Friday, February 22, 2008

The Wedding Videographer



Wedding videography can trace its roots back to before the advent of the modern video camera through 8mm and 16mm films. Over the decades while film was the only way to capture moving pictures a few enterprising individuals would take out the family 8mm camera and film the weddings of friends and family. These film cameras were limited by their short load times for the film, high cost of processing and the fact the majority of them could not record sound to the film. But there were a few individuals who had turned 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 for the rich or celebrity 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 was primitive at best. The equipment was generally of low technical quality. Cameras required bright lights, had fuzzy pictures, poor color saturation and mono audio recorded with cheap microphones that didn't reproduce good audio quality. The cameras were bulky with the camera being a separate unit that connected to the video recorder via a cable. Many wedding videos weren't edited in post production and those that were, were primitively edited at best, usually just removing the mistakes. If titles were added you were lucky if they were legible. Generation loss (the copying of a copy, and so forth) was also a major problem with analog video tape. Each time you recorded the video to a new tape, it caused errors to build up and picture and sound to degrade.

From its earliest days and through the 1980s Wedding Videography had a negative reputation of being an interference on the festivities. The bright lights required to produce a quality image were damaging to the mood many brides and grooms wanted to have. As the market expanded, it was flooded by many individuals who had little experience and technical knowledge, which left the consumer with fallen expectations. And the consumer technology that was available to the wedding videographer could not match up with broadcast quality at the time. (more)

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