Wedding Video History – how it all started

A little history of how it all started

Great memories

My wife purchased a Panasonic hand-cam back in 1998 as a Christmas present for me, a great little “big boys toy” at the time.  It was full colour as well!  I videoed everything that moved in the weeks to follow in and around Tipperary, but  my first job was to film a holy communion for a  neighbour.  When I look back at it today, the colour in the church was a fantastic rustic brown!  So my next purchase was a colour corrector along with a title computer… the old commodore 64 was the job!  This was the bees knees in technology, along with the Scala software it could do scrolling text  in colour.  But as time went on, and of course from looking at TV, I wanted a shoulder camera – one big enough to look good!  It had a full-sized old type VHS tape that growled as it went over the video heads, but gave a great picture all the same.  My next requirement was to layer music over the footage so I got myself an audio deck. This allowed me to do voice-over and put music on my soon-to-be finished production and the people I filmed the holy communion for loved it!

Then as time moved on, so did my interest in wedding videography and technology. With the new 3 chip cameras and a few different channels for audio, came a whole new look and feel to both the camera and the footage it created. Then of course windows 2000 arrived, and with that came some state-of-the-art editing systems (well they were then!) but 4 hours of footage occupied lots of hard drive space and the old processors were under fierce pressure to keep up. However, I pressed on with it and began making videos,

TV also changed around that time.  It became much clearer with lots of fancy titles and so on.  I wanted the same for my wedding videos and again purchased more and more new gadgets – next was the DVD disc.  Now this was a huge jump in technology, burning a film to disc, and I can tell you many sleepless nights and late nights in front of computers went by to perfect this, but I persisted and finally mastered it after much effort.  Then, Sony DVD recorders arrived on the market and made things a little easier – I mean just a little – but I got my first movie onto DVD and a whole new world opened up to me.

And yet again technology made advances, and a new breed of cameras was born. DV cam arrived on the scene.  A must-have then, this gave a fantastic image on DVD. It went from there to the current full HD, and not forgetting blu-ray and  of course 3D and 4k, but I’m happy now with my new Sony HXRNX5U  professional camcorder.  At weddings it is so inconspicuous, it’s great. I can capture fantastic detail throughout the day without people being uncomfortable with a camera being around them.   These cameras capture 75% better picture quality than many of the lower consumer type cameras such as the older Sony 270s etc.  Some videographers still use these old 270s, however I like to keep up top notch with my technology as it is the main link to securing  wedding bookings and event videography work in and around my own local area and of course all over Munster.

Wedding videography is a hugely responsible job – it’s one day, and you only have one opportunity to get it right.  I have overheard people say ‘sure you only have to press a button all day’.  As you can see, this is far from the reality.

Wedding Video Tipperary | Editing | Abbey Video Productions

Let me give you a little insight … for every wedding video I begin preparing my cameras and audio packs the night before, making sure all are fully charged and my memory cards are in full working order and clear.  The morning of the wedding video, a quick recording test and make sure my radio mics are again fully charged and working.  Along with that, I always leave in plenty of time to arrive at the location the bride is leaving from to capture the bridal preparation.  I don’t like to arrive too early, as it is in the final hour when things really get underway and the fun begins.  I like to be at the church or wherever the service is taking place about one hour before it starts – this time is given to setting up in the best possible place to film and get a great vantage point, then onto the flowers and of course the guests arriving.   The ceremony audio is very important, and I like to get a crisp clean audio feed by both using radio mics to the church sound and a little unit in the groom’s pocket to make sure the vows are heard nice and clearly.  The speeches are another area of utmost importance where audio is concerned, so I like to tune into the hotel system – by doing this so the sound is 100%.  I have often been complimented on my crisp clear audio on the finished wedding DVD.  So it’s a little more than just pressing a button all day! Anyway I hope you enjoyed some of my travels in the video world – there’s a lot more but I don’t want to be flooding Google with right now,…  but soon 🙂 ~ Joe