How are others presenting their long-forms?

[Max Palmer]

Let's just get this out of the way: I hate long-form. I wish I could just concentrate on making great highlight videos, but I'm new at this and just haven't made up my mind as to what people deliver or what clients want, yet.

Part of my trouble is, I'm never sure what to do about music. I always license a couple of songs legally for the highlight video since I really only need two, but I can't afford to properly license music for an entire 1-2 hour long form edit, because the cost would just eat into my profit so much that there wouldn't be anything left. So as far as I can figure, I either find Creative Commons music, or do it not-so-legally - neither is an option I like very much.

Here's what I'm trying to figure out- are most of you offering your long-form edits with background music, or are you simply leaving the raw accompanying audio with each clip as the sound? How rough are you leaving these long form edits? Just editing the footage down to it's best shots, and leaving it at that?

[Clive McLaughlin]

Are your long-forms ever going to be viewed in a public arena to a mass of people? Then why do you worry? A dvd or bluray to go on a shelf in a family home for a few decades - who do you think is going to come after you for that?

Use whatever music you want, unless its for a commercial purpose or is going to be published online or viewed in public.

[Max Palmer]

No they won't be, and I've taken that into consideration. I guess maybe I'm too worried about the .0001% chance that a client will upload their 2 hour video publicly and I will get sued.


Maybe I worry too much? ;-)

[Robert Benda]

You do. Put it in your contract about the rules with the long form. Make sure it's mentioned in another prominent public place - we have it in our price list.

My long form (we call it the 'all day edit') is basically just all the decent footage that is at all interesting, plus the full ceremony, speeches, and first dance, with very little done for soundtracking and such. It's really just what I have once I put all footage into the timeline before I start cutting away to make the real wedding film.

[Peter Rush]

I break it down into chapters with a 'play all' option - for a typical full day package the chapters are as follows:

Arrivals
Ceremony
Celebrations
Afternoon reception
Speeches
Evening reception
First dance

The ceremony and speeches are in real time with live audio, and the other chapters are set to music - the couple choose which music they wish for each chapter and this is covered (for DVD production) by the PRS licence I purchase for each wedding.

Pete

[Christian Nachtrieb]

I'm the same with Robert, no need to add a soundtrack to the doc edit, just use whatever sound was from the day. We don't even edit these, we pay an editor to do the doc edits and then I edit the highlight or feature.

[Art Varga]

For my long edits, I use a lot of instrumental/ambient music. Just something to add to the background so it doesn't sound too dry. I purchased this package from Neumann Films. Reasonably priced and a multiple use license. Assuming there are other similar packages out there.

The Wedding Video Album | Neumann Films

[Max Palmer]

Originally Posted by Robert Benda

You do. Put it in your contract about the rules with the long form. Make sure it's mentioned in another prominent public place - we have it in our price list.

My long form (we call it the 'all day edit') is basically just all the decent footage that is at all interesting, plus the full ceremony, speeches, and first dance, with very little done for soundtracking and such. It's really just what I have once I put all footage into the timeline before I start cutting away to make the real wedding film.

That's pretty much what I do, but I seem to be spending way too much time on it. For one thing, I tend to remove a lot of the footage because I'm a lousy shooter and half of it is garbage. Also, I tend to shoot lots of "small" clips instead of fewer, longer clips. Particularly in the preparation section, where I'm filming the girls doing hair, makeup, and dressing of the wedding gown. For instance, I might have a bunch of clips ~10 seconds long of different things being done to the bride's hair so she can remember how her hair was done (brushing, pinning, curling, etc.) I feel like a lot of these small clips strung together would get annoying unless they had background music, but that's just me.

For comparison's sake, for those of you that shoot the prep stuff, how much footage time-wise do you end up with, if you're there for a few hours? (I'm really considering cutting down the time I spend filming this segment.) My last wedding that I'm editing now, I shot about 1.5 hours of prep footage which seems insane to me, and edited the segment down to ~15 minutes.