Wedding shooter Daniel Boswell of DVArtistry has always been on the bleeding edge of innovation…he was one of the early adopters of HD camcorders and has built his business on the Same Day Edit highlight. Daniel was also one of the first to embrace the XDCAM PMW-EX1, and he’s written an EventDV article on the solid-state workflow as it relates to wedding and event videographers.

“As someone who does Same-Day Edits at almost every wedding, the day is usually segmented into 20-30 minute blocks of time, so this works perfectly with the 8GB card workflow. For example, at most weddings my assistant and I will each shoot about 10-20 minutes of prep. We meet up before ceremony and I dump both of our cards at that time and back them up.

Out here in Southern California, almost all of our non-Catholic ceremonies are about 20 minutes long, which means they can be easily covered with one 8GB card in HQ mode. Again, this makes importing ceremony footage for SDE and back-up very easy. Likewise, the cocktail hour and grand march/first dance can also usually be fit on one 8GB card. This is all I need for my SDEs, so once I have all of the footage from these 8GB cards, I have my second shooter switch to the 16GB card for the bulk of the reception while I edit for the SDE.”

For wedding videographers that have been apprehensive about migrating to HD and/or solid-state, this article may help dispel some of the confusion and hesitation. Speaking personally, Daniel has a good workflow in place and this solution seems to fit his needs perfectly. Perhaps it will fit yours as well.

For more info on the Sony XDCAM EX1, check out our repository of EX1 links and resources. And as always, purchasing the XDCAM EX1 via our B&H linkage helps to support FreshDV at no additional cost to you.