Based on the title of this post, you might wonder why the topic of wedding video are year-specific. I would have titled this post “Why You Need a Wedding Video,” but wedding videos represent a much different form of content than that term used to mean.
In the past, a wedding video was typically a low quality, very long video of the entire wedding start to finish on a VHS. Often these things were 8 hours long; it was ridiculous. As a result, they weren’t fully utilized and watched much after the wedding. My parents have a huge wedding video on a VHS from their wedding in the early 90’s, and I think they could count how many times they have watched it on one hand.
This old era of wedding videos is very much a thing of the past. The long form style of wedding video is obsolete, and a new era has been born. I don’t know when it first emerged, but it was shortly after the birth of this new age of digital media. My guess is sometime between 2005-2010, and its style was really coined in the last few years.
The style of this new era of wedding videos is 3-8 minute, cinematic, story-telling video. It truly is incomparable to what most people imagine when you think of traditional wedding videos. Including 4k footage, high frame rate slow motion, cinematic cinematography, storytelling dialogue, and much more, wedding videos in 2018 are much more of a need than a want.
It is becoming more and more common to see a videographer at a wedding, and rightly so. People say a photo speaks a thousand words, so imagine what a 5-minute video can do. I agree that a photo speaks a thousand words, but, the difference is, a video actually does speak words. It speaks the words of you and your fiancé’s, maybe your mom, your dad, your best man, your maid of honour, or maybe a great-grandparent. Anyone that is special to you can have a word in your video that you’ll cherish for the rest of your life.
When I say you’ll cherish a wedding video for the rest of your life, I mean it. As well as style, the format of wedding videos has massively changed for the better. In the past, you receive a VHS, maybe a DVD, and that’s it. It was a single physical copy that could only be played in an appropriate player on a TV for the people physically present. Now, I can give you as many USB’s as you want that can be plugged into any laptop or computer plus I can give you a digital download link that you can send to anyone on Earth with an internet connection. With a digital link, not only can they watch it, but anyone with that link can also download the video in full resolution for free. Friends in Australia? Family in Europe? Doesn’t matter. You can send them the link the same day I deliver you your video and they can watch and download it for themselves immediately. If that isn’t revolutionary, I don’t know what is.
So, not only are modern wedding videos shot and edited at an incredibly high-quality level, but the sharing of the videos is also incredible so you can genuinely cherish it for the rest of your life. Moving forward, I suspect that we are only a matter of years away from wedding videos being just as normal as wedding photos, where a wedding without a videographer will be abnormal.
