As such, we are offering 3 lucky couples the chance to have their wedding filmed for only £250! The only rules are that you need to be getting married in the North West of England and in to be during 2012. This offer is therefore perfect for late bookers or people who weren’t sure they wanted to splash the often £1000+ cost of a video service.

You will receive our normal full service for this cost, which includes:

• Guests at church pre-service, arrival of Bride
• Church Service
• Post Service
• Reception Arrival
• Speeches
• Cake Cutting
• 1st Dance
• Stylish editing to create a memorable DVD of your day
• 3 copies of DVD in special wedding cases
• 2 camera operators

If you’re interested, please, get in touch. This is only open to the first 3 couples who book (not inquire, you actually need to book us). Once these 3 spaces are filled, we will still be offering a discounted service for the remained for this year as we build our portfolio.

• Music Videos
• Corporate Videos
• Kit Listing
• About Us

I’m also working on a showreel I need to get up in the next month or two, but I’ve got loads of new work coming up in the first couple of months of 2012 that I want to add to this. In the meantime, you can still view my Youtube and Vimeo portfolios and most of the commercial pages now have a number of example videos linked on them.

“In these austere times, even Santa is feeling the pinch. Now he’s taking back what’s his”

Also, read the fantastic testimonial from Joe:

If you’ve got a performance that you want shooting as well, get in touch. Although we’re pretty booked up this month, we’re looking for more bookings from January onwards. Give us a call or drop us an email to discuss our pricing.

You can see the event details here.

First of all, my editing path on non-linear systems has come from the early days of a Pinnacle DV500, Canopus product, I think it was the Raptor and a Matrox product. Software wise I’ve used Pinnacles own, Adobe Premiere (pre CS!) and last on my PC was Sony Vegas until I migrated to Mac where I taught myself Final Cut Pro 7.

After watching the impressive Apple show on FCPx, I was a little bit excited to say the least. I looked fantastic, it was 64 bit, it was fast, it looked so slick. Then it came out and the backlash was massive. Now, I don’t need half the pro features that were missing, I don’t edit on tape, I don’t really need all the timecode and a load of the import /export stuff. I shoot on the latest kit, DSLR and Canon XF100, so the fact it could natively edit these camera’s codecs was a big bonus.

So, what did I like?

• Skimming – This is the best new feature in my opinion. It really is so very useful to be able to skim through your clips so easily and see exactly what is there.
• Nice & Quick – Yes, its x64 so the program is nice and quick
• Keywords & Favourites – These were really useful, to be able to mark parts of a clip as a favourite or rejected and then filter down your views to show. Keywords also the same

What didn’t I like?

• The main ones was the removal of being able to create BINS and move your stuff into them. The way FCPx works, just doesn’t allow you to really manage your projects in that way at all, if you just have it non filtered, it’s a mess
• Colour Correction – I just couldn’t get used to it, I’m so used to colour wheels and the traditional way all other colour correcting and grading programs are laid out. It may be a sit down and learn it thing, but this isn’t Color
• Can’t import FCP7 projects – They’ve made a complete break and the way the program is laid out I can see why, but, it really is a draw back
• No multi-cam editing – Okay, Apple have said this is coming 2012, but to leave it out …
• Speed Changes – It doesn’t appear you have the ability to curve/ramp your speed changes. Key-framing of speed doesn’t seem to exist. I couldn’t find it, two other people I know can’t find it and a good Google search couldn’t find it. Is it there?

There are also a few things that had good and bad points:

• Clip Analysis – Sort of works. It can do some great work on correcting the colour and cleaning audio, it can also go badly wrong!
• Background Rendering – Very useful at times, a right pain at others. Some tasks you can’t do while it is background rendering I found and you don’t get a choice
• Transitions – A really nice set of transitions (plus point). The ability to be able to not move the transitions on the edit point (especially cross dissolve) is very poor though
• Single Magnetic Timeline – Again, at times this is great, things just go where you want if you’re laying things down for a first draft. When you start trying to refine though, it did get a bit annoying at times if you slightly dragged the clip too far say. The single timeline, well, it’s not quite true, you can put multiple tracks down, but it isn’t the same way as a traditional editing program and you can’t seemingly really interact the ‘tracks’ or storylines I think it calls them with transitions and effects etc…
• Some of the key strokes are the same, some aren’t. I did hit the wrong keys a good few times and sometimes I found it hard to get it to show me what the key stroke was for the thing I wanted

So, from me it is a mixed bag. I think if I sat down and really learned it for more than the trial period, with some training material and a few improvements from Apple, some third party transitions and stuff, I could get more used to it. The biggest issue was that things just didn’t seem to be where you’d expect and though I often found you could do what I couldn’t initially find, it was a workaround or a way that just wasn’t intuitive. I can see it being useful for editing single camera events, small corporate videos and less complex things to start with until you got your head round it.

If you want to give the trial a go, I’d seriously recommend watching these videos. They’re near 3 hours of tutorials and certainly helped me along, as did Google for various things you’d think would just be there easy to find …

Overall then, I’m going to stick with Final Cut Studio 3 suite for as long as possible. I’m already looking to work a few projects in Premiere Pro CS5.5, which just seems to ‘work’ as you’d expect and I may look at Avid as well. I expect some stage I will go back to FCPx, probably after the next major update and Apple having fixed or sorted more stuff with it.

• Canon XF100 Pro HD Camcorder: This has a fantastic 50Mbps recording spec with 4:2:2 colour space. It uses one of the few BBC certified broadcast HD codecs
• Rode NTG-2 Sound: Rode NTG-2 mic, boom pole and shock grip
• Lighting Panel: On camera lighting panel

I’ll be adding this to my kit list once I fully update it over Xmas, along with a load of other website updates.

On this film, I came up with the idea (Part II of a III part trilogy!), directed it and also ran as editor. I also did the motion titles for the short in After Effects.

I also picked up 3 camera credits on ‘Guess Who’ by Chris Lane and two Paul Anderton films, The Capist & Alienastrophe. All 3 are watchable below: