Why Are Wedding Videographers So Expensive?

When searching for a wedding videographer are you left astounded at the amount each videographer charges? While planning a wedding couples are often faced with expensive quotes on services that are must haves for the wedding. However because of the costly quotes you may start asking yourself which services you can live without or which ones you can maybe find discounts on. Often times wedding videography is one of the first services that couples either start looking for cheaper options or cut out altogether. I think it is important to understand why wedding videography is so expensive. Greater understanding might help couples justify the price or at least approach booking a videographer with more clarity so as to make a better educated investment. That's right I said investment and not purchase. While it can seem like all you're doing is purchasing a wedding video, wedding videography is truly an investment as it is one of the few services that help you capture the big day for a lifetime.

What Goes into Wedding Videography: What Does The Job Entail?

When booking your wedding videographer you are not just paying for the end results of getting a highlight film or full length film etc.. When looking at the brochure and package prices the cost reflects much more than the final product. So if the price in the brochure doesn't just reflect the end product, what else does it include?

I want couples to understand the work that goes into capturing and creating a wedding film. So with that being said I want to go into some of the behind the scenes efforts that you may not see in black and white on the brochure list.

When building out pricing the videographer is going to take the following into account: The time it takes to prepare for the wedding day such as getting gear prepped and cared for, any gear rentals they may need, charging batteries, getting the storage space such as memory cards and hard drives ready and other necessities taken care of in preparation for the wedding day.

The next part that goes into pricing is the day of coverage. How many hours will they be contracted for and how much storage space might that require. Hard drive and memory cards are extremely important factors when taking into account wedding videography. Often times videographers will pay to have redundancy meaning that at least one or more of their cameras can record to two cards at the same time and then be taken to the office and again be saved on the external hard drives. If anything should happen to one of the cards or drives there will always be one to fall back on and the footage for your wedding day will be safe. This can become quite expensive in ensuring your wedding day footage remains safe and secure. And of course the videographer will also take the hours of coverage into account and the amount of work that will be required of them for the day. A 6 hour wedding day requires far less endurance, stamina and storage space than a 12 hour day.

When the wedding day is over the work is not over for the videographer. Often times the biggest part of the work has just begun. The careful care of saving and backing up files takes place and depending on how much footage they were able to acquire during the day and what resolutions they filmed in, this can take upwards of hours to do. Editing is of course the last step in the process. Again this is no small feat. Wedding films can take any where from days to weeks to edit. Editing requires going through all the footage captured of the day, editing out bad clips from the good, syncing audio to clips from the ceremony and toasts or other events throughout the day and finding good music before actually sitting down and putting it all together to form the full wedding film. On paper it may not sound like a lot but even the music alone can take upwards of a day to days to find. I have spent full editing days searching for the right song or songs that fit the couple and the wedding film well. I've also had times where I thought I found the perfect song just to put in the timeline and end up hating it before resuming my search. Music is something you want and need to get right. It helps set the tone for the whole film and for the couple.

While in the main part of editing finding the main story from the day to tell is also important and takes time. Now isn't the story that you got married? Well yes but the real story, the couples individual story, is in all the details. From the words spoken at the ceremony and in the toasts to the party favors, color schemes and all the big and small choices of the day. Even the food they choose can be apart of their story together. I often say that weddings are mostly all the same but what sets Fridays wedding apart from Saturdays wedding is the couple and their unique qualities and journey that brought them to this day. Again this is something that needs to be captured right. As a videographer you want the couples review of you to be "they captured my spouse and I well" and not "it was like watching someone else wedding day"

So the wedding videographer needs to include in their pricing the time it might take to edit the final film(s) and make sure that the price will help fairly compensate them for the time.

Lastly what goes into how much a wedding videographer charges comes down to their experience level. Brand new videographers might charge as little as $200 dollars. While more experienced videographers can charge anywhere from $2000-$10,000 dollars. Videographers with the most experience are going to be the most expensive but also the most reliable to hire. They have worked through some of the best experiences and they have learned from the worst experiences. They will have better knowledge of what to do when things go sideways than a videographer just starting out. Now you won't have to spend $10,000 to get a reliable and experienced videographer. Reliable and experienced videographers can be found within the $2,000 to $5,000 range. Videographers charging in the range of $10,00o often times also include a lot of additional services that help them attain that level of pricing.

There is so much more that goes into why wedding videography is so expensive. Check out my blog Why Do Some Wedding Videographers Charge Less Than $1000 and others charge more than $4000. In this blog I help couples better understand the different price ranges of wedding videography and go further into why there can be such an extreme range. While we did touch on this topic some in this blog, I believe the next one will further help you understand the different price ranges and which one will work best for you.

While I don't go into too much detail of the services or other offerings that can make wedding videography so expensive, I hope I helped give couples a better understanding of what the videographer's job entails and the work that goes into capturing and creating a wedding film. For a better understanding on why some videographers are more expensive than others please look at the next blog Why Do Some Wedding Videographers Charge Less Than $1000 and others charge more than $4000.