If I can throw my hat into the ring:
1. If you have all different light levels in your shot, (i.e. Bride wearing white, Groom wearing black, bright sky in the background) this is a real nightmare for figuring out expose. The one rule to use is to expose for the face. Make sure the peoples' faces are exposed properly, irrespective of how everything else looks. If the bride's gown is super-wide and causing her face to be under-exposed, you still have to open up the iris to get her face exposed properly, even if the gown gets blown-out.
A quick and dirty technique is to zoom extremely close into her face to fill the entire screen, then hit your auto-iris to get the right exposure. Then turn OFF the auto-iris and zoom back out. This will get her face exposed right.
If your camera has zebra stripes in the viewfinder, learn to use them. They are your friend!
2. Use a manual white balance whenever possible. Sunlight and shade have different color temperatures. Professional cameras have A and B color temperature switches. Before shooting outside, I will do a white balance in the sunlight using the A switch. Then, I'll go into some deep shade and white balance using the B switch. If I am going back and forth between sun and shade, I can quickly switch between the two color temperatures. Of course going indoors means another white balance. Too bad there isn't a third C switch for that.
3. NEVER use auto-focus. NEVER NEVER NEVER! Learn to crash focus everything before rolling. Crash focusing means to zoom right into the subject's face, focus, then zoom out to frame up your shot. You should focus on their eyes if possible. The eyes always have a shine to them, so it is easier to pick up a crisp focus than it is on their skin. Professional cameras don't even have an auto-focus.
4. Always roll long. Roll the camera for 5 seconds before and after each shot. If you are interviewing someone, start recording a few seconds before you get them to talk, and continue recording for 5 seconds after they've finished talking. Sometimes this seems incredibly long when you are in the field. However, when you are back editing, the pre- and post-roll is very important. If you want to dissolve from your interview to another shot and you stopped recording right as the person stopped talking, your dissolve will happen while he is still talking. Not good.
The same thing happens if you don't pre-roll before someone starts talking. If you want to dissolve to someone's message, you would end up dissolving into the shot while he is already talking. This looks really bad.
Of course dissolving from one interview directly into another would be horrible because they would both be talking during the dissolve.
5. Shoot lots of cut-a-ways. Cut-a-ways are your friends! Cut-a-ways are mainly used to edit out large gaps or mistakes from a shot without creating a noticable jump-cut.
For example, let's say Uncle Joe is giving a speech to the Bride and right in the middle he is interrupted by something that you want to edit out. It looks bad to just edit it the bad spot have have is face jump abruptly from before to after the edit, known as a "jump-cut."
What you do is edit the video the same way, with the jump-cut, so that with your eyes closed the audio sounds like he talked continuously through the edit. Then insert some video of the crowd of wedding-goers listening eagerly tables overtop of the audio edit. Start the "cut-a-way" a few seconds before the edit, and let it run a few seconds after the edit. Now the video looks like Uncle Joe talked continuously, without interruption, and you just happened to show the congretation to prove that they were still awake.
You can use this technique all over your wedding video. If the wedding itself has huge gaps while your waiting for the bride to start down the aisle, you can cut-a-way to shots of the congregation eagerly waiting, then cut back to the bride starting down the aisle. In the background you may have edited out 5 minutes of wait time, but the video makes it look like things moved along at a good pace.
The secret is to plan ahead and shoot all the cut-a-ways while you're at the wedding. Get shots of people sitting and watching the service, or standing and applauding after a speech. You can use the applause after ANY speech, not necessarily the one they were applauding for.
Enough of my rampling....I hope this helps.
Best of luck
Randy
