iMovie 6 & iDVD: The Missing Manual

Weddings

Ah, weddings! Everybody loves weddings—especially camcorder manufacturers. Talk about once-in-a-lifetime (all right, very-few-times-in-a-lifetime) occasions! What bigger event could there be to drive somebody to buy a camcorder?

Where to Stand

If you’re just a friend or family member in the audience, you’ve got no choice about where to position the camcorder. You’ll have to shoot from your seat or stand in the back.

But suppose that you’re a wedding videographer—or becoming one. (That’s an excellent idea, by the way, if you’ve been thinking about going into business for yourself. You, with your digital camcorder and iMovie, can advertise your superior equipment, lower costs, and greater editing flexibility when compared with all the poor slobs still lugging around older, analog equipment.)

From the videographer’s standpoint, weddings are tricky. If you’ve only got one camcorder, where do you stand during the vows? From the spectators’ side, where you can’t capture the faces of the bride and groom? Or from the opposite side, where you get the bride and groom, but can’t see the scene the way the spectators see it? Here are a few solutions:

• Film the rehearsal. The idea is that later, in iMovie, you can splice in some of this footage as though it were captured with a second camera on the day of the wedding. The rehearsal isn’t usually “in costume,” of course, so you won’t fool anyone with your footage of the bride and groom in their sweatshirts and blue jeans. But the presiding ...