If you think you are creative this will put you to shame.

How true this is… the amount of times I came up against a balshy photographer with attitude at weddings was becoming intolerable, there is no need for it it’s just damed right un-professionalism.

When it comes to recording someones wedding no one has sole rights over the other no matter how much the photographer thinks they are top dog, bad attitude photographers are the bain of the wedding industry and I have seen it from both angles.

DSLRs do not help as the photographer who is a notably suspicious creature at the best of times will not be happy when you turn up with your HD DSLR.

Weddings are stressful enough without having a fellow professional acting the goat, on the whole I got on really well with photographers and always introduced myself from the minute they arrived.

This video kind of tells the story from both sides but the poignant part for me is the stepping in front of the camera, deliberatly spoiling your shot, I had a female photographer do this to me once and I took her aside and told her in no uncertain terms where her camera would go if she ever tried that trick again, she was frosty after that but we knew where each other stood…not in front of each others shot !

We have a wedding photographer in Glasgow who insisted there was to be no “video-man” at the wedding and gave the couple an incentive of £200 discount from his £2000 package for doing so, this un-beknown to him was doing us a favour as no one wanted to work beside him, his photography was very good but attitude was a joke. If on the occasion he had to suffer the “video scum” he would insist on taking the bride and groom to a park, himself, for 2-3 hours, then on delivery of a very scratchy bride by this time and an even more irritated reception manager things were put on fast forward as we were now well out of time.

A modern solution is to produce a complete package pics and DVD then you get a team of professionals working from the same hymn sheet. You can’t win in the wedding video game I once worked with a photographer who used to film for Sky News and he would also try to dominate the wedding.

You have to put yourself into the way the photographer thinks to understand why they think as they do. It’s about exclusivity, getting the next MPA winning wedding shot and you don’t get such pictures if you have a distraction tagging along (video).

Most of the pains in the ass I came up against and there were only about half a dozen were high flyers, photographers with portfolios and competitions in mind and the video was a distraction no matter how professional you were.

I have not produced a wedding DVD for over 7 years now and I don’t miss it one bit in fact I have taken more photographic weddings since concentrating on corporate video production. I have that inner knowledge that sees it from both angles but in my books there is a place for both disciplines, who cares if the video is filming over your shoulder, he is moving and I am still…what’s the problem !

Dragons Den a BBC series in which budding entrepreneurs get three minutes to pitch their business ideas to five multi-millionaires willing to invest their own cash. Two weeks ago two ladies from Clapham came on the show to introduce their idea of handing out a video camcorder to a budding punter to film at their friends wedding and the girls would charge £849.

For the £849 you get a dated Sony camcorder for a day to film whatever you wish at your friends wedding, returning the camera and tapes to the girls, they spend 3 days editing some kind of video together ending up with a DVD.

At first I was horrified at this concept but that depends what side of the fence you are coming at this…

Pro cameraman/editor’s hat…Very unprofessional footage to work with and as we all know you can’t make a silk purse out of a sows ear. This idea turns years of instilling into punters heads that they must get a professional to film the wedding…upside down.

Businessman’s hat…Great if you can get away with charging £849 and doing half the work.

There must be hundreds of wedding videographers cringing at this idea but if you think about it it’s not such a bad idea, who in their right mind wants to spend one more second at a strangers wedding if you can possibly avoid it.

The worst part of the wedding is when the £1500 a day wedding photographer skips off after the mock cutting of the cake and you still have at least 3 hours ahead of you.

The point is if you don’t enjoy being there then it makes sense to let someone else do your job…in fact I will bet the two girls are charging a lot more than many so called professional wedding videographers and they are only doing half the work.

It goes against all professional ethics but times are changing…no one thought 10 years ago that people would be filming weddings with photographic cameras, it’s all changing though I may add not for the better.

Anyone in their right mind will always choose a professional videographer over a DIY Video Bob or Bettie but financially if people in Clapham are affording this DIY filming service with editing and DVD services then you should all be charging £1500 minimum per professional wedding video and I bet thats way off the Clapham average cost of a wedding video…£650 at a guess.

Latterly when I was in the wedding scene I would on occasions hand out a smaller camcorder to see what footage the best man could produce or in one occasion I gave the flower girl a camera, so as you can see this idea is not new but the “extra” footage shot by amateurs was clearly identified and the client got the best of both worlds a cracking wedding video with some extra family input. The important point being 98% was professional and the extra raw footage was cherry picked and even the flower girl was given some tuition on using a video camera.

Good luck to the girls, they should be updating and handing out Sony MC50s, simple solid state camcorders with very little to tweak and cracking HD or SD pictures.

They prove one thing people are willing to spend money on little to no production values and are happy with a few copyright music tracks and an edit on iMovie…how much lower are production values in this world going to drop.

Conclusion : Over the past two days I have spoken to many people involved in and around this topic and it seems this has been good for the wedding video scene in general.

1. It has raised the profile.

2. Given many cheap skates a lot to think about.

3. Given the professional a benchmark for the first time “If you want to film it yourself it will only cost £849″

There is nothing to stop you as a working wedding videographer offering this very same “DIY” service as a starter package or doing what I did and giving various members of the wedding party a shot at filming some footage with a smaller easy to use camcorder.

The best news is the new benchmark starting price is £849 if you are charging less than this you are too cheap !

Is it such a surprise to anyone that broadcasters like ESPN are reviewing the cost of producing 3D HD sports over 2D HD.

To get the quality needed for 3D HD in a broadcast environment you need two cameras, two lenses an expensive rig, all cameras have to be converged…it’s a technical expensive nightmare and all for what…a few hundred people watching 10-30 minutes of 3D coverage, it’s a joke.

3D is an expensive gimmick and the truth was exposed earlier on this year when Nintendo brought out their 3DS a hand held 3D games machine that did not need glasses to watch 3D and what did all the kids do…switch off the 3D because it was too hard to concentrate on the game with 3D activated.

That spoke volumes and as much as I am a 3D fan it’s not yet come of age and why broadcasters like ESPN are now questioning the extra cost to produce 3D HD sports programmes is like questioning the surgeons need for his anaesthetist during an operation.

Is’s not just the pictures that double…the cost must double as least or even triple due to it’s cutting edge production workflow, but we all know who is really behind this dilemma, the bean counters…who are the sole owners of the broadcasting implosion in the UK and beyond.

We are now dictated by saving money at all costs and sadly this is at the cost of many productions across the UK alone like Scottish Televisions Taggart, one of the most successful Scottish dramas to be axed due to “falling numbers”.

Bean counters don’t like the words “falling” and “numbers” it equates to less pennies…the BBC alone have lost BBC Broadcasting House in London thanks to “cuts”, that decision will come back to haunt them in my opinion.

I was just reading the NHK annual 2011 report last night in bed to discover NHK in Japan have FOURTEEN helicopters stationed across Japan on 24 hour standby with pilot and camera person.

I can’t think of any UK broadcaster who owns any helicopters let alone 14 of them, Japan puts all of us to shame and its obvious their so called bean counters are not given the same priorities as we do in this country.

In the UK it’s all down to cutting costs which means cutting corners in productions or worse axing programmes completely  all in the name of what…so the share holders are happy at the top of the tree but once you fillet out the flesh of good television you are left with the bones are you surprised people are turning away from watching television.

8 or 10 bit it’s all hocus pocus to many of us so what do the figures mean in real life terms, I have trawled the internet to try and put this into plain man’s english.

In a nutshell…To start, 8-bit means that for red(R), green(G), and blue(B), the values 0 to 255 can be represented. For 10-bit, the RGB values can be from 0 to 1023. This means that per component, 10-bit is 4 times as detailed as 8-bit. Therefore, if you had a raw image with 10-bit depth, it would have a color palette 64 times as large (4x4x4=64) to represent the image on your screen. In the case of high definition video, with the exception of footage from EXTREMELY high end cameras (starting with the RedOne cinema camera and upward), you will never come across media of this scale. The reason is, it would require a signal of 3.125 gigabits per second to properly transmit this signal.

As you can see from the image above the 10 bit image is far more detailed the colours blend from one to another while the 8 bit image is blocky, you can see this effect on most 8 bit video cameras and is one of the less endearing features of the new large sensor camcorders.

While I had my Panasonic AF101 the main problem you were fighting was getting the balance between a less noisy picture and increasing the tendency for banding which is the drawback of any 8bit video setup.

So why was this not a problem in the days of DV…simple your picture information was a lot less, standard definition TV is 720 x 576. We are now we are seeing HD footage that is 1920 x 1080 which is like a magnifier to that same 255 bits of colour hence you get banding.

The new Panasonic AG-HPX250 camcorder is one of the new breed of camcorders with 10bit 4:2:2 giving you silky smooth pictures and no banding. 10bit is the future for all video camcorders, lets hope Sony and Panasonic update their present range of large sensor camcorders to take full advantage of that fantastic 10 bit processing.

As you can see having a 10 bit recording gives you 4x more colour information this is great for green/blue screen work and editing that needs colour grading. It’s all about striving for the best you can afford, the better your master footage is the more that can be done with it before degradation kicks in.

A young filmmaker obtains a mysterious device that unleashes the full force of cinema on his front lawn.

Created using Magic Bullet Suite 11. Learn more at RedGiant.com/PlotDevice

Watch the “Behind the Scenes” documentary at: http://vimeo.com/24747132

I have a lot on this week with my review of the Sony FS100 near completion and the H Preston open day on Thursday at Hampden football stadium in Glasgow, more about this in a later blog today. I am producing a directors cut of the music video within the FS100 review and as usual it takes time to develop and hone such an edit but I think Douglas will be happy with the end result.

I have partly produced a review of the new Sony FS100 over in Arran but came back to the mainland with a major lack of content showing the FS100 not only being used but shots from the camera itself. After a day or two racking my brains my sister Martine sent me an email telling me that her son Douglas had published a new single with iTunes called INSECURE http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/insecure-single/id444728785

That gave me an idea, Douglas had been thinking the same idea so we got together to produce a storyboard of Dougies ideas, slow motion, black and white, speed changes he was certainly a focused young man with specific shots in mind.

Things kicked off in Dougies first chosen location a penthouse flat in the centre of Glasgow with it’s Bang and Olufsen LED television that electronically swivels to give you a perfect viewing angle. I am using the new Glidetrack Hybrid slider with a Manfrotto DV head and the Sony FS100.

Dom and Fiona were the central characters and a charm to work with, Dom is in fact a junior surgeon in one of the major Glasgow hospitals and must swoon the nursing staff where ever he goes. Fiona a very pretty young lady who is a marketing manager for a major Glasgow firm.

The Sony FS100 was an absolute joy to work with, once again working outdoors I was using the 4x ND Cokin filter which allowed me enough depth of field without getting carried away.

We arrived at 1pm although the first shot did not kick off till 2pm and as you can see the pictures from the FS100 are stunning, this is a frame grab but the natural skin tones and lack of noise is un-real.

I was ably assisted by my long time friend Stewart who was a good sounding board and came up with some nice lighting ideas. This video grab is from the Sony NX70, I had Stewart record some behind the scene footage which I will edit in the morning.

Dougie was having a ball, basically he played his song via an iPod and mimed in sync to the lyrics, seven hours later Dougie called some of his friends to help us move about 500 yards from one flat to another.

This is Tonys flat, this is where the party was to be held and a further three and a half hours shooting taking us up to 10.30pm

The great thing about the large sensor cameras is your ability to work in either available light or with a minimal bounced ceiling light due the the cameras ability to have up to 15dBs of gain with little to no noise.

The crucial scene being explained to Dom, this video is about female insecurity with her boyfriend, if I were a girl I think I may be a tad insecure working with a modern version of Dr Kildare.

Twelve hours later and we reach the final scene back at flat one, I was shattered by now and just wanted to get to my bed.

Highlights from the 2011 Harley-Davidson Euro Festival in the Golfe De Saint-Tropez, France.

I saw this on Philip Blooms blog and had to share it, they closed down a city to make this happen, don’t see Glasgow doing this.