What do you guys think of this ad?

Wedding video taping services Manitoba Canada

"Your wedding should give you lasting memories...not lasting debt. Check out our wedding video package for $99."

As a former Winnipegger, Dollar Store Capital of the World, this does NOT come as a huge shock and surprise...

Who needs Craigslist when we can slit our own throats in the race to the bottom!

Hi Kren

I guess if you bought a domestic DVD camcorder and did the ceremony only you might make it for $99.00 .... You going to drop your prices to $59.00 now????

We had a bunch of students here offering weddings for free!! The catch was you had to pay their gear rental!! Of course, they had no takers and disappeared off the map!!

I wouldn't worry too much about the $99 operator!!

Chris

The $99 video package gets a client what exactly? If it's only 10mins of coverage for the vows. Seems like a possibly good idea. If you can get 10/day and work on volume. Why not? But $99 for the whole wedding, is just ridiculous. The guy is better off working at Wal-Mart for $8/hr, at least there, he doesn't have any capital investment costs.

Many get their initial work experience at very low or even negative pay rates.

Probably as Harding said a DVD Camcorder on a tripod for the ceremony uncut/unedited. Then they probably upsell from there ($50/hr for the reception, $250 editing costs etc) so that a full wedding might be upwards of $500 or more. Not a terribly bad advertising strategy. And for them even if the party only purchases the ceremony deal, $99 bucks for an hour travel, and hour shooting, and handing over the DVD at the end. Sure it probably looks pretty bad, but it's a cool $100 for 2 hours of their time.

Please pass on their phone number.

I need to ask them if they can do my wedding 12 years ago... they seem to have to keys to some sort of magic...

Sure it probably looks pretty bad, but it's a cool $100 for 2 hours of their time.

And THESE words prompt me to wonder how many of the "Video-O-ographers" that are working on this sort of "business model" are the ones asking questions on DVi like "how do I capture my footage? How do I make a DVD? Which microphone under $3 should I put in the trunk of my car to capture good church audio?"

And 2 hours? Plus the phone call(s), emailing, in person meet up to discuss/deliver/blah blah blah....

I get it: The media and social marketing folks have told us that digital video is the great equalizer and now EVERYONE can be a video-O-ographer, regardless of training or story telling skill. Just remember that when you want to go from "hobbyist making beer money" to "pro able to make mortgage payments", I'll be there, pushing my shopping cart with my tin foil hat on to keep the Government and Aliens from broadcasting their messages directly into my brain because I lost the ability to earn a living long ago due to undercutting to tell you "I TOLD YOU SO!"

And then maybe it will be MY turn to beg...

I believe you Kren. Give me the guys phone number, I will hook him up with a local photographer who charges $ 100 (not kidding either). They can conquer the world, Imagine a Wedding Video/Photo Package for $ 199.00. Then make it a business empire hook-up with the $ 150 DJ (not kidding either).

Imagine admitting years later to your kids that you bought that shaky-cam combo wedding package!

Andrew

The trouble for all of us behind this nonsense is that it's this guy and his $100 photographer friend who'll get the publicity on your local TV station when the clients find out they've completely wasted their money - but the fact that they paid peanuts won't be the headline, it'll be the unfortunate couple who were ripped off by their wedding videographer/photographer. and a part of each of our promotional efforts goes down the pan.

Another very sad thing is that some brides don't even appreciate a decent wedding film and just seeing themselves on telly is joy enough..even if the vision is terrible!!!

I still think that most brides seem to not take their wedding film anywhere as seriously as the photography so we have to educate them that Uncle Joe's footage just isn't good enough for memories that need to last a lifetime. One of our online wedding directories has a forum and it worries me that the brides there will pay a photog $3000 to work for 5 hours but are quite happy to let a family member shoot the wedding video on a $150 camcorder after saying that $1500 is way too much for a wedding video!!

You obviously will have the really bad videographers..(remember the one in the UK, Philip, that made headlines around the world with his wedding shoot last year????) but I still feel that we need to "re-label" wedding video shoots so their is an obviously difference between a home movie and a wedding film!!! Gosh, no bride would be happy if the photog turned up with his $79 digital camera and did the wedding prints at the 15c each discount store so our creative skills need to be isolated from the "home movie" category!!

Hmmm maybe we need to go back and shoot on 16mm film to be recognised as professionals???

Chris

Well, there's the stuff that we notice and then there are the bits that a bride / public / client would notice.

I did a wedding for a neighbor recently and what was the thing that they noticed? The clarity of the video imagery on the DVD. Yes, the bit that impressed them most was effectively the quality of the lens ... which we all take for granted and wouldn't otherwise think about.

The next biggest thing would probably be the clear audio that I obtained from using a Rode NTG3 inside a blimp with the furry animal wrapped around it.

I guess these are the things that stand out the most when compared to a home video camera recording.

Andrew

Hi Andrew

I have brides who comment "gosh it's so clear" but mostly they are interested in whether the bridesmaid's dress in your sample video are better than the one's she has chosen for her bridesmaids.

I think that the problem with video is that our product has a perceived lower value than photography... why??? I have no idea!!! Brides seem to think that the stunning photo pack that the photographer has is easily worth $3000 but seem to put just a minimal value on their DVD pack before even evaluating the contents! Maybe it's because you can walk into K-Mart and pick up a complete DVD Set of your favorite TV show season for a mere $39.95 and they compare the wedding DVD to that??

Seriously, we work normally harder and longer than photographers, lug a lot more gear around and yet the photographer seems to be perceived as being better value for money???
Shucks he is usually near the top of the priority list for brides and we are a lot further down.

In my eyes video has so much more to offer yet a lot of brides won't have it or get a relative to produce a shaky palmcorder version.

It would be nice for brides to have us up with the photographer on her list but elevating us there seems to be problematic.

Chris

There's probably not much comfort at being in the company of other "losers" (in this battle of perceived values) but what there is is shared by sports press photographers, embroiderers and music copyists (the people who copy scores for individual players) to name but three professions screwed by technology in some way. The sports photographers whose colleagues leave cameras behind the soccer goal and press their wireless controls like mad any time someone looks like scoring (what happened to composition, lighting etc) and rely on autofocus in their 600m f2.8 beasts; the embroidery machine has scuppered the needleworker and Sibelius (the software not the composer) churns out individual parts faster than the players can play them.

I think we need to be ruthless about two things. First, make it clear to our clients that we are at least as important as the photographer and stop pretending that photographers have any regard for us at all - in truth they give us their left-overs and we turn them into works of art. Secondly devise ways of taking the decision about video earlier up the timeline. Our DVD invitations seem to be doing the job; in the past two weeks we've got two full-price weddings for late September 2010, no deals just "when can we do the invites?"

We have plans for other such devices - the key is to make them compelling enough and of sufficiently high perceived value to make them desirable yet costing us little in time and even less in cash. If they work we'll publish them here - no sense in giving it away.

Finally, Andrew is absolutely right - but it is the first step down a slippery slope if we ever allow the client's ignorance to be an excuse for delivering anything but the best. In the days when I had up to 15 people working for me I earned a reputation amongst the youngsters we used to employ, often straight from college, for preaching this mantra, but I am rewarded by the number I meet from time to time who remember and remark that it is what continues to separate them as pros from the wannabe-pros.

And if you think this is bad, how about when one videographer posts an add wanting another videographer to edit an entire wedding video for him for just a hundred dollars!

No kidding. It happened to me. His ad caught my eye because he specifically asked for an Avid Liquid editor. I responded to his post, told him a hundred dollars wasn't much money for a professional editor, asked a couple of questions, and suggested if he was lucky, maybe an intern from a college.

One of the questions was if I would be expected to capture the tapes, or if the footage had already been captured, ready to edit in Liquid. He was very insulting, like why would I make a big deal about capturing the tapes? So I'd had enough!!

I mentioned the previews on his web site didn't even play, but his pricing page worked just fine. His surcharge for a menu added to the DVD is $75, which takes me a few minutes to do in Liquid, but he was only willing to pay ME a few dollars more for editing the entire wedding, which is hours of work to do a good job.

My final comment was "You're not looking for a professional to work WITH you, but you're looking for a flunky to work FOR you!", and that there would be no more communications between us.

It's bad enough when someone outside our industry tries to cheat us. But one of our own?

Hi Philip

Very wise words from the master !!! Yes, we definately need to get higher up the timeline and totally ignore photogs!!!
A marketing guru said to me a while ago that you always need to make sure that the product you are selling in unique and cannot be replicated easily by the man in the street! That way you have a niche market and price comparisions are hard to do (as well as perceived value) as there is nothing to compare your product with!!
Let face it, any moron can go into a discount store and buy a camcorder for a few hundred then stand in the Church and film it on auto and even use the included software to spit out a DVD ... of course the result will be horrific but it can be done (and probably has been done too!!!)

We do need special features in our productions to set them apart and make them unique. I was actually with a bride last night and she said to me "Do you know why we booked you?"
"Because your weddings have lots of talking!!" (She was obviously un-impressed with footage set to music in other samples but loved the fact that we do one-on-one interviews with the guests during the pre-dinner drinks)

I think if we can make wedding films that have features that the average relative with a camcorder wouldn't or couldn't attempt then we have a more unique product with a decent value!!

Chris

Maybe we can offer to shoot in HD Progressive and the bride on a budget can simply use a frame grab of her favorite bits to get the pictures she wants? Besides, it will really get up the nose of the photographers! :-)

After all, we shoot 25 or 30 frames per second compared to just one or two by those lazy snooty photographers! :-)

Andrew

Hi Andrew

If it's interlaced any imaging software will sort out the interlace..I used to used screen grabs on my old cams for DVD covers and they came out well.
The only issue would be that the images are only 2megapixel (1920x1080) unless your camera has a hi-res still facility ?? I know the HMC40 does 10 megapixel stills...even at 2 you can get some pretty sharp prints as long as the couple don't expect wall sized prints from the images.

Come to think of it.. I'm wandering around a lot of the time with the camera and could quite easily do extra stills...I'm often asked to do stills later in the evening as the photog has gone home already!!

Chris

My camera doesn't have a high res facility. If anything, the colour model transforms between video and regular RGB / CMYK might give us a bit of grief.

Andrew