The cameras you don’t see us carrying
Extra angles on the day, lined up by sound afterwards.
A wedding happens once. The ceremony is not going to be repeated because a camera was pointed the wrong way, and two people cannot stand in four places at the same time.
So alongside the cameras we operate by hand, we set up locked-off angles that run on their own: the aisle from the back, a wide of the whole room, the guests’ faces during the vows. They cost nothing in attention on the day and they rescue a surprising number of moments in the edit.
Angles that all start at the same moment
Those extra angles are iPhones, and they run on ActionCheese – Multicam Remote, an app we wrote for our own shoots. Two to four iPhones act as synced wireless cameras, and every one of them stamps the same timecode.
They all start together from one place — another phone, or an Apple Watch, which is what we actually use when the ceremony is about to begin and we are not going to walk across the church to press record. The phones talk to each other directly over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the way AirDrop does, typically over 10 to 30 metres with a clear line of sight. No venue Wi-Fi, no router, nothing to fail at the worst moment. The app needs a connection once to activate, then roughly once every 30 days — never during the event itself.
They record 4K, with high frame rates and 10-bit Apple Log where the particular iPhone supports it. The app collects no data and asks for no account. It does not live stream, and there is no Android version.
Then everything is lined up by sound
Back at the desk there are Sony cameras, several iPhones and a Zoom recorder taking the microphones from the celebrant and the groom. Nothing shares a timecode across all of that.
ActionCheese Sync, the second app we built, lines them all up by their sound. We hand it the folder from each card and it writes a ready timeline for Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.
It corrects the recorder’s clock drift with a small speed correction on the audio — the picture is never resampled — reads the start time from the sidecar files on Sony cards, keeps markers tied to their clips, and never silently drops a clip it could not match.
Sync is free and open source under the GPL-3.0 licence, for Macs with Apple silicon. For anyone who used to rely on PluralEyes, which is no longer developed, it is what we moved to.
Tell us about your day
If you want more than one angle on the ceremony, let’s talk about what the venue allows and what is worth covering.
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