5 Steps Wedding Videographer Editing [2020]

To make a great wedding video highlight in Melbourne, the Wedding videography edit is equally important as filming on the wedding day.

For wedding videographers, finishing filming on couple’s wedding day only marks half of their wedding videography journey. For the rest of the journey, the wedding videographer will be staying in a dark edited suite alone with a strong espresso and working on the footages.

To achieve a high-level wedding cinematography in Melbourne, it requires lots of effort and talent during the post editing process. If you want to be involved in making your own wedding video. You should read this final chapter-everything about wedding videography editing and the behind the scenes in Melbourne.

There are 5 steps of making a wedding video highlight.

Know your wedding video style and find a suitable editing style

The first thing is to think about is what is your wedding style, is it a rustic, modern, romantic, vintage or lavish wedding? I usually get to know this from my conversations as well as shooting their big day.

I’ll outline the wedding video style, as they involve different editing techniques.

Then I will have a brainstorm with my wedding video editor on the music, storyline as well as the color of the highlight video.

Draft a wedding video structure and storyline

Check out all footage. I look through all video footages I filmed on the wedding day. There are unexpected moments I was not aware of that I captured on the day. Reviewing footages and audios from the speech can help me refresh the memory and get some ideas of building the storyline of the wedding highlight video.

When I find some good footages, I will put them in the media pool of the Adobe Premiere software, I’ll use them later on.

On the wedding day, the celebrant would read the couple story. Also, the best man and the maid of honor’s speech also contains a lot of information about the couple. All of the voiceover is an essence to make a good structure of wedding film. I will highlight some of the good speeches throughout the day and use them to tell the story.

Draft a big picture before the editing based those details. I will create an initial storyline in a narrative way to unveil their wedding day.

Finding a suitable wedding music for wedding videography highlight and music arrangement

A good piece of music can take the wedding video highlight to the next level. In the opposite situation, an unsuitable music can make the video look and sound awkward and tacky.

To achieve a high-quality wedding highlight video, next step we will need to find a suitable music to support the wedding video story.

Where can I purchase the music?

You could purchase licenced music from Musicbed and AudioJungle. It is very handy on musicbed: use filters like music genre, mood, artist and instrument to search for music for your wedding film.

What makes a music good for the wedding videography highlight reel?

A great Grammy Award music is not necessarily a good music for your wedding highlight reel. On the other hand, some unremarkable music would create chemical effect on the wedding highlight reel.

When making a wedding highlight video, the consistency is one of the most important factors when you are combining the sound and video together. The wedding style and wedding venue gives a direction and hint of the music. For some couple who desires a natural and candid video, the slow and indie music would be a good idea. Some uplifting and upbeat music can be used for modern weddings.

Some couple want to use the voice-over from the ceremony and speech at the reception, the instrumental music can be an option. The people voice over is will then not be covered by the lyrics.

I suggest couple to choose 2-3 songs for the highlight, one slow and soft music for bride and groom’s getting ready and one upbeat music for the night party. The third song can be a backup option.

The music arrangement and Re-composing the music

The optimal length of wedding video highlight is 4 to 6 minutes. According to the survey of views on YouTube in 2018, the bounce rate of views remarkably increases after 7 minutes. So making a video short and concise prevent the video become boring to its viewers.

For 4- 6 minutes highlight, I will normally use 2 songs as each is usually around 3 minutes long. As I have already watched the raw footage earlier, I will roughly know how many video footages I can use for getting ready, ceremony, location and reception.

The video structure acts as a foundation and is it directly affects quality of a wedding video highlight. I would think about which music I would use for the introduction to establish the beginning of the wedding story. The beginning of a video plays a huge role in hooking viewer’s attention. I put a lot of emphasises on the beginning to make the beginning immersive and interesting.

The beginning part of the video will usually be slow and gentle while the narratives tell the stories to its views. The tempo can be gradually turned up to introduce more details from the videos. For the middle part of the video, I would use some up and down music to boost up the emotions. And the story will then move on to the emotional part: the beautiful dress and touching vows at the ceremony, followed by the couples are officially married and walking out the while guests throwing the flower petals in the air. At this point, the video will hit the climax point.

I will often choose a more upbeat music for the later party at reception. During that part, the wedding video highlight will reach to its high point again during the couple’s first dance. The highlight reel normally ends at the guest’s dance.

Re-composing the music is my recent experiment. I always find there are some great parts and not so great parts in songs when I am working with the wedding highlight reel. I cut off the unwanted part and loop some of the good portions and even sometime I can create a seamless music transaction from one song to other song, I always ask my colleague to listen to the transition to see if it is really seamless.

Should I let my wedding videographer to choose music for me?

Normally the bride and groom are encouraged to choose the music by themselves so they can feel more engaged with the wedding video editing process.

Your Melbourne wedding videographer is very experienced with the editing of the wedding video highlights, as well as choosing the just-right music for it. It is also a good idea to let your wedding videographer choose the music for you. And you will be surprised by the music that he chose for your highlight.

Colour grading-wedding videography

Same as editing photogs, we also apply different colour effects on the raw wedding footages to create different look and feel. The professional colour tool is named LUT or Look up table.

We always discuss with bride and groom to say which colour tone do you like? Do you want the colour of your wedding video to look warmer or in a more neutral look?

For a romantic rustic wedding video highlight, a soften and pastel colour would be awesome. For a modern and lavish wedding, we will suggest using a cleaner colour.

We will use a preset or LUTs to give the video footage a basic initial grading. Then we will adjust elements, like RGB curve, hue, saturated and exposure to make the colour of the wedding highlight pop out even more.

Colour correction of people skin tone in the wedding video highlight

Further colour grading will be focused on couple’s skin tone.

Colour correcting requires the attention to details character from the video editor. Comparing to the general basic colour grading, the people skin tone has a narrower colour bandwidth.

We will select the bride and groom’s skin pigment and isolate the people skin tone from the background and adjust the skin tone’s hue separately. As the result, couple’s skin tone will look more natural and fresher.

When working with my Melbourne wedding couples, some brides do have specific requests such as they want their skin to be looked more tanned. We would then correct the skin tone based on their requests.

Sound mix in wedding video sequence

A great wedding video highlight’s sound source should contain music, ambience sounds and dialogue.

The music is always Hi-Res audio. The RAW ambience and dialogue shall be enhanced before put into video track.

The wedding dialogue captured on wedding day sometimes contain hums and hisses caused by electric noise and also wind noise. I will use noise reduction filter to remove any unwanted noise. It can drastically improve the quality of the sound.

The Dynamics and EQ tool can enhance people’s speech voice. It can make male sound deeper and female voice warmer. And a dramatic sound can boost out a wedding cinematic atmosphere. The sound will be focused: just like someone is talking in front of you.

We will keep some of the relevant ambiance sounds, like the birds singing and people’s cheering sound.

Mix all sound source in wedding editing software

When we put the music, ambiance and dialogue into video into multiple soundtrack. We adjust the three sources balance accordingly so one does not cover the other up. To make the speech clear and crispy, we slightly increase the dialogue volume to make it sound louder or soften down the music a bit.

If the music has lyrics, the dialogue voice and music lyrics would overlap. I try to make the dialogue clearer and at the same time I don’t want to lower the music too much, because the romantic music can boost the emotions and I want the viewers to be able to hear the music at the same time.

Because human voice has a narrow frequency range around 85 to 180 Hz, I can lower this narrow frequency of the music so the music can harmoniously accommodate with the speeches.

Enhancement

After we finish editing the wedding highlight, we can make the video link via the YouTube or Vimeo, the bride and groom can then have a first look on the wedding video and share with their family and friends. Some couples would have some personal suggestions on the video, we can invite the couples to drop in the studio to refine the video highlight together. In that way, the bride can get what her really wants.

To give you a first people experience, here is our editing behind the scenes.

Present the wedding video to bride and groom

In the end, we invite bride and groom also occasionally their family as well back to studio. The wedding video USB is stored in a delicate wooden Box. The box is carved with Tree studio’s name and logo.

We will then play the wedding video in our studio theatre with a 100-inch projector. When the light is turned off and wedding video starts to play, the big screen often makes the couples tearful as if this is the first time they see it.

We comply with our clear wedding videography workflow in Melbourne to ensure our bride and groom to feel more informed and supported via the first time we have a meeting with them to the end they receive their wooden video USB.

If you have further questions want to ask, you could read my other blog- top 10 questions you shall ask your Melbourne wedding videographer before you hiring them.