Why are Videographers so Expensive?
How much?
Hiring a wedding videographer is not always a budget friendly option, especially if you want a good one, but why are they the price they are?
Let's explore a few of the reasons and I will also dive a little into how videography differs from photography.
Time - Filming on the day is a very small part of a videographers time making your wedding film. The length of their day will depend entirely on how long they were booked for. Was it just the ceremony or reception, both, or the whole day beginning with make-up and hair through to the late night reception party? Travel could be a large part of their day. I have personally travelled 6 hrs the night before a wedding to work all the next day and then drive back in the evening. Thats an extra 12 hours of travel time that will have to be covered in some way by the cost. It must be stated that a photographer will have just the same issues here as the videographer.
Equipment - A photographer can easily spend £3000 on a camera, £2000 on lenses and then another £1000 on filters, bags and batteries. A videographer will have all of those expenses plus potentially a gimbal (£500), audio equipment (£300) and the top videographers will also have portable lighting rigs (£500). There is also the small matter of a computer fast enough to be able to edit the 4K footage. While a mid priced laptop will easily handle editing 800 photographs a videographer needs a powerful machine to edit those huge video files in an efficient way. So theres another potential £2000 for the pc. There are a few other costs such as extremely fast and large SD cards to record the footage onto, which are by no means cheap, or spare hard-drives and editing software, but I think I have made my point that this is not a cheap service that you are booking.
Editing - This is the videographers bread and butter. The part where they put together the magic moments in a fun and inspiring way that hopefully blows the couple away. This is however a hugely time consuming task, and requires a lot of knowledge and skill to piece together. I can easily spend 40 hours in the studio editing a wedding film. Photo editing is by no means an easy task, and I take my hat off to photographers for the skill it takes to edit beautiful wedding photographs but video editing is more time consuming and dare I say slightly more specialised.
I haven't even mentioned the business side of things in terms of time spent doing marketing, admin etc, plus running costs of websites, music licensing, etc. There are too many for this blog alone and maybe I will do a more comprehensive breakdown in a future article. However, these running costs must be considered when justifying the price paid for a videographer.
By booking a quality videographer you are in essence hiring a highly trained specialist who will deliver you an excellent product using specialist equipment. This job is incredibly cool and I count myself lucky to be able to do it but it is also an expensive business to run in terms of time and costs.
At Four Three Films I offer 3 different options to cater for all budgets. I truly believe they give everybody the opportunity to experience the joy of having a high quality wedding film. So please explore these to see if they fit the wedding budget you had in mind.