Wedding video footage: how to choose the format of a wedding film

Wedding is the only and unique holiday in the life of each of us. And the desire to preserve the memory of this day for life is more than natural. Therefore, it is not surprising that at almost every wedding there is a person with a camera. He created the wedding video for many years keeps the memory of an unforgettable wedding day. But in what form should this film be? Videotape? DVD? Blue ray disc? Or maybe just a file in MPEG-4 on a computer or clips posted on YouTube? Understanding the mass of technical details is very difficult, and the operators themselves are very reluctant to share information. To your attention – a few simple tips to help you understand the intricacies of the wedding video.

Few technical details

The first thing you need to decide – in what form you need a movie. At the same time, let us agree with you that by film we mean digital video. VHS (home videos, tapes that are inserted into video recorders) is already the day before yesterday. No parameter in this format can compete with digital video.

So, from the many technical details that exist today, we need only a few points to understand to understand the reverse side of shooting a wedding film. The most important question is which wedding movie format to choose? There are only two of them:

DVD

These are familiar DVDs that are read on any home player or computer.

Hd

In the future, high-definition video will replace the DVD format. According to our subjective feelings, this will not happen in Ukraine for at least five years. To view high-definition video on a TV (plasma panel, LCD TV, etc. – this is also a TV) you need a special HD-player. On a computer, this video can be viewed without additional devices (unless codecs will be needed if the video is converted to something not included in the standard codec packs during installation).

Order wedding video in other formats is meaningless. If you need your movie in MPEG-4 in one file, either on the same videotape or to put it somewhere on the Internet – all this is done without any problems from a DVD or HD movie, in just a few minutes.

Today we will focus on the DVD as the most current and widespread format of the wedding film.

And for DVD, and for HD there are some more features. So, for DVD there are formats PAL and NTSC. these standards were transferred to digital video from analogue television specifications. The PAL system broadcasts analog television (this is the transmission of conventional television signals from TV towers) in Europe (except France (NTSC), Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (all SECAM), NTSC is used by the USA, Canada and several other countries. Without going into technical details, We will assume that for Ukraine (as well as for Russia and Belarus) the “native” PAL format.

Accordingly, there are cameras that shoot video in PAL, and cameras for which the native format is NTSC. If the camera was brought from the States, it will almost certainly be NTSC. To use such a camera in the production of programs for domestic television, no one will, but for shooting weddings, it fits perfectly. After all, the standard DVD allows you to use both formats in movies. So which one to choose? The answer is any. You can talk for a long time about the differences in formats (for example, PAL uses a picture of 720×576 pixels with a frame rate of 25 fps, and NTSC – 720×480 with a frequency of 30 fps). But in our topic about the format of wedding films, we need to understand one thing: for a modern household player, there is no difference in what video format – it understands all the formats and displays the same high-quality picture on TV.

And then what is important for a wedding film? The answer is the aspect ratio of the video. Both in PAL and NTSC, there is a standard mode with an aspect ratio of 3: 4 and a widescreen mode with a ratio of 16: 9. In the same way, there are TVs of these two formats. On the screen of each of them, you can play any video – with the only difference that any unsuitable picture size will be displayed with black bars along the edges.