A wedding experience!

A wedding video experience - by Gillian Gatland

"Mum, can I borrow your camcorder"

Sounds innocent enough doesn’t it? My son David’s girlfriend Cheryl’s sister (have you got all that?) was getting married, and they couldn’t afford a video. He says ‘i’ll pay all the costs, it will be part of my present to them’. David is a keen photographer, and he knows how to frame a shot, and had heard all my strictures on keeping the use of zoom and pan to an absolute minimum. So off he went to Essex for the weekend with the camcorder.

He came back with about 50 minutes of film for editing. Shouldn’t be a problem, leave the service pretty much intact, the reception speeches ditto, a cross section of guests and posed shots of bride and groom at the photo session, and a bit of the evening fun, some appropriate background music, and there you are

Well....the wedding took place in the hotel, not a church, in a large room. It had a large bay window, with a table set in front of the window, the lady who conducted the ceremony behind the table, her back to the window, bride and groom in front, the guests all back in the body of the room. Bright sunshine outside. You know what I’m going to say, don’t you. Backlit pictures. David didn’t know my camera well enough to correct for it, so I had to try in the edit. Juggle around between light and contrast. I got a result that looked acceptable, but the computer screen is always darker than a camera or TV screen., so you don’t know it’s right until it’s seen on the TV.

I did a test run, and because all the scenes had an effect added, it took ages to render too bright. Plus the picture had a sort of oil on water rainbow sheen visible. Did another with lower settings, more time rendering....better for brightness, still the oily sheen. Another try, more rendering, a shade darker than ideal, but no oily sheen. OK - go with that.

David was halfway down the room, and unlike most churches these days, no microphones. I turned up the volume in my software. Now I can hear them OK, but also the camera hum!! So, I opened the avi file in Soundforge, made a wav version, opened that in another programme to get rid of the hum. (I can’t afford the state of the art Soundforge noise reduction plug in) Then, opened the edited avi file in Premiere having started in Pinnacle Studio 8 which I find much more user friendly. Expanded the sound wave form. brought in the cleaned up sound file and matched the waveform up so the new sound was in synch. then muted the original sound.

There was only one real photography glitch, Cheryl was one of the bridesmaids, sat at the front off to one side, facing the guests. David thought it was about time he had a shot of the bridesmaids so swung the camera that way. Non church ceremonies are shorter. There he is, camera on the bridesmaids, when he hears 'You are now man and wife. You may kiss the Bride’! So he swung back hurriedly to the bride and groom to get the kiss. Luckily the bridesmaids were sitting still, so I slowed down the clip of them, and was able to delete David’s sudden pan while keeping the soundtrack intact.

I had to do the same noise reduction exercise for the reception speeches, but the rest of the edit was fairly straightforward. I alternated between shots of the guests, and the ‘official’ poses, to allow for the official group to reform ‘out of shot’, and tried to get as many guests as possible dancing, while overlaying just one dance track to the various ones on the film. David filmed the last dance, a nice romantic number which the bride and groomed danced alone, and was able to fade out on a smashing hug as the music ended.

David has DVD burning capabilities on his computer, but I don’t. As we have a family ‘network’ of computers at home, I made a DVD compatible file of the finished video, and David transferred it to his computer. However conventional burning software did not recognise it as a DVD file, so we had to get a ‘freeware’ programme off one of his friends, that did, and we burnt 2 DVDs, one for Bride and Groom and the other for Cheryl, both of whom have DVD players. Mums and Grans etc needed VHS tapes. The supplier I usually get my short VHS tapes in presentation boxes from was shut for the holiday weekend, and 1 wanted this done so Cheryl, who was staying with us that weekend, could take them all away with her. Luckily a nearby club member had some spares he could sell me. David had acquired writeable DVDs, with full size cases, for a remarkable 65p per DVD and box, from a friend who bought 100 somewhere online.

David had to give me quick lesson in Photoshop to make the DVD box insert as my easy to use CD cover software didn’t do DVD inserts, and finally it was all finished.

Total outlay, about £10!!! Time and effort priceless !!! Boy does he owe me a BIG favour:)