How to Edit a Wedding Video

You've captured the romantic moments, sights and sounds of a wedding, a once in a lifetime event for the newlyweds. Once you have the footage you need, it is time to edit the wedding video. If you shot your video well, editing will be fairly straightforward. Adding in special effects, music and animations and rearranging scenes into a different order is not difficult for the average videographer but it can be time consuming.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Editing software

1. Ask the bride and groom how they want their wedding presented. Most couples choose the uncut version of the ceremony with the reception video cut down to the highlights. You may also create a video montage or set some clips to music.
2. Allow enough time to edit the wedding video. A typical wedding video can take 40 to 50 hours to edit. This includes dumping the tapes, creating titles, shooting baby pictures and cropping them as necessary and editing the actual footage.
3. Add extra hours if you plan to print labels for the tapes or DVDs or create animations to use in the video. You will also have to create a master tape and copies, as well as ship them to the newlyweds.
4. Use B roll to smooth transitions between scenes. You can also use it to cover any cuts. B roll is video that adds to the story of the wedding, such as shots of the church and of guests arriving at the wedding.
5. Match up elements in your shots to smoothly join clips that have been taken out of order. For instance, if your subject is sitting cross-legged in one shot, don't cut directly to a shot of them sitting with their legs uncrossed without adding a transition in between.
6. Add wipes. They allow you to cut to a different scene without startling your viewers.
7. Create or capture musical selections to include in your video. This capability might be bundled in with your editing software or you might require a separate program.

Tips & Warnings

• Before you start editing your wedding video, make sure you have enough storage space on your computer. If you need more, you can purchase an external hard drive to save the files on.
• Be aware of copyright. Get a license to use royalty-free music in your wedding videos or create the music yourself. It is not worth the legal risk to use popular music without permission, even though many videographers do it.