Understanding the editing process of your wedding film is a key element to managing your expectations on when you will receive your finished film. An industry standard for completion of a wedding film is roughly 6 months. A couples first thought is 6 months seriously??? Are we working on your wedding film for the entire 6 months? The answer is no. But there is an extensive process to complete your film. Once your footage comes in after your wedding we import it into our editing system and go through a process called “logging”. This is where we label and organize every clip that we shot. Once it is logged we then work on your Wedding Movie Trailer which is a 2-3 minute mini Highlight Film. Once that is completed you go into the lineup of films to be completed. Most cinematographers have a few months of backlog of couples whose projects are ahead of yours to be completed. Once it is time for your film to be completed at Serendipity 2 Editors are working simultaneously to complete it. One Editor is editing your Highlight Film and the other is working on editing your Documentary Style Edits like your Ceremony being edited in full or your Toasts being edited in full. So now you are thinking “Ok cool so they are editing my wedding film… How long could that possibly take? A few days? What’s so hard? Pick some shots and throw down some music and call it good.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. Editing is a very extensive process and takes sooooo much time. For every edited minute of footage it takes an hour to lay down that one minute. And that is before you color correct, add any special effects, any titles or any audio. At Serendipity our films are very audio based so the time it takes to edit a film doubles. What I mean by audio based is that our films have a lot of “sound” in them meaning parts of the interviews, toasts and ceremony audio are in your film. All of that takes a significant time to lay down. At Serendipity all of our films are handcrafted for who you are as a couple so we are weaving together a story of your wedding day. Once your film is finished you get a link emailed to you to approve it. Once we send you the link to the film things move super fast and you generally have your film within a week. So that’s the skinny. So the take away from this post… Editing takes a really longggggg time.