Should wedding videographers give their couples raw video files? This is a pretty controversial issue in the wedding video space, with some videographers saying they always give their couples raw files, others saying you should sell the files to make more money, and some saying that raw files should never see the light of day and the only thing you should deliver is the finished wedding film.

So let’s talk about that. I’m going to share with you the options you have as a videographer, as well as my recommendations for how you can make more money. And if you’re thinking, oh dang it, he’s just going to tell me to sell raw footage, well hold up, because I have an option for you that has the potential to make you even more money than just selling your raw footage, and it’s also very little work.

Does that sound intriguing? Okay, keep reading.

Before we talk details, because I want to help you out even more in your wedding filmmaking journey, I want you to know that I’ve put together a free workshop that’s going to help you book your next wedding in 30 days or less. It’s going to show you the practical steps you can take and the exact words to say to a couple to book them.

Raw Footage Option 1: Don’t Offer It At All

If you don’t want to make money, option one would be for you to not offer raw footage at all in any form. I know plenty of videographers that operate their businesses this way, and in short, their sales pages never mention raw footage, and if a couple ever asks them about it they simply say no, we don’t offer that, and that’s really it. The couple doesn’t have any other option.

That’s not going to make you any money, but it is also the least amount of work, because you as a videographer don’t have to do anything extra in regards to copying files or doing any editing. So that can be very appealing.

Raw Footage Option 2: Sell It To Them

Remember, I want to help you make money. So the second option would be for you to offer your couples the raw footage from their wedding day. But there are a few caveats I have for you about this before we talk about price.

First, if you are delivering your couple true raw footage that’s direct from your camera, you’re going to want to be careful with what you deliver. What I mean by that is that I’ve had weddings happen in the past where, remember, weddings are inherently stressful events with a lot of moving parts, and sometimes things happen that don’t go the way you expected. And either you or the photographer are discussing the events of the wedding, and even if you were not meaning to be negative, maybe you came across a little negative. And you also happened to be recording whenever you said those words.

Suddenly your video clip has audio of a negative moment. And while you would definitely edit that out of the main wedding film, if you’re giving the couple the raw footage they may be able to hear it whenever they play through it. Or alternatively, maybe you just have a photographer that curses like a sailor. I’ve had that happen too, and I would have felt uncomfortable delivering that raw footage to the couple.

Here’s my point. If you’re going to give your couple the raw footage, you need to be very careful that the footage is, let’s say, sanitized. Which means you either need to go through all of the footage whenever you’re editing the wedding film and make note of any clips that have audio that could be problematic, or you need to try to remember as best you can if there were any moments at the wedding that could have been problematic, and make sure not to include those clips in what you hand over.

What If You Film In LOG?

Speaking of problematic, there is one other issue that comes with delivering a couple raw footage, and that is that most videographers I know, as well as myself, film in a log picture profile at a very high resolution. Which means all of your footage is flat, it’s desaturated, it’s in 4K or 6K.

And whenever I say raw footage here, I’m talking about just unedited clips. But you may have a camera that films in true raw, which isn’t even playable by a normal video player. So regardless, the odds are the footage looks really ugly and it’s not going to play well unless the couple has a really powerful computer.

This is another argument I hear often from certain videographers, basically saying, why would you ever give the couple raw footage when the odds are they’re not even going to be able to play it, much less color grade it? And I think that’s a good point. I think both of these past two points are very good points.

So if you realize, hey, I’m sometimes negative on the wedding day and I don’t want that audio heard by the couple, or I don’t want to have to deal with educating the couple about how to view log footage, then those are two very good reasons for you to not offer raw footage, and that’s fine. But remember, you’re not going to make any extra money doing things that way either.

All that said, if you’re comfortable making sure your footage has safe audio, and you’re willing to take the time to properly set your couple’s expectations that they’ll be receiving flat log footage that requires a powerful computer to watch, and I would also throw in a stipulation that you tell the couple they’re not allowed to have someone else edit the footage without your permission, so they don’t go out and hire some other videographer to make an edit instead of you, because that can get really messy from a copyright perspective. In that case I think it’s perfectly fine for you to sell the couple the raw footage from the wedding.

You can do that either by copying all the footage to a hard drive and mailing it to them, or even easier, just using Dropbox or another file sharing service. I’ve had great success doing both of those things.

The Amount You Should Charge For Raw Footage

But I’m sure you’re now wondering, what the heck should I charge for delivering the raw footage like this?

Here’s another argument I’ve heard against selling raw footage, and it essentially goes like this. What if the couple hires you to film their wedding, and instead of booking a more expensive package they book your cheapest package, and then they choose to add on the raw footage as a way to cheat you out of making more money? The couple pays a little, but they get everything from you.

I’ve heard this argument many times and I’ve always found it to be a little fanciful, like we as videographers are just making up arguments in our minds. We can’t do that, what if something bad happens? Because this issue can be very easily solved by having a bit of fine print in your contract.

If you’re worried about a couple booking your cheapest package and then adding on the raw footage, you have two really easy options to avoid that.

One, you can raise the price of your raw footage to be more expensive than it would be to simply upgrade the package. So for example, if you were charging $2,000 for your cheapest wedding video package and $2,500 for your next package, you could charge $600 extra for your raw footage, which would then make it more enticing for the couple to just upgrade to the $2,500 package instead of spending another $600 on raw footage. Regardless of which one they choose, you’re making good money. Just make sure your raw footage price is higher than the cost of upgrading to your next package and you’re good to go.

Alternatively, you could lock your raw footage availability behind a higher package, where the couple is only able to add on raw footage if they book one of your more expensive packages. Or you could have one of the more expensive packages include the raw footage as extra value, but the couple is going to have to pay you significantly more to get it.

So there are definitely ways for you to make money with raw footage and not be taken advantage of.

And my recommendation, considering the amount of time it’s going to take for you to go through the raw footage and make sure it doesn’t have anything inappropriate in it, listen closely, especially to the audio, and especially if you’re going to be buying a hard drive, copying the footage to it and then going through the process of shipping it, at the very bare minimum I would say you need to charge at least $400 to cover the cost of doing all that.

Of course, keep in mind this is just a suggestion. You could charge less if you wanted to. I have in the past, especially when I was getting started and I wanted to make a little bit of extra money. And you could also definitely charge more, which I have as well. And that’s the direction I would be heading with raw footage.

The Best Way To Make Money Selling Raw Footage

Speaking of charging more. Now that we’ve talked about how you can make no money with option one by never selling raw footage, and I’ll add that you can also just give the couple the raw footage, which isn’t going to make you any money either, or option two where you can make some money by choosing to sell it, we now need to talk about option three. Because option three is how you make a lot of money with your raw footage. And that’s what you want to do, right? That’s definitely what I want to do. Let’s do that.

I want to give a shout out to Jake Weisler, who was the first person I saw posting this as an alternative to selling raw footage for wedding videographers. Go give Jake a follow at @runawayvows. He’s awesome, and he has this great husky man voice that he uses whenever he’s talking to the grooms at weddings. He’s like, this is your moment, you two have this moment together, hey there brother, I got you, don’t worry about it. I can’t even do it. It’s so good. Jake’s great.

Anyways, this third raw footage option is called a FOMO edit, which stands for Fear Of Missing Out. As the name implies, this is an edit you sell to your couples that will prevent them from having FOMO, because you can pitch it to them as essentially receiving all of the footage from their wedding day.

Okay Matt, how the heck is this different from just giving a couple their raw footage? The way it is different is that instead of you copying all the raw footage onto a hard drive or into Dropbox and attempting to educate the couple about what the heck log footage is and why it’s so ugly and how they may not be able to play it on their computer, instead what you offer them is a FOMO edit.

Which I’m sure you’re already thinking, that sounds like more work, Matt. I don’t want to have to edit any more. But hear me out, because this is not an in-depth edit at all.

How To Build A FOMO Edit In About An Hour

All you are doing with the FOMO edit is taking all of the footage you filmed from the wedding day, with all of your cameras, throwing it onto one video timeline in chronological order from beginning to end, cutting off any shakiness from the beginning or end of clips if you want to, and then slapping a very minimalistic color grade on top so it doesn’t look super flat and log. And by the way, if you want to save time and easily get colors that look great, I would check out my color presets.

And that’s really it. Hit render and you’re going to have a multiple hours long video you can deliver to your couples.

By the way, you’re not syncing audio from different audio recorders unless you want to. Your goal is to make things as simple and easy for yourself as possible, so use that on camera audio and don’t worry about it. Even if you have literally hundreds of video clips from multiple cameras, you can put together an edit like this in an hour. I believe in you. You can just drag them to the timeline, go okay, done, hit render.

And I already hear you asking, Matt, what about all of the different ceremony angles? Should I include all of them? It doesn’t matter. Include them if you want to. If you want to lightly cut them so they’re not so long, or cut between them, you could do that too. But be careful, because then you’re doing a full video edit. Remember, this is a FOMO edit. It’s just showing all of the footage to the couple.

How To Pitch It, And What To Charge

You’re going to tell them that if they want to see every single moment of their wedding day from beginning to end, you will do that for them by giving them the opportunity to purchase this FOMO edit, where they can watch literally everything you filmed on the wedding day.

And what’s great is you don’t need to worry about telling them how to open unedited raw files, or educating them about what log footage is and why it looks so flat. Heck, you don’t even need to worry about them being able to edit this footage after you send it, because you’re not sending them individual high quality video files they could pass to another video editor. You’re sending them one very long video file that has all of the clips in it.

All you’re telling them is that this is lightly edited footage. You’re setting that expectation ahead of time and you’re telling them it’s going to show them every part of the wedding day. And a lot of couples are going to be really intrigued by this and they’re going to want it.

So here is the big shift. Instead of treating your raw footage as some weird sort of add on that if couples really want it you’ll sell it to them for a couple hundred bucks, I guess, here you can have it if you want, no. Instead, you have just created a new type of wedding video edit that you can offer to your couples in addition to the main edit.

And if you have a couple that looks very fondly back on their wedding day and thinks about all the moments they missed, telling them you can give them all of this footage means they’re going to love it and they’re going to want to buy it. And most importantly, they are going to be willing to pay significantly more than they would have for regular old log footage.

So suddenly you don’t need to charge 400 or 500 bucks for this. No, this is a literal edit. Another edited video for their wedding day. And so for pricing this, I would start at something more like $1,000 or $1,500 or $2,000.

Imagine making that extra for every single wedding. Keep in mind this is like an hour of work on your part, so the profit margins are incredibly good. But because it’s so valuable to your couples, due to how you have packaged it and presented it to them, they are going to be willing to spend this money and they’re going to love the edit you created for them.

Where That Leaves You

That is the state of raw footage in wedding videography. Some people love offering it, some people hate it, and I hope I’ve given you some good perspective on your options as a wedding filmmaker. Above all, I hope I’ve shown you some ways you can make even more money so your wedding videography business can be even more successful.

Speaking of being more successful, if you’ve not watched my free workshop that shows you how to book your next wedding in 30 days or less, what are you waiting for? It’s going to show you the specific tactics you can use to get another booking, and word for word scripts you can send to a couple. It’s completely free.

Side note, by the way, I am planning on filming more weddings myself in the next couple of years. So if you are planning on getting married and you’d be interested in having me film it and create a behind the scenes video for my YouTube channel, I would love it if you could reach out through my website.

Thanks so much for reading, and have a great day!