With the recent affordability of high quality video equipment, many well meaning family members and friends may be eager and confident to videotape your wedding. While this can be a great way to save money, there’s a good chance you won’t receive the video you expect, even if the best equipment is being used.

Here are just a few of the questions you will want to ask your friend or relative before allowing them to take on the task. If they can’t answer these questions in detail, you may want to strongly consider having our professional team capture one of the most important events of your life.

How will you capture audio during the wedding? Typically you can’t fit a wireless mic onto a wedding gown…how will you capture the brides audio during the ceremony?

Even the best cameras can have technical issues; will you have back-ups? What happens if a tape jams? How long will your battery last?

If you are using wireless audio equipment how will you ensure that interference from a dj’s system, cell phones etc will not cause the loss of your audio?

How will you film in low light environments and if you use on camera lighting, how will you make it unobtrusive and soften it so you can preserve the high quality look?

How will you set your gain settings on the camera? Typically automatic settings are the lowest quality and can produce terrible results if used incorrectly

Will you shoot in widescreen or full screen and how will you ensure that your video will look right on different types of television sets?

How will you adjust white balance on your cameras? Typically automatic settings are incorrect if you want professional results

Slow motion looks fantastic in wedding videos, how will you adjust your settings on the cameras and during editing to ensure it’s not jumpy? Just slowing the speed in most editing programs is not enough to get the effect you’re looking for.

Exposure ratios are limited even with the best video equipment. How will you adjust this to ensure skin tones, background and wardrobes are represented correctly? White wedding gowns are guaranteed to mess up your exposure if you are on automatic settings.

What about artistic shots? Will you use interesting focus effects, shooting through objects to create natural frames, using 4 or 6 point filters for interesting lighting effects, Dutch tilts, Glidecam, crane shots?

The list goes on and on….