or at the altar.
But I guess this goes down to how the bride and groom handle their request for video.
Two years ago I photographed my nephews wedding. While at the church before the wedding,
I met the person in charge. She mentioned that I wasn't to go up on the alter. No problem I said, I had no plans to.
She stated she told the last photographer the same thing and he DID go up on the alter.
This was a big church, and there was plenty of room to shoot up the aisle and on the sides of the alter.
So a "professional" photographer after being told not to go on the alter did so.
So now you have told your guests to film away and that their video will be part of the wedding day video.
It's not hard to imagine a guest who doesn't know any better or was not told they couldn't go on the alter doing so.
I can also imagine guests buzzing around during the first dance, speeches, bouquet toss and other events capturing the precious moments for the bride and groom.
Yaryman wrote:
Two years ago I photographed my nephews wedding. While at the church before the wedding,
I met the person in charge. She mentioned that I wasn't to go up on the alter. No problem I said, I had no plans to.
She stated she told the last photographer the same thing and he DID go up on the alter.
This was a big church, and there was plenty of room to shoot up the aisle and on the sides of the alter.
So a "professional" photographer after being told not to go on the alter did so.
So now you have told your guests to film away and that their video will be part of the wedding day video.
It's not hard to imagine a guest who doesn't know any better or was not told they couldn't go on the alter doing so.
I can also imagine guests buzzing around during the first dance, speeches, bouquet toss and other events capturing the precious moments for the bride and groom.
Nope, you only use those who are discrete with the digital elphs and who are still enjoying the event as they normally would. Occasionally they see the op for the clip
Yaryman wrote:
Two years ago I photographed my nephews wedding. While at the church before the wedding,
I met the person in charge. She mentioned that I wasn't to go up on the alter. No problem I said, I had no plans to.
She stated she told the last photographer the same thing and he DID go up on the alter.
This was a big church, and there was plenty of room to shoot up the aisle and on the sides of the alter.
So a "professional" photographer after being told not to go on the alter did so.
So now you have told your guests to film away and that their video will be part of the wedding day video.
It's not hard to imagine a guest who doesn't know any better or was not told they couldn't go on the alter doing so.
I can also imagine guests buzzing around during the first dance, speeches, bouquet toss and other events capturing the precious moments for the bride and groom.
no. it's really not. In fact, a guest is much less likely to get up and go onto the
alter than a paid photographer. It sort of like the distribution of responsibility principle
in which people in large groups tend to not take action because they assume someone
else will do something. Nobody wants to be the one to get out of their seat and look
like a doofus. Now... an unstable and socially challenged uncle? Maybe. A drunken
group of college friends? maybe. But under normal circumstances, I can mostly assure
you that no guest would walk up onto an alter.
jprezant wrote:
no. it's really not. In fact, a guest is much less likely to get up and go onto the
alter than a paid photographer. It sort of like the distribution of responsibility principle
in which people in large groups tend to not take action because they assume someone
else will do something. Nobody wants to be the one to get out of their seat and look
like a doofus. Now... an unstable and socially challenged uncle? Maybe. A drunken
group of college friends? maybe. But under normal circumstances, I can mostly assure
you that no guest would walk up onto an alter.
I am with Jason on this one. I can not see anyone, other than a socially challenged uncle getting up and disturbing a ceremony at the altar. I have done weddings for 4 years and have yet to see something like that happen. Most people have common sense and if a bride is worried about it, I wouldn't think she would give the camera to someone she suspected would do something like that.
Also, I think we too often think we are the only ones there that are capturing memories. This is a family and close friend celebration. Guest will be buzzing around with their own iphones and cameras anyways. That's the world we live in. Technology has made it easy for guest to have these devices and know how to use them. For us to get mad, because guest will be buzzing around is kinda ludicrous in my mind. Shouldn't we be able to get the shot regardless?
Great! if people want jerky, poorly framed, funniest home video style wedding coverage. I personally can't stand to watch that "wave the camera around" style of videoing. Amateur guests would not be using a tripod. The result would look horrendous on a big screen. I am beginning to feel sick just imagining it now.
Depends on the definition of "experience" ... I saw Jason's link... went to the site, took a look at the "how does it work" thinghie and got the impression that if you want to YOU can edit your own using their software... it kind of made sense that at $99 they were indeed relying heavily on you doing that bit of the work.
Then again... the $99 is the "foot in the door" price ... they can probably still make it profitable (albeit minimally so) at that price point with formulaic editing... considering that they don't have to do any filming they could pay someone $60/hr (actual employee cost... including cost of hiring, taxes, benefits etc. you know not what's in their paycheck) and maybe the employee can crank out three decent edits every two hours... putting the labor cost at $40 ... which leaves $49 to pay for overhead, taxes and still eek a (small) profit. Those are of course totally arbitrary figures... they could probably bring their labor costs down fairly significantly from there.
Shoot it yourself in the UK are getting pretty popular. They have pretty decent cameras with external Mics and video lights. They're quite a bit more expensive though.
I've had a few couples use them and to be honest it was a lot less hassle then a pro videographer for me. The people shooting always came and said hi were really nice and always stayed out of the way. I think they knew I was the hired pro and what they were shooting was just for fun so they really did their best not to impact me.
I saw a lot of traffic from a source I never heard of before and found this forum!
It's been interesting to see the discussions and feedback from everyone. Just to clarify, we do actual, professional quality editing using FCP. And our business model is not based on traditional editing techniques. We have our own proprietary software and processes, which allows us to offer our services for such low costs.
It seems like some of you like the idea and were talking about ways to do it yourself. We have a simple alternative that would allow you to do just that, without figuring out a process and needing to do the actual editing. You make money (up to $300+ depending on the package) with minimal extra work.
I don't want to turn this into a sales pitch, so if you're interested you can simply click on the Partner with Storymix link in the upper right corner of our site for more details. Hopefully this doesn't offend everyone, but we'd like to help photogs tap into the 70% of couples who don't get a video.
