This All Encompassing Trip

Same Day Edit for My Brother’s Wedding

Posted by J Rock| Filed under My Videos

July 25, 2010

Congratulations to my brother and new sister in law, Justin and Stephanie, on their marriage! The ceremony took place on a sunny July 24 at the lovely Brock House at Kits Beach.

When I offered to do the wedding video, I was given a brand new HD camera from my parents months ago for the effort. Then Justin and Stephanie asked if it was possible to do a same day edit for viewing at the dinner party. Now, a same day edit is quite difficult for a team of 2 cameramen and 1 editor, let alone me trying to be both for my own brother’s wedding. But I saw this as a good challenge and I was excited to test my videography skills. There was no way I could achieve this on my own, so I asked my cousin in law, Francisco, to help out and he was able to borrow a Nikon D90 and a slider for free. Together, we assembled quite an impressive line of equipment for the shoot:
Panasonic TM300, Canon HF10, Nikon D90, and 2 mighty GoPro Cameras.

On the day of the wedding, I arrived at Stephanie’s house at 5:00am and began my hectic day. When I wasn’t filming, I was uploading the videos onto my laptop and editing at the same time. Meanwhile, Francisco went to Justin’s apartment in the morning and filmed with the amazing D90 on the slider. I eventually fully dedicated myself to editing after the reception, while Francisco continued to film the photo shoot. I stationed myself in the limo and was feverishly cutting together a nice piece for everyone to view that evening. When my laptop finally ran out of power (there was no power outlets in the limo), I was able to relax for an hour before we arrived at the Executive Inn, where the dinner reception was taking place.

It was 5:00pm, so I had about an hour and a half to finish the edit. I was 90% finished, with only 40 seconds of my clip remaining to fill in. Right on track. But then, disaster struck. Adobe Premiere decided to crash my computer and it continued to crash. I spent the next few hours frustrated trying to fix the bug and missing most of the party inside. Whenever I appeared to have made any kind of progress, it would crash again. We might have overloaded the project file with too many HD video clips, 30 gigs worth. At 9:00pm, I finally gave up feeling gutted about it. I joined the party and drank the night away with everyone else. No one seemed to care too much about it, so I felt better.

Today, I spent half the day trying to fix the problem and was finally able to get it to work. So the same day edit was completed one day later and played for Justin and Stephanie privately. They loved it and I am very happy with how it turned out. Thanks to Fransico for helping out and for borrowing the excellent equipment. The challenge was nearly met, and only because of circumstances beyond my control. So I’d be up for doing another same day edit, as long as it’s not my brother’s wedding. Good thing that won’t happen again. Congratulations Justin and Stephanie.

The video is below and the actually wedding video is still to come. Enjoy!