All you guys know that I’m a wedding photographer. Well, some of you may know that last year I began filming some weddings as well. I know everyone thinks of this as being a videographer (heck, I even put that in the title of this post), but it’s much more involved than that. This is why I like to say I’m a wedding cinematographer.

What is the difference you ask? Well, I’ll tell you my opinion of the difference. A videographer records what is in front of him and then plays it back. Most of the time this means having one camera on a tripod, pointing it at whatever the focus of the day is at that moment and hitting record. A cinematographer uses much more of a creative vision to tell a story of the day. An in-depth knowledge of lighting and camera technique is required. Many more tools are used besides just a tripod to achieve the dynamic footage that is needed for the final product. This is also why I say the finished product is a film, not a video.

Even though I’ve filmed several weddings now, and have many coming up, I still consider myself somewhat new to it all. If you’re already a photographer, making the decision to try your hand at producing this kind of a film requires you to learn many new techniques, tools, software, and how to capture good audio. One of the biggies in that list was software, and by that I mean some sort of video editing software.

Since I work on an Apple computer, I decided to use Apple’s Final Cut Pro X editing software. At $300 it is actually one of the cheapest professional video edition applications out there. Final Cut Pro (FCP) is a beast and required quite a bit of reading, watching, and demoing, to become somewhat proficient in it (as would any professional editing suite).

Currently, it takes roughly 40-50 hours of post production to create a wedding film (this is on top of the 8-12 hours spent filming it on the wedding day). I try to break my post production workflow down into segments to not be overwhelmed. This consists of importing the raw footage into FCP, watching through it all and marking my “favorites” so I can quickly find pieces of footage I know I will use, laying down the clips and creating the story of the film, finding good music that fits each part of the film, stabilizing shaky footage, and finally color correction and color grading.

While I was creating Kyler and Katie’s wedding film, I used a program that took a screenshot of my computer every couple of seconds. I would turn this program on when I was working on their film, and then back off when I was done for the day. I then took all those individual screenshots and put them together to create a time-lapse. I then had to speed it up or else that video would be way too long.

If you’d like to (quickly) see what goes into creating a wedding film, spend 2 minutes watching the video below and let me know what you think or if you had any questions. I’d be happy to answer them.

And if you’d like to see the final video that resulted from all that hard work, check it out:

You can also see any of my other wedding films on my Vimeo channel.