The Post-Pandemic Turn-Around Times: Photo & Video

Hello to all of our amazing couples!

Cam here, we’ve been getting a ton of questions about turn-around times recently so I thought I’d make this post to clear things up!

Since the very start, my biggest fear has always been letting even a single couple down. Luckily, that has yet to happen and hopefully it never will, this is why I wanted to clear the air on why photos and videos may be back later than expected.

As I’m sure all of you have guessed by now, this has been the busiest year of me and Beth’s lives. Due to the compression of 2020 & 2021 postponements into the last 6 months of this year, we’ve had around 70 weddings to complete in basically 5 months (June, July, August, September, October). For reference, the average company captures on average around 30 weddings over a span of a year and 50 if they’re really busy.

With our postponements, we did absolutely everything we could to save as many couples dates as possible and we’re still thankful that we did. It’s been an absolute pleasure meeting all of you recently and we’re also looking forward to the rest. Our spirit & passion for capturing weddings has grown, not shrunk during these busy times.

Since early May, we’ve had precisely zero days off and have been working 16 hours a day (sometimes 20), 7 days a week. We’ve been covering weddings across the country and editing in every moment of our spare time, including our wedding breaks, desperately trying our absolute best to meet deadlines while still delivering the absolute best quality possible. We don’t expect that to change for a while, and we’re fine with that. We know that you can’t wait to see your photos and videos to re-live your incredible day again!

We’re still working as hard as before, but with this post I wanted to be completely transparent with when you can expect things back. Because there’s only two of us and we’re both working as hard as we can, we realise now we won’t be able to stick to our pre-pandemic turnaround times of one month per service (which was absolutely blazing fast, things were even difficult on a normal year). Instead, we’re moving to seven weeks per service to try and be more realistic and fair to our couples and not keep them in suspense as the dates run by. For reference, seven weeks is roughly industry standard and one month was borderline unheard of except for micro businesses or photographers who do less editing.

For complete context, culling, editing, checking & uploading a photo wedding takes around 12 hours from start to finish, taking no breaks. Videos take around 14 hours per cut from adding the footage, sorting through and picking the best clips, syncing audio, editing it together, rendering it out and uploading it.

Once again, I’d like to promise up and down that we’re still working as hard as before to get everything back, this isn’t so Beth and I can take breaks, It’s more to give you a realistic idea on when you can expect things back. To explain the new times further, we’ll take the photo and video package for example. If your wedding was on the 25th of June, your photos will be back up to seven weeks later. Followed by the highlight cut up to seven weeks after that, then finally the long cut after another seven weeks. A lot of love goes into both photo and video editing so we never want to let anything half-arsed leave the door. We’ve upgraded all of our equipment this year so expect some next level stuff when it comes back!

I realise this may disappoint some of you and for that we are deeply, deeply sorry. Unless we compromise on quality, there’s no way we can get things back any faster. We’re looking into hiring an assistant editor for photos so we can both work on the videos and put them out at a much faster rate too. Because we still have tons of weddings left at the time of writing, the majority of our time is still spent travelling to weddings, capturing them and travelling home. Fortunately, things slow down come late October so, with any luck, we can speed turnaround times back up again for everyone as we should be back in the house almost 24/7!

I’d like to stress one last time how sorry we are that we won’t be able to meet the one month turnaround times. In hindsight, with the industry standard of wedding media turnarounds being 7 weeks, we should have moved to that from the very start to avoid any disappointment. I just absolutely hate letting a single person down so even writing this post has been extremely difficult and has been bashing about in my head for over a month. Coming out of the pandemic with a fire in my heart blinded me to the workload and having not edited in over a year, I was mistaken by how fast we’d be able to get things back while dealing with the unprecedented workload.

I really hope you all love your photos and videos! We love every single one of you and we’re so grateful to you all for allowing us to live the dream. I know that things will speed up come October so if you’re waiting on a few things, we’ll be cranking stuff out at lightning speed again.

P.S I remember that we have special arrangements with some couples and those haven’t been forgotten, we’ll still work hard to get those back during those special cases.

I realise this post is getting long-winded so I’ll summarise:

Too Long, Didn’t Read:
Turn-around times are moving from one month per service to 7 weeks per service (Photos, then highlight cut, then finally long cut). We’re not slowing down, we’re working harder than ever to get things back and are just trying to be more transparent about timings. We’re deeply sorry.

We love you all so much and we can’t wait for you to see your photos and videos. The fire for this industry still burns strong in our hearts as it should for working with and meeting such brilliant people.

Hopefully come January we’ll be sitting on a beach somewhere in the southern equator, zero editing back-log, sipping a drink and laughing at how many times we had to sleep in the car because we didn’t make it to our hotels in time.

I love you all.

Cam & Beth.