Do you need a wedding videographer? An honest answer

Ask married couples their biggest regret about the day and one answer comes up with unsettling regularity: we wish we had a film. Ask couples planning a wedding what they will cut first, and the same word appears. The videographer sits in this strange position, first onto the chopping block, first into the regrets.

Here is what film actually gives you, so you can decide with clear eyes. Photographs hold how the day looked. Film holds how it sounded and moved. The wobble in a father's voice at the toast. The exact way your partner laughed during the vows. A grandparent dancing, in motion, forever. Ten years on, these are the moments couples replay, and no photograph contains them.

When it is worth it

If people you love are elderly, film them. This is the bluntest and best reason. If your wedding has performance in it, speeches you have laboured over, a band, a choreographed entrance, a mehndi night full of dancing, film earns its fee many times over. And if one of you is the sentimental one, listen to that person now, because they are the one who will feel the absence later.

When you can honestly skip it

A tiny ceremony with no speeches and no dancing loses less on film. And a videographer who films everything but delivers a three minute highlight reel set to licensed music may give you less than you hoped, so interrogate what you actually receive. The full ceremony and full speeches, delivered as plain unedited footage, matter more than cinematic colour grading.

The middle path

If the full package is out of reach, ask for coverage of ceremony and speeches only. Some videographers offer it quietly. Failing that, put a phone on a tripod at the back of the room and press record. It is not cinema, but the voices are saved, and the voices are the point.

What you should not do is decide by default, by letting the budget quietly absorb the question. Decide on purpose. It is the one supplier you cannot add after the day.