Hi,

New Member and new to video. I am a full time photographer and have started to look into offering video also. I purchased the Sony HD1000 as i wanted to shoot in HD, but without a large initial outlay in cash. Have been very impressed with what it can do for the money.
If all goes well, will look at upgrading to something with more manual control and better audio control/input.

This is a short trailer from my first Wedding. All comments welcome, as i know i have a lot to learn (esp sound).


Helen and Iain Wedding Trailer on Vimeo

Cheers

Paul

P.S uploaded a 16:9 file, not sure why it is now 4:3. Will look into.

Hi Paul

I suspect you uploaded the video as a 720x576 file and vimeo cannot recognise the fact that the horizontal pixels have an PAR that is not 1:1 You need to render the file for vimeo as progressive and with square pixels and then manually set the size so it has an aspect of 1.777 : 1 ie: 480x270 ... Vimeo purely sees it as a square pixel video that is 720x576 and squashes the video to 4:3

It takes an awfully long time to load in vimeo for me so it's probably a big file too..either keep the sample very short or make it smaller. (480x270 or 640x360 if you are working from the SD version or 1280x720 if you are working from the HDV version)

Chris

Cheers Chris, will have a play with the settings. Hopefully get it right with the next upload.

Paul

Hi Paul, not bad if this is your very first wedding video shoot. My only comment is the opening shot, it looks kind of shaky to me. I guess a tripod would do wonder for your next shoot. With regards to audio, an Iriver with Mic would have done wonder to the vows. You can buy Irivers for $ 25 at Craigslist, the Giant squid microphone will set you back $ 15.

I am impressed with the quality of the HD1000 ( Dance portion). I am pretty sure your client will love it.

Good luck.

Hi Paul,

It's good to get a pat on the back now and then, but I think it's also useful to get third party input on things to look at again and maybe take note for next time. Clearly this is the highlights and without seeing and entire DVD it's going to be hard to give proper feedback as such.

Hopefully you will see what follows as constructive to help you go forward.

There was both good and bad in this video, as there will be with any wedding video. Shooting a wedding is one of the hardest things you can do because of the 'no-retake' nature of real-time recording. Weddings are a skill set all of their own and doing your first, second, third (and so on) will teach you so much that many arm chair commentators will never know (even though they think they do!).

The biggest problem by far here is the shaky footage. Finding a way to stabilise this is a 'must' going forward. The client should never feel sea-sick watching their land based wedding ;) Imagine looking at this on a large screen rather than a small screen. Imagine looking 'into' the picture rather than 'at' the picture on a small scren. The shaky footage could become a real problem, even on a large LCD/Plasma TV in a fairly small room (more and more people seem to have these now).

Low level shooting seems to be something you like, and finding your own style is important. However, low level shooting that's also "at an angle" makes it hard to execute good subject-following pans, such as the one at 0:58 (lots of wobble).

Lots of shaky footage includes 0:06, 1:48, 1:57, 2:05 etc. See if you can stabilise this more in post.

Try to stabilise the footage at 1:11, it would make a big difference to this shot.

The pan down at 1.41 and 1.59 were too quick. These need to be much slower and more deliberate. Panning too quickly makes the footage break up (or go muddy) quickly and the speed you can do this is governed by the focal length and the sensor type of your camera.

Shooting in to a window, such as 2.01 is always going to be problematic, especially on auto exposure.

First dance @ 2.45 was better than I expected for this camera, though I suspect the available light was not too bad.

Watch the action safe boundaries at places like 3.05. I suspect that the foot will drop off the bottom of many domestic TVs, although it will look fine on a computer.

The last shot lasted a little long for my taste.

Take care with editing. Small moves that don't look planned, or where the start of the move is within a second or so of the end of a clip need to be tidied up, such as at 1:14. You can often get away with stretching the footage to fit the space and chop off the pan at the end. Little things like this make a big difference.

Having shots wider than you 'think' you are going to need helps prevent zooms where they don't belong, and zooms should (when ever possible) be planned in advance or avoided completely. The editing should be done so that the zoom has already begun before you cut to the shot, rather than having static footage with a sudden (unexpected) zoom. Some of the biggest things that differentiate a 'home-movie' from a professional video are the zooms, pans, shaky footage and white balance.

As you will come to realise, audio makes up at least half of video. You can often get by with less than perfect video is the audio is good, but no matter how good the video, if the audio is bad the entire video is bad. Take the time to research audio solutions. We spent a fortune on good audio gear!

I see lots of potential here, so please take these comments as 'constructive' rather than just criticism for criticism's sake.

Dave