Is a wedding videographer worth it?

I film weddings for a living, so treat this accordingly. What I can do is give you the actual numbers and the actual trade-offs instead of a paragraph about capturing magical moments, and tell you plainly when I think you should not book one.

What a film actually does that photographs cannot

This is the whole argument, and most suppliers bury it under adjectives.

A photograph cannot hold a voice. It cannot hold your dad's speech going off script, or the pause before someone says something they have clearly been practicing for a month, or the noise a room makes when you say your vows. It cannot hold how your partner sounds saying your name in front of everybody they know.

Couples tell me afterwards that the bit they replay is almost never the pretty drone shot. It is thirty seconds of somebody talking. That is the product. Everything else is craft in service of it.

There is also a version of this nobody enjoys thinking about. Grandparents speak at weddings. So do parents. A film is often the only moving, speaking record of somebody that a family ends up with, and that is the thing people write to me about years later.

When it is genuinely not worth it

Four cases, and I mean these.

• If it means cutting something your guests will feel. The food, the drinks, the size of the room. A film is for you afterwards. Those things are for a hundred people on the day. Do not trade one for the other.
• If you already cannot afford a photographer. Book the photographer. I will say that to your face on a call.
• If nobody is speaking. No speeches and no personal vows removes most of what makes a film worth re-watching. It can still be lovely, but be clear you are buying something more decorative.
• If you genuinely do not re-watch things. Some people do not, and that is fine. Be honest with yourselves rather than buying it because it is on a checklist.

What it should cost in Scotland

Most published wedding film prices in Scotland sit somewhere between about £1,000 and £2,000. Two things about that range are worth knowing before you use it as your benchmark.

First, it only reflects suppliers who publish a price at all. Several of the genuinely premium Scottish studios show no price anywhere, so the visible range is the part of the market you can see rather than the whole of it. Second, price differences are mostly not about talent. They are about hours, cameras and editing time.

The four questions that explain almost any price

• How many hours are included, and when does coverage stop? Six hours and thirteen hours are completely different days.
• Is late coverage extra? This is the big hidden one. Most suppliers charge by the hour for the evening, typically £100 to £500 on top. Compare like for like.
• How many cameras? One camera at a ceremony means one angle, and a cut to nothing when it needs to move.
• How long is the edit, and what do you get? A short film and a full ceremony record are different deliverables, and the short one takes far longer per minute.

For what it is worth, mine are £1,500, £2,500 and £3,000, and they are published in full rather than sent out on request. Roughly 35 hours of editing goes into a film, and on my top collection coverage to 1am is included rather than billed hourly.

Two claims to be sceptical of

"98% of couples regret not hiring a videographer." You will see this everywhere, along with 94%, 60% and 35% versions of the same line. I went looking for the source. There is not one. It traces back to vendor blogs citing "multiple surveys" with nothing linked, and the fact that the number changes depending on who is quoting it is the tell. Any supplier using it either has not checked or is hoping you will not.

"You can pull photos from the video, so you barely need a photographer." No. A 4K frame is around 8 megapixels against a stills camera's 20 or more. Video is shot at a shutter angle that bakes motion blur into every frame. There is no flash. And one person cannot direct a group for a portrait and film a moment as it happens at the same time. Stills from film are great for socials and thank-you cards. They are not a photographer.

How to choose one, if you decide yes

Watch a full film, start to finish, not a showreel. Showreels are the best four seconds of fifty weddings and every one of them looks incredible. A whole film tells you whether they can hold a story and whether the audio is any good, which is what you are actually buying.

Then check the sound with headphones on. If you cannot hear the vows clearly, nothing else matters. And find out who is turning up. "We" is doing a lot of work on most supplier websites, and it is worth knowing whether the person you spoke to is the person filming.