A few months ago I published this post regarding church restrictions. As restrictions can affect our ability to film your wedding properly, I feel that I should revisit this topic. Reception venues vary considerably on how much freedom videographers have. Most (but not all) non-church ceremony locations will allow us to work with no restrictions. Individual priests, ministers and rabbis may impose their own set of rules when conducting a wedding at a non-religeous location. The venue itself may have rules. So even if you are having your wedding ceremony at a reception hall or country club, it is important to ask both the manager of the venue and the officiant what rules or restrictions exist for videography.

When having a wedding ceremony in a church, you should ask about restrictions before hiring a videographer. While we can work well even when shooting from the balcony, we will still need to set up audio (wireless microphones and digital recorders for the groom, officiant, and for reading and music). Sometimes this is not allowed and we cannot properly capture the music and speech. Occasionally a church will not allow any video, although this is rare. Don’t assume that the rules are the same for videographers as they are for photographers. While most venues do have the same rules, there are some places that restrict videography but not photography.

Most of the time we have no problems and will be able to get the coverage that you would expect from us. But it is important to know ahead of time. Discuss any restrictions with your videographer. He or she will be able to tell you if they can provide adequate coverage.

In this earlier article, I mentioned trying out Paolo Ciconne’s Trucolor preset. I am pleased to say that I have used Trucolor on my XH-A1s for the last three weddings with great success. The colors and flexibility of this preset are amazing.

Here is a fantastic grand entrance by the bride and groom at their wedding on June 28, 2008.

Kristin and Scott’s Grand Entrance from Alan Robinson on Vimeo.

About a year ago, I tried using Apple’s Soundtrack Pro to do sound design on a wedding that I was editing. Unfortunately when I exported my mix back into Final Cut Pro, I found that the levels were all over the place and not what I had set during the aduio edit. Since then I have done all audio editing inside Final Cut Pro.

I am pleased to say that Apple has fixed these problems. I just completed sound design on a 25 minute highlight video with no problems. I will now be using Soundtrack Pro on a regluar basis.

Color, Apple’s color grading program included with Final Cut Studio 2, brings the ability to do professional (i.e. Hollywood level) color grading to video. It isn’t the best solution for every editing situation though.

When is Color better than color correcting in Final Cut Pro? If you have to do nothing more than simple levels adjustments or correcting a slight color cast, you are usually better off staying in FCP. But if more extensive color corrections need to be made, or if you are trying to achieve a certain look through grading (a term used for making multiple corrections on a clip), then Color is a good tool to use.

For the event videographer, there is one major limitation. Color doesn’t like FCP Multiclips. If you try exporting a sequence containing Multiclips, you might find clips out of place, or even footage that wasn’t even included in your sequence in the Color timeline. Sometimes the graded timeline cannot be sent back to FCP. The only workaround that I have found is to substitute clips from the orginal media for the Multiclips. This unfortunately makes grading multiclips, or even clips that originated as multiclips difficult and time consuming.

As a result, I am not using Color at this time. Until Apple solves the multiclip issue, color correcting in Final Cut Pro is the only viable option. I do a lot of multiclip work, and can’t afford to take the time to work around this limitation.

The June Greater Philadelphia Videographers Association meeting was held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in King of Prussia, PA. Featured was a panel discussion on freelancing, how to be a freelance videographer, and how to hire freelancers.

Steve Newbert of All Occasion Video showed a portion of his new documentary about the American flag called The Color Bearers, The Story of America’s Flag Passion.

Joe Bradley received a well-deserved award for his service as GPVA treasurer.

After the meeting everyone went to Champps for dinner and discussion.

Congratulations to Darlene and Jason Bergener on their wedding, May 23, 2008 at Celebrations in Bensalem, PA.

The ceremony (Length 21 minutes)

Darlene and Jason’s Wedding from Alan Robinson on Vimeo.

More from Jason and Darlene’s wedding here.

We have been experimenting with this remarkable little camera over the past two weeks, including using it at a wedding. First, this is not a “pro” camera. The HV30 is an HDV camcorder for the consumer market. Is is small, light, and lacks the some of the controllability that we expect in a professional camera. It also uses a single image sensor rather than the three that a pro camcorder would have. The major downside of this is that the HV30 doesn’t perform well in low light, relative to a three chip camera. However it’s low light performance is better than most single chip camcorders.

While the HV30 doesn’t have the controllability of a camera like the XH-A1 that we use, it still as a lot of control available. You can set shutter speed and focus manually. There is also manual exposure control, although you can’t easily set a specific f stop. There are zebras (70 and 100%), as well as magnification and peaking to assist in manual focusing. You can also shoot in 24p (24 fps progressive scan) mode for a more film-like look.

The best part is that in good light the image from an HV30 rivals that of the XH-A1. Last week I used it at a wedding as a balcony camera. It was no problem intercutting the footage from the HV30 with the XH-A1. After a little balancing of levels you would be hard pressed to tell which camera shot what. Considering that the HV30 coast only $750 while the XH-A1 is $3400, this is remarkable.

I also shot some action footage at a local horse show a couple of days ago. The camera was hand held the entire time, and looked great due to the excellent optical image stabilizer.

Among consumer camcorders, the HV30 is top-notch. You can’t get anything better for the price. You will be able to get professional quality images from the HV30 in many situations. Just make sure that you learn how to use it and know it’s limitations. And excellent resource for the camera is the HV20/HV30 User Forum.

We are pleased to announce that we are now taping all weddings using high definition equipment. What this means for our clients is that our videos will now be in a wide screen format, for today’s high definition televisions.

In addition our Deluxe and Ultimate package clients will also receive a high definition Blu-Ray compatible copy of their Wedding Highlights. And with the Ultimate Package, you will get the entire package on Blu-Ray disk (along with standard DVDs).

We will still offer non-widescreen services on request, as well as Blu-Ray as an add on to the Basic Package.

In the last post, I talked about using Roxio Toast as a low cost solution for authoring Blu-Ray on a Mac. Here I will discuss another solution, Nero 8.

Nero is an application that only runs under Windows. This limits it’s use on a Mac to Intel based machines running Windows either in a Boot Camp partition or in a virtual machine using Fusion or Parallels. If you have an Intel powered Mac, Nero will provide a much better solution to Blu-Ray authoring than Toast.

Nero can run either in a Boot Camp partition (where Windows is running by itself), or in a Windows virtual machine (running in OS-X by using Parallels or VMWare Fusion). I used the VM method. This has certain advantages as you can access files on your Mac filesystem by putting them in a shared directory. You should probably avoid running in a VM however if you have a low-end Intel Mac, or one doesn’t have much memory. I was using a 2.66Ghz Mac Pro with 4GB of RAM running Windows XP in a Fusion VM. You will need to install Nero 8 Ultimate Edition and if you are authoring real Blu-Ray disks, you will have to purchase an activation code for the Nero Blu-Ray/HD-DVD plugin. This is not required however, if you are authoring AVCHD DVDs (This is Blu-Ray compatible video on a regular DVD).

As I don’t have a Blu-Ray burner, I decided to work with creating an AVCHD DVD. Authoring is done using the Nerovision appication which is part of the Nero Ultimate suite. This is an all-in-one video capture, editing, and DVD authoring package. After selecting AVCHD on DVD, the next step is to add media assets. Nero being a consumer app, does not have the flexibility of DVD Studio Pro regarding the type of media that it will accept. You must have both video and audio multiplexed into one file. It accepts MPEG2 and H264. MPEG2 should be saved as an m2t (MPEG2 transport stream). H264 can be a Quicktime or AVI file.

Although Nero is supposed to be capable of not reencoding Blu-Ray compatible files, this does not seem to work. Because you have to assume that it will reencode, it is best to start with best possible source file. Therefore I exported my HDV timeline in Final Cut Pro as a 25mbps (roughly equivalent to the full HDV data rate) MPEG2 transport stream. This can be done using Compressor. I also exported another timeline as an H264 Quicktime file in Compressor. Both of these were added to the Nerovision project. After importing, you can then create chapters (Nero will not import chapter markers from FCP).

Once you have added assets, the next step is to create menus. Nero provides as full set of templates to work with, and some of them are not bad looking (you will have to download them from Nero if you don’t have a boxed version). The nice thing is, unlike Toast, you are capable of doing a lot of customization. You can even create your own menus and save them as templates. While it is not DVD Studio Pro, you can still build some very nice custom menus. Just make sure that you click the advanced option on the menu creation screen.

After creating your main and chapter menus, you are ready to preview. Nero provides a preview screen where you can test things out. When you are satisfied with your menu, you will be ready to encode and burn your video. There are several options that you can set for encoding, and you can encode either MPEG2 or H264 (H264 is much more efficient). One note of caution. If you are using AVCHD to burn to a standard DVD, do not set the data rate higher than 1500kbps. While you can encode to a Blu-Ray disc at up to 4000kbps, you will get skipping if you go much over 1500 on a red laser DVD.

I found that even using the default encode settings that I got some very clean results which played pefectly in my PlayStation 3.

Before you create any Blu-Ray or AVCHD discs, you should read Phil Hinkle’s article in EventDV on Blu-Ray authoring with Nero, and the Nero Vision 5 AVCHD Authoring Guide in Digital Digest.