Modern technology has obliged us with a number of facilities and wedding video is one of them. Today all the ceremony, rituals, fun and frolic of a wedding can be shot like a film and can be watched again and again and enjoyed. Choosing the right videographer for your wedding cinematography is a big task and if you consider the following things, you can have one of the best professionals.
Experience
Wedding video is a specialty product and you should look out for a person who knows the genre inside out. Like many other fields, the field of wedding videography too is full of inexperienced people who do the job just because they think that shooting weddings is a pretty easy way to make money. But not to worry. There are plenty of expert videographers too who work for genuine reasons. You have to just find out about the experience of the videographer you are planning to hire.
Checking Previous Work and Reviews
You should always check the previous wedding videos the professionals have shot. If they hesitate to show you the same, you can reject them. While checking the films you should watch them from start to finish to check their ability to shoot the entire event competently – it should not be the case that the videographer would just snap some nice-looking shots here and there and prepare a film. And you should also consider neglecting some minor errors because they are possible in a long video.
You can also check the feedback of previous customers of the videographer for which you should take their contact numbers and talk to them.
Choosing the Style
Wedding videos are commonly made in styles like fly-on-the-wall, like reality-TV style, arty, cinematic styles, documentary style, like having voice-overs, interviews, etc. You can talk to the videographer and get information of these different styles to choose one that best suits you.
Choosing the Format
Choosing the right format is also important. High-definition, wide-screen format is the most recommended, because in future it is going to be ubiquitous and if you choose the standard format, your wedding video would appear of poor quality.
It is also recommended that you ask for a master-quality version of original format along with the tapes meant for normal viewing. This is the version before it is encoded or compressed. The benefit of this is you can use it in future for editing or changing it to new formats. Understand that this being an out-of-the-way request, possibly the videographer would be surprised; so, ensure to ask for it before your big day.
Editing
Editing is extremely important regarding the quality of the final version. So, you should enquire thoroughly about it. You can ask questions like:
- What duration the final product will be of?
- Is it possible to make more than one version, like a full version and a short highlight package?
- What types of captions, music, titles etc will be included?
Price
Producing a nice wedding video is an expensive affair and truly good professionals charge a lot for it. So, if you get some cheap quotes, you should be suspicious rather than happy.