If you remember nothing else from this posting, remember this: Premiere Pro isn’t backwards compatible.

I was asked to assist with a wedding video on the editing side of things.  All content was shot with handheld cams, not a tripod in sight.  The family had rented out a pretty fancy place for the bridesmaids and bride to hang out and get ready for the big event.  There were three cams roving around and were all shot by staff of Sidewalk Digital Media.  I know the owner there, which is how we made the connect and ended up chatting about me helping out.  He was busy doing the Reception…the Second Reception (yep, there were two!) and the Ceremony.

My task was to take 53 minutes of some pretty shaky footage from the pre ceremony preparations and turn it into something pretty to watch.  It was actually a lot of fun to do.  I noted that the colors are heavy in the reds and yellows in some scenes but try as I might, they just wouldn’t wash out.  It was also interesting to see how the footage from each camera varied in terms of “feel”.

The only real snag we hit was that I am on P Pro CC.  The guys at Sidewalk Digital are on P Pro 6.  He is also on a Mac and I am on a PC.  Have you ever tried to read Japanese when you can’t actually read Japanese?  Did it work?  So that’s the take home message here.  No matter how many articles you might read about how you can save files in a certain way or export them as whatevers…just for goodness sakes, stop right there.  Get on the same page or hire people who are on your same version of software.  Or…give the person who doesn’t have the same version a chunk to edit that can stand alone and be shared as is…and doesn’t need to go into a sequence anywhere along the way to join other footage.

And from a video editing perspective…it’s tricky when you also love shooting.  Because when you get footage that you never would have stylistically shot, it’s hard to glean how to edit it.  My ideal is definitely to shoot what I edit.  But that definitely isn’t always going to happen.  I personally do not enjoy handheld looking footage.  Not ever.

My motto is: Have the subject move, not the camera.

But hey, we all have our own ways of doing things.  Overall though I have to say that style not withstanding, I enjoyed what Sidewalk Digital captured.  Some of the footage is really gorgeous and striking.

The Asheville Wedding from Charles Morris on Vimeo.