When it comes to planning the perfect wedding, the photographer is often second on the list of ‘must haves’, but the wedding videographer tends to go amiss and is often left until it’s a last-minute consideration; at which point the budget has already been blown. So you’re planning a wedding on a tight budget and you’ve set aside 10% of it for photography, but you didn’t even consider hiring a wedding videographer until someone mentioned that you might regret it and now you are left struggling to find an Essex Wedding Videographer to meet your requirements.
How much do wedding videographers cost?
The average price of wedding videography in Essex is £1,750 for a mid-range wedding videographer. A high-tier wedding videographer, or team is likely to set you back £2,000-5,000.
But why are good wedding videographers so expensive?
The reason is simple. Creating a wedding film requires a LOT of work, years of experience and very expensive equipment. Wedding photography on the other hand is cheaper, easier and less intensive/technical. Let’s for a moment consider the cost of a film vs the cost of a photo shoot. Even low budget films cost literally millions of dollars and even the simplest television ads cost upwards of tens of thousands of dollars for a single day shoot and post-production with a 10 second ad as the end result. Wedding videos these days involve similar amounts of work to short films with multiple camera angles and cinematic videos lasting between 3 and 90 minutes!
Obviously, producing wedding video isn’t the same as producing a TV ad or a short film, they are completely different industries. When shooting a TV ad or a film the production company/videographer will have a set budget and timeline for delivery. If things go wrong, they can always re-shoot. Wedding videographers don’t get that luxury. If they miss the first kiss, they can’t stop the ceremony and ask everyone to repeat just because they missed the moment. Wedding videography is unforgiving, highly pressured and chaotic!
Wedding videographer camera gear vs wedding photographer camera gear:
We asked a wedding photographer and wedding videographer what gear they would typically bring to a full day wedding shoot so that we could compare the amount of gear and the pricing of it all.
For our wedding photographer we spoke to Dan from Peppermint Films, this is what he had to say:
A typical wedding photographer will shoot on two cameras, something like a Sony A7III and they’ll have two flash guns, a zoom lens, an 85mm prime and perhaps a 35mm prime as well as some memory cards. That’s all they need.
Dan’s wedding photography gear:
- Sony A7III (X2): £1300 each – Total cost £2600
- Tamron 28-75: £690
- 50mm prime: £250
- 70-200: £1600
- Camera shoulder straps: £35
- Memory cards: £75
- Flash guns (2X): £195 each – total cost £390
- Laptop or computer to edit: £600
- Spare batteries (4X): £80
Overall cost of gear: £6320
The Camera Guys are Essex wedding videographers and we asked them to provide a list of the gear that they would typically bring to a wedding. Here is what they had to say:
Wedding videographers need substantially more equipment than wedding photographers due to the nature of their work. Wedding photographers capture still moments but video is in motion and there are so many additional variables to take into consideration.
Here is a breakdown of the gear we would bring to a wedding:
- 2X Sony A7S III cameras: £6000
- 2X Sony A6400 camera: £1700
- GoPro Hero 9: £300 (safety angle)
- Camera cages and rigging: £100
- Power banks: £70
- Spare batteries (lots): £200
- Gimbals (2X): £760
- Memory cards (V90 class) – £575
- Memory cards (V30 U10) – £250
- Fluid head video tripods: £500
- Lenses: 24mm 1.4 (£700), 35mm 1.8 (£400), 35mm 2.8 (£220) 50mm 1.8 (£250), 85mm 1.8 (£350), 24-105 (£850), 70-200 (£1600), 10-18 APSC (£530), 18-105 APSC (£420), 30mm APSC (£290), 50mm APSC (£240).
- Total cost of lenses: £6750
- Lens filters: £450
We use so many lenses because we shoot most things with prime lenses as they produce better results with more blurry backgrounds and nicer falloff. We tend to work in a team of two and each videographer might have two prime lenses in use at any given time, such as a wide and a portrait. Each lens provides a different look. We use the zooms for the ceremony and speeches, the 70-200 gets everything happening from the back of the room which allows the videographer to be discreet and unintrusive. The 10-18 goes on a safety angle to get a wide shot of the room. All the lenses will get used at some point in the day. We could get away with just shooting everything on a zoom lens, but the videos wouldn’t be as good.
So far with cameras, lenses, tripods and memory cards the total cost of the wedding videographers gear comes to an eyewatering £17,585. But there’s more…
Wedding videographers also need to account for sound.
Audio gear:
- Wirless lav mics: £800
- Shotgun mics: £300
- External recorder: £80
- Cables to get line out: £100
Total cost of audio equipment: £1280
Lighting and misc: £850
Drone: £800
PC powerful enough to edit 4K 50fps 10bit 4:2:2 video – £1200
750GB-1000GB of footage per wedding (backed up twice): £30
Total overall cost of wedding videographer gear: £21,745
That’s 4 times the cost of the wedding photographers gear, yet in most instances wedding photographers and wedding videographers charge the same amount.
Wedding videography is more work.
Filming a wedding is only 10% of the work. After filming a wedding the wedding videographer must then backup up to 1TB of footage (twice), then organise the footage into separate timelines for different parts of the day. This alone can take 2-4 hours.
Then a timeline must be created for each part of the day and the footage from camera 1, 2, 3 and 4 has to be organised. The footage then gets culled and watched through in full whilst cutting and trimming it to remove any shaky sections, parts of waiting etc. Up to four cameras each with 2-12 hours of footage. This process can take one to three days.
Next the wedding videographer will need to create edits of each part of the day selecting only the best bits. They will also need to create a multi-cam edit of the ceremony and speeches as well as create a teaser video, a highlights video and a full-length wedding film.
It’s a lot of work!
According to The Camera Guys, the complete post-production process can take up to two weeks of continuous work to complete. On the other hand, a wedding videographer can completely edit a wedding in a days work, for wedding photos it’s usually just a case of dragging the images into Photo Mechanic, deleting bad ones, moving them to Lightroom, applying auto-corrections, applying a LUT and then checking them individually to make micro-adjustments.
That is why a wedding videographer costs so much.