The Major Difference: Wedding Cinematography and Videography

Ollie Mattison

Sep 30, 2024• Proven solutions

Wedding captures hold a special place in a couple’s heart. Both, groom and the bride wishes to cherish each moment of their coming together forever.

From shooting pre-wedding pictures to capturing the small moments of happiness throughout the wedding events have become a must in the recent times.

Are you searching for someone who is good at it, but confused with the terms like wedding videography and wedding cinematography while searching online? Are you thinking, if both the terms hold similar meaning or are they different?

Then, this article will be of great help to you. Learn the difference between the two terminologies, the wedding videography, and the wedding cinematography.

• Part1: Storytelling
• Part2: Equipment
• Part3: Other Differences
• Part4: Which is Better – Cinematography Vs Videography

Part 1: Storytelling

Wedding Cinematography

Wedding cinematography is an art form blended with creative storytelling. It is like filling a blank canvas with shades of various colors from the moments encountered.

The cinematographers are some of the best storytellers who can set the right tone for the video and weave magically wonderful introduction and a climax of the wedding film. They capture a moment from various creative angles to give it a certain perspective and strum the heartstrings of the people viewing it.

Whether capturing an emotional father-daughter moment or the beautiful bride sharing a smile looking at her groom, the good wedding cinematographer weaves a story from each moment and creates a fairy-tale wedding movie out of it.

Wedding Videography

Wedding videography is a common one which does not involve much of creativity. With a smartphone in hand, nowadays, everyone turns a videographer.

But a professional one uses a typical video camera and keeps it rolling and moving around to capture any random picture of the couple and the ceremonies going side by side.

There is no storytelling involved in videography process and neither there can be any inputs while editing the video. There is no emotional connect which can be seen in the cinematic wedding videos and the wedding videography is also cheaper than wedding cinematography.

Part 2: Equipment

Wedding Videography

The wedding video is shot using a tape-based camera that has static lenses or the basic camcorders. Wedding videographer doesn’t have giant tripods with huge lights at the top of the camera like the wedding cinematographer. Such videography consists of lower resolution.

The low lighted areas suffer in case of wedding videography as the equipment used has a smaller tolerance for low light situations. There are hardly any dramatic camera angles in wedding videography and it seems a long and boring watch.

Wedding Cinematography

The wedding cinematography is captured with DSLR video cameras. Such equipment consists of large sensor-sizes. It creates a great aesthetic difference in the wedding captures with DSLR. It has interchangeable lenses and a selective depth of field to isolate a particular subject with a strong focus and blur out the rest.

Part 3: Other Differences

Team Size

As the wedding cinematography involves a storytelling process, it is shot accordingly from various angles keeping the story or the perception in mind. While editing, all the effects are combined and interwoven to come up with a great wedding movie that you finally get to see.

Unlike the videography which can even be managed alone as there’s nothing much to edit, the cinematography crew is quite big with a number of camera people and editing professionals.

Terminology

With the rise of the digital cinemas, the differences between cinematography and videography have minimized but it still remains very different from each other.

The wedding videography as the term itself suggests is a part of video production. On the contrary, the wedding cinematography is about cinema, movies or film production.

A cinematographer’s work involves more complex cinematic process as compared to the videographer, who just deals with simple video.

Part 4: Which is Better – Cinematography Vs Videography

Both cinematography and videography have their own sets of advantages and disadvantages.

Whether you wish to see yourself as the lead actor or actress of a high budget wedding film with every element of a cinema like emotion, drama, love, song, dance all combined package or you just want to capture the moments which is often quite long and boring, is completely your decision. It will depend on your taste and your budget to hire a videographer or a cinematographer.

Conclusion

If you still have any doubts it would be wisest to check out the portfolios of both the cinematographers and the videographers. You can find out few of the best ones online, call them, have a friendly conversation, letting them know the requirement of yours, and see what they have on offer.

Once you are satisfied and understand the right choice for your requirement, you can hire accordingly. If you ask a friend or a family member to shoot your wedding video, try editing it with Filmora. It is a simplified tool with several high-end features to make a great wedding video for you.

Ollie Mattison

Ollie Mattison is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Ollie Mattison