NEED HELP CHOOSING A VIDEOGRAPHER

spyc1457

Several of the videographers we wanted are booked: Video 21, Imagine Wurks, Studio Red.  

We are currently decideing between the following; (1) Image Creations, (2) IMF, and (3) Digital Expressions.  Anyone have any feedback about these companies (good or bad).  Besides price, we'd like to know how responsive they are, how good their edits are, etc. 

Thanks, 

Tanq&Tonic

Ok, I had a look at all of them.  No experience working with them, but just my own non-professional assessment of their work.  If I had to choose, I would prefer Image Creations, and pick a more upbeat song for our highlight, and possibly negotiate the rights to the raw footage so I could edit it again on my own :P  The worst, by far, is IMF -- both for quality of work and value.

Image Creations:
- Solid work
- Good gear / lenses
- Editing style is very 'cheezy' & not modern
- Uses way too much slow motion effect
- Music choices are very slow & boring
- The reason the videos seem boring is because they really only shoot 2
   angles/motions:
      1.  Holding the camera still
      2.  Horizontal motion on a slider

IMF:
- Much more interesting motion than Image Creations, but almost too much -- I almost get motion sickness watching
- Frames are grossly underexposed
- Image quality ranges from awful to decent -- I think they recently upgraded some of the gear and haven't figured out how to use it yet (aka, too many close ups focusing on just one tiny element, back-to-back-to-back)
- More modern music selections
- Editing = bad.  They piece frames together, not tell a story
- Cheezy use of effects like softening
- Gimmicky - eg, timing a clip of a girl's hair to when the song says "her hair"
- Based on their work, they are grossly overpriced

Digital Expressions
- Don't shoot with DSLRs, so image quality suffers a bit
- Control of lighting is only OK (possibly camera gear related)
- Also terrible choices of music
- They use way too much black & white
- Their price for output is a much better deal than IMF (and they seem to run some good deals from their website)

Depending on your price range, you might want to consider Aria, 10th Letter, or Fisheye. I think all 3 of them are multiple times better than the 3 above. 

Clearly I need a better Saturday morning hobby   Hope that helps!

spyc1457

Thanks. I thought it was just me with IMF. When I watched their videos, I got dizzy too.   Your comments were really helpful, they reassured some of the concerns I was having. But as this is the first time I've had to consider video, I though maybe I was wrong. 

Thanks.