Personal View site logo
Total disaster, reports from the weddings front
  • 108 Replies sorted by
  • The wedding I'm editing at the moment had a sound problem with the speeches again - starts off okay but then the sound is muffled & quiet.

    when I link the recorder I had sitting on the lecturn to the footage I can see the MC having a bit of a problem with feedback.. so he moves my recorder off the lecturn and under some papers!!!!! - I'm on the other side of the room. I don't know how many times I've been blamed for feedback by venue staff when I'm using a standalone recorder!

    Oh and while I'm at it - I just had a celebrant refuse to allow me a line out of her PA because .." the last video guy blew it up" there seems to be a flood of menopausal women that decide to become celebrants and know little about public speaking and even less about the PA they are using.

    end of vent

  • Oh yeah - I've encountered those types. At a church gig we did last year they went completely ape because we moved a mic stand AND when she tried to test the PA it wouldn't work because we switched it off at the wall. So we switched it back on for her to convince her it all worked but she was pretty huffy about the whole thing and insisted on testing it before she let us leave. As we were walking out the door I whistled a steady high-pitched tone, louder and louder, and (thinking it was feedback) the last thing I saw was her looking at the amplifier with absolute horror, trying to work out what the hell was wrong and how to stop it whistling.

    Evil, but also strangely satisfying. Actually, it's a great gag to pull when someone's setting up any PA especially in an echoey building. In satisfaction terms, it's right up there with bursting a paper bag while someone's poking around in the innards of a power supply.

  • Woo! THis is funny stuff! My friend, a musician, played a wedding where the groom made his vows to... his mistress. He blurted out her name by mistake. The band was close to being set up in the corner to play the reception. Without a word, they started packing up their gear to leave.

  • I have massive respect for anyone who has the courage to shoot weddings. Doubly so for those that shoot weddings on HDSLRs. That's something I'm never getting in to. I care too much about making people happy and never letting then down!

  • I shot my first wedding at the weekend, with GH2 and AF100. Went better than expected. :-)

  • There was one wedding I had where after the ceremony ended, we realized the vows were not recorded to the portable recorder. We usually wire the groom up with a lav and hit record before the ceremony begins. It turns out that the groom said something really bad while chatting with his friends, and he tried to delete the recording himself. Of course, he didn't know how to operate the damn thing and he just ended up shutting it off. He never came up to us before the ceremony so basically we ended up with in-camera audio from the other side of the church which sounded like crap. I guess the lesson is, put an active taser in his pocket with the recorder so when he tries to touch it he learns a quick lesson.

    Funny, in the same wedding when the couple arrived at the reception, the DJ said the wrong name for the groom (Jesse instead of Jason or something) and we got the bride's reaction to it. Pretty funny stuff, but yeah, weddings are a pain.

    Props to you guys who are using HDSLR's for weddings though. I don't think I could do without the deep DOF and fast autofocus of traditional 1/3" 3 ccd cameras.

  • @Mark_The_Harp Those are some pretty uncanny whistling skills you got there, Mark! Can you imitate ground loop hums as well? :-)

  • @mintcheerios What a bummer! I guess I need to have a backup plan for my groom Lav then. Maybe Laving the priest too, or setting up a mic close to the spot where they are going to stand?

  • Never tried those, @oscillian, but I can imitate vacuum cleaners and spin dryers. My version of a MieleW916 on fast spin cycle is a treat for the ears! I worked for years in BBC sound effects and drama and we spent all our spare time making silly noises and adding foley to everything we did in the office (probably annoyed the hell out of people but we were young then and it amused us). I had a colleague who did foley on porn movies - so it was an interesting bunch of skills we had, though probably not so useful for wedding videos.

    Whistling the sound of feedback is great fun - you MUST have an echoey acoustic, though, so you can build up the sound in a very natural way and with a lot of reverb in the room it's difficult to tell where the sound is coming from (so people assume it's the PA). The best one is to wait until they slam all the faders shut, and then start whistling again...

  • I was shooting a wedding and the bridesmaids fought the whole time. I'd be filming and a cat fight would break out,... the bride yelled for me to stop recording,... while the best man signaled silently making the keep-rolling hand motion. funny stuff. Later at the same wedding the father of the bride broke a beer bottle on his table and went for the throat of one of the bridesmaid's husband. Got that on tape too, somewhere. The entire bride's side of the wedding reception walked out after that.

  • @Mark_The_Harp Oh that lovely detuned Hoover sound! I always try to sing in unison everytime I vacuum: love the Doppler effect!

  • @johnnymossville would love to see the edit to this. I saw a highlight where the the zipper of the bride's dress broke off when they were attempting to zip up. 40mins later the Seamstress arrived and sewed it up, the best part of that highlight... the bride was chugging red wine from the bottle directly from the stress. This made it to the highlight, but still well told.

  • Not bad news, just showing this off!

  • Jeeze! You should be shooting feature films. - But marraige is one of those, isn't it..:{

  • I've been literally shooting weddings every weekend this summer, and it's brutal! But my GH2 has proven to be a trooper, just have 3 or more batteries with you for a whole days shoot, maybe charge one at reception start so if you run out near the end, you have at least a partially charged battery for the send off...can't miss that! And I hear you @mintcheerios about using traditional camcorders...it's a hard transition with a lot of anxiety. I'm still using one as backup camera just in case, but one of these days I'll go without it and rely strictly on HDSLR's! But you MUST have a portable audio recorder & wireless mics for good quality audio for reception! And always ask the DJ if you can have a line out from his system if they are mic'ing the officiant and/or groom...they're usually happy to oblige and you get the best audio! (But do not rely completely on them, still use some of your own mics in case their system fails)

    And I think sliders are only useful if you have more than one shooter....I've brought mine to every gig, and not once did I even have time to pull it out of the bag! It's just too time consuming to setup and get the shot...I don't know how people do it!

  • " I care too much about making people happy and never letting then down!"

    what self indulgent crap! - so you're saying wedding shooters don't care! I'm amused by the number of people that comment disparagingly on shooting weddings simply because they haven't got the balls to shoot in a pressure situation.

  • Make sure to look at a map of where you are actually going for the ceremony & reception...don't just rely on GPS or printout directions...look and see the road, how far you go until the next turn, even streetview on Google Maps helps alot.

    And also a BIG NO NO: planning other things on the same day before your wedding job's start time...I don't care if the wedding is later in the day or evening and you want to visit friends in the area...DON'T.

    I had an afternoon wedding ceremony that was close to some friends I haven't seen in a while, so I met up with them for lunch...ended up with a parking ticket and was almost late to the church because I got lost trying to find the road the church was on! This is not how you want to start your shoot, stressed out from being lost and pissed that you got a ticket.

  • Just shot an outdoor wedding with plenty of ambient noise, wind, guitar music playing through loudspeakers and so on. I decided to use my Sennheiser MKE300 shotgun mic with windsock to shoot the main angle of the ceremony and some interviews of the guests greeting the couple during the reception. I was a bit surprised the audio signal showed up very low on the audio bars on the GH2, but figured I could gain them up in post. This was my second shoot with the mic and I had good results with it previously.

    Once back in editing I had no audio! The battery had drained and no signal was recorded, not even the GH2s own, since the mic input cancelled it. Result: I had to painstakingly sync up 50 minutes of recording to the LAV sound by eyeing frames and lipsyncing during the ceremony (thank god I had LAV-ed the groom) but the guests greetings were beyond repair. In the end I opted for just using the their smiles and them waving into camera with no sound and mixing in ambient sound from my B-cam placed further away.

    Lesson learned: Always have a fresh battery in your microphone! I routinely do this with my Zoom H1:s and cameras but missed the Sennheiser since the run time is 300 hours (if you remember to turn the bloody thing off during shoots!) Another tricky thing is that the mic has no continous light showing it's ON, just a flashing light when you turn it on. And the GH2 will show ONE flashing bar of sound even if you have no incoming sound :(

    This is the resulting highlight video. 3x GH2s with Cluster V6, Lumix 20, Lumix 14-140, Nokton 25 0.95 and Canon FD 50 1.4. Zoom H1 and Sennheiser MKE300 (not!) Edited in Vegas Pro 11 and graded in MB Looks 2. Music from www.musicbed.com

  • @fosterchen I know! Never trust the GPS! You'll end up in a dead end street with the ceremony being on the other side of a brick wall and have to double back for 20 minutes. Google street view have saved me a couple of times.

  • @artiswar Nice one! I like your intimate style with mostly closeups. The handheld shooting makes it different from most other productions. More edgy.

  • @oscillian - Thank you!

    Here's the finished. iPhone lav mics to the rescue.

  • @artiswar Great work! I really need to break free fom my sticks :) What kind of setup du you have? Solo shooter?

  • @oscillian - Two rigs, two on sticks. One of the tripod set ups is used for the rear of the ceremony as well as time lapses throughout the day. One us goes with the bride, one of us with the groom. We meet back up for the ceremony and reception.

  • @tired- FWIW I didn't take @Sangye 's comment as disrespectful. He even says

    "I have massive respect for anyone who has the courage to shoot weddings. Doubly so for those that shoot weddings on HDSLRs."

    I take his comment to mean he doesn't want to be put in the difficult position that event shooters do. Which I relate with 100%. I have done 4 weddings, the last of which was in 2009, and consider myslf lucky that I ended up doing more "Corporate" style work. It has it's own stresses but nothing like that of weddings and the like.

    Cole

  • @tired - Sorry if I wasn't clear, but @Cole is exactly right about what I meant. I don't have the balls to be in that kind of a high-pressure situation with a DSLR! That's why I have massive respect for people who do. I'm sure wedding shooters care. What I said is that I care too much about not letting people down, and I don't trust myself enough in unpredictable situations like weddings, with a [sometimes] unpredictable camera like a DSLR, to know that I won't let them down.

    Please read more carefully before getting hostile, next time.