With videography, it's with the intention of adding more strings to my bow for events, weddings etc!
Ooooh. That's a big jump.
More a question of needing to add an orchestra to your bow, not just a few strings! "Events" and weddings are probably the furthest away from photography as you can get. As a still photographer, you can get great images by hovering in the shadows, being almost invisible, and you have the luxury of features like continuous shots and bracketed exposures to make sure you have a massive amount of material to choose from later. When it comes to videography, though, you only get one chance to capture the moment, and there are any number of ways that can go wrong at
that moment, not to mention the fact that you've got almost no control over the environment or the programme. And that's just the visual side of things; as discussed on the other thread, audio is a whole other ball-game.
I've done a bit of "events" video work - but only for domestic consumption. However, I regularly attend events that are being filmed for a wider audience, and even though these are usually "amateur" events with "amateur" crews, there's a serious investment of time and human resources that go into them. For reference, here's a clip from a festival I was at earlier this year. This is a typical "one chance only, no practice run, no you can't mess with our lighting!" situation, for which there were
five camera operators on site; the principal sound was taken directly from the mixing desk but there were a couple of boom mics waved around from time to time to capture ambient noise!
In contrast, this is a bigger festival, captured by a professional one-man outfit. One man and a ton of gear (about 3 cubic metres of it - it was my job to store it, in a room that was already packed with musical instruments! Most of it was gimbals, tripods, sliders ... and batteries, lots and lots and lots of batteries
) He shot this over three days and nights, to end up with a two-and-a-half minute clip ... and again, no significant audio.
These are relatively "easy" events at which to film, as you can piggy-back on someone else's audio or cheat and overlay a track from a CD; with a wedding, though, the vows, the speeches and the chatter are all important. I'd strongly recommend that you hone your skills on some "documentary" film-making where you'll have more control over the scenes, before you get too deep into weddings/events.
