If you are planning a wedding or have been part of any wedding planning, you will know that wedding service providers tend to be quite costly. This costliness also applies to wedding videographers.
The question then should be why.
In the case of wedding videographers, it may seem silly to pay so much for the services provided, but I would urge you to delay judgment until you have read this article.
Let us consider the factors that contribute to the costs associated with making use of a professional wedding videographer and what you get for your money.
For starters, if you have read our article on the process of turning the footage of your perfect day into a clean-cut, well-edited product you can be proud of, you will know that there are days worth of work that goes into the process. It should be kept in mind that the average editing suite costs around R50 000 and any editor worth his salt will charge around R2500 per day, regardless of the type of project associated with the edit. On top of that, there are certain monthly operating costs involved for every professional video editor. These include, but are not limited to:
- Offline storage space, configured in RAID.
- An online storage server.
- An Adobe account.
Editors also need to have a solid foundation behind their experience and the tertiary education for this can be up to R80 000 per year.
Furthermore, some videographers are incredible cameramen/women, but they may need editors to edit the footage. They may also need to hire equipment for filming bigger weddings, and there is also fuel and insurance costs to consider. Any decent wedding videography company will bring along at least R400 000 worth of equipment to your special day (whether they own the equipment, or whether they are hiring it) – ranging from cameras, lights, sound gear, drones, and grips.
The editor or videographer needs to license the music you choose for your video, which can also be quite costly.
Something else to consider is the money that is spent on marketing. In a competitive industry, marketing can be cutthroat and oftentimes require up to R10000 per month of marketing budget.
The last thing to consider is that a videographer needs to be selective with what contracts he accepts, as once he receives a deposit for a specific date, he can take no further bookings for that day.
Put all of that together and combine it with all the expertise that your chosen wedding videography company brings to the table, you are looking at a price that still needs to support your wedding videographer and enable him to provide for his loved ones. So next time you see an expensive quote for a wedding videographer, consider that they make a big commitment and take on a massive responsibility to ensure that you are happy with the product you need.
The last thing to note is that many suppliers offer both wedding photography and videography services and can sometimes have amazing specials when you book both.
