Wedding videography

Wedding videography is a video production that documents a wedding on video. The final product of the videographer's documentation is commonly called a wedding video. It is also referred to as a wedding movie or a wedding film.

Small text Wedding videography can trace its roots back to before the advent of the modern video camera through 8mm and 16mm films. When film was the only way to capture moving pictures, a few enterprising individuals would take the family 8mm camera and film the weddings of friends and family. These film cameras had a major limitation in the form of 4-minute load times. After exposing 4 minutes of film, the operator would have to load a new film cartridge. The high cost of processing and the fact the majority of them could not record sound to the film further limited the industry. However, there were still a few individuals who were able to turn the documentation of weddings into a business.

1980 saw the introduction of the first consumer camcorders by Sony, with other manufacturers soon following suit. With the introduction of these first camcorders, wedding video documentation evolved from something only for the rich into something for the masses. Early adopters were primarily hobbyists who at first started recording the weddings of friends and family, then went on to do jobs for pay.

The early days of professional wedding videography were marked by primitive technology and technique, with the equipment generally producing low image quality. Cameras required bright lights, had fuzzy pictures, poor color saturation, and single-channel, poor quality audio. The cameras were bulky, with a separate unit that connected to the video recorder via a cable, severely limiting the videographer's movement. In post-production, many wedding videos were not edited. Generation loss was also a limiting factor because of the nature of analog video tape.

From its earliest days and through the 1980s, wedding videography developed the negative reputation of interfering with the festivities it was meant to document. The bright lights required to produce a quality image were damaging to the atmosphere many brides and grooms wanted to create. As the market expanded, it was flooded by many individuals who had little experience and technical knowledge, which left a negative impression on the clients. Consumer technology available to the wedding videographer also could not equal broadcast quality of the time.

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