Highlight film, full film, raw footage: what you actually get

Comparing wedding video quotes is harder than it should be, and the reason is vocabulary. One studio offers a "highlight film" and a "feature". Another offers a "cinematic edit" and a "trailer". A third lists a "documentary" and "full raw footage". Some of those are the same thing under different names. Some of them are wildly different things under the same name. Until you can translate, you can't compare.

So here is the translation. We have used the most common names, given typical running times for each, and been honest about which ones you will actually watch.

Most of the confusion in wedding video quotes is vocabulary, not value.

The pieces, in order of length

Content reel, teaser, trailer

Sixty to ninety seconds. Usually vertical or square, because it is made for your phone and for Instagram. Fast, music-led, the best five or six moments. It is often the first thing delivered, sometimes within days, and it is the thing your friends will see. Lauraine and Brian's teaser is a good example of the shape.

Highlight film, feature film, cinematic edit

This is the main event, and the one you will watch most. Anywhere from four to twelve minutes depending on the studio and the collection. Music-led, with the vows and the best of the speeches woven through it, and the day told in order. When somebody says "the wedding video", this is what they mean. Ours run four, eight or twelve minutes, depending on which collection you choose.

Ceremony edit

The full ceremony from the walk in to the walk out, lightly cut between camera angles so it plays as one piece. Twenty to forty-five minutes, depending on what kind of ceremony you have. A full Mass runs long. A civil ceremony can be twenty minutes.

Speeches edit

Every speech, in full, with clean sound. Twenty minutes to an hour. This is the one your parents will ask for, and the one that gets watched at Christmas. It is also the one where audio quality matters most, which is a subject of its own.

Documentary edit, full film

The whole day in order. Preparation, ceremony, drinks, dinner, speeches, dancing, cut to flow but with nothing important left out. Sixty to a hundred and twenty minutes. We call ours the Signature Documentary Film and it runs about ninety. It is the one you watch once a year, all the way through, with a glass of wine.

Raw footage

Every clip from every camera, unedited, ungraded, with the audio not yet synced to the picture. Many hours of it. What it really is: a hard drive of material, not a film. It is useful if you plan to edit something yourself or want the archive for its own sake. In our honest experience, most couples who ask for it never open it, and we would rather tell you that than sell it to you.

How it arrives

The standard now is a private online gallery where you can stream everything and share a link with family. Ours is called The Vow Portal. Beyond that, ask about downloads. You want the actual files, not only a streaming link, because websites close and links expire and a wedding film should outlast both. Files are usually MP4, which plays on anything, and often delivered in 4K where the day was shot that way. A USB drive is still common. For our fullest collection there is also a physical film album, which is a lovely object and not something a screen can replace.

When you are comparing quotes

• Add up the minutes, not the number of items. Three short deliverables can be less film than one long one. A quote with five things on it is not automatically more than a quote with three.
• Ask whether the ceremony and speeches are included in full. Or only as excerpts inside the highlight film. This is the single biggest difference between quotes that look alike, and it is rarely stated clearly.
• Ask what "raw footage" means in that particular quote. It is the most variable term in the industry. To some studios it means everything. To others it means a folder of selected clips. Neither is wrong, but you should know which you are being offered.
• Ask how it is delivered and whether you can download it. And for how long the gallery stays live. The answer should be "indefinitely" or close to it.

Once you can name the pieces, the quotes stop looking random and start looking like different answers to the same question: how much of the day do you want to keep, and in what form? There is no wrong answer to that. There is only the one that suits the two of you.