Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Toler Wedding Video [Projects]



I finally finished the Toler Wedding DVD.  This is the highlight video of the reception.  I'm going to try to get into the habit of writing up a post of projects I finish, mostly just so I remember what I did in certain situations for future reference.

Gear:

Sony HDV 1080i (Borrowed from church)
+ Shotgun mic (also borrowed from church)
+ Fluid Head tripod (borrowed from church)







Canon T2i (Borrowed from Matt Peterein)
+ Canon 50mm 1.4 lens
+ Sigma 28-75mm 2.8 lens (I think)
+ Ball head tripod (Borrowed from Matt)







Setup:

During the wedding ceremony, I was set up with the Sony on the Fluid Head tripod in the second row on the left side of the auditorium.  This way I could pick up everyone walking down the aisle, and then turn to get the everyone on stage.  Matt Peterein captured a consistant wide angle shot from the balcony with his Canon T2i.


From the Sony the angle wasn't the best so I could really only see the Groom and the Pastor's face.  The auditorium was way to dark for this camera, so I had to gain up a lot (which introduced a LOT of noise).  It was even darker down the aisle, so the noise level in those shots were really bad.

Notice how bad the noise is in the black suit.

The Canon was a different story.  Matt was using the Sigma 28-75mm 2.8, but because the light was so low he switched to the Canon 50mm 1.8.  This ended up being a life saver, and as you can see, produced a much higher quality shot.

It wasn't as wide as I would have liked, but it was worth it to get the low light.

The reception (video at the top) was shot entirely with the Sony HDV camera.  I need the ability to quickly zoom in and out, and I had to mount the shotgun mic to pick up the guest speeches.  The shotgun mic performed much better than I expected.  While shooting, I couldn't hear the person talking myself sometimes, and I was afraid none of it would be usable.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that the audio was actually pretty good considering the loud room it was shot in.

Editing:

All of the video was shot in 1080i and 1080p, so the file sizes were huge.  All in all my project files are about 30Gb.  I worked off of an external hard drive formatted with fat32 which means I have a 4Gb single file size limit.  The wedding video when rendered out at its highest resolution is well over 4 gigs, so I had to render it out in standard definition (which ended up being 3.48Gb).  This isn't a problem right now, since it's getting put onto a DVD anyway, but I'll have to re-render the video from the Final Cut Pro project whenever I eventually burn it to Blu Ray.

Closing Notes:

This was my third wedding filming and editing, and so far all three have been completely different (that's what happens when you borrow all of your gear).  I learned a lot, and I think this will really help me out for future weddings.  Based on what I learned here, I think I'll definitely use a DSLR for the reception, but I for sure need a shotgun mic to capture people's voices.

Now that I have my own DSLR, I should have a little more consistency and flexibility with wedding videos.  Low light is definitely key, but I also need some flexibility in zoom for certain angles.  Hopefully I can eventually get to a 3 camera setup so I can capture both the bride and groom, and keep a wide shot to help with editing.

Hopefully, I'll have one or two more opportunities to get some practice this wedding season... and maybe help pay for some gear to increase the quality as well.


2 comments:

Miss Veronica Lee said...

I'll volunteer Kevin and I's wedding for you to practice filming! :)

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