What are the technical Must-Have’s for a virtual wedding with three days notice during COVID-19 Shelter In Place?
An abridged version of this story was published in The SF Chronicle — please find the piece here.
TLDR:
- Pick a location that you’ve speed tested, 30 Mbs down / 10 Mbs up
- Get a Google Meets business account or Zoom paid account so you can screen record your wedding easily (for a free approach, read below)
- For yourself you need a phone on a tripod to telecast the event, a laptop to see your guests virtually and a Bluetooth speaker for sound
- Run a video pre-wedding rehearsal with your older or less tech competent guests
- Make sure you tell in person guests to tune into the virtual wedding on their phones with headphones
- You’ll be busy with your hundreds of virtual guests, but make sure your physical guests are looked after
Many of our guests said it was one of the most beautiful weddings they’ve ever been to, despite it being virtual.
I would say for me it was one of the best weddings that I have EVER attended. I completely lost the idea that all this is happening virtually. The emotion and depth of all the events was so powerful that it transcended the distance.
So don’t let it being virtual, change the beauty of the day for you! Read this post so you can get the technical things out of the way, and really be present with your better half and your guests on the day.
What do you do when you get engaged during Shelter in Place? You naturally wonder when you could actually celebrate with your family and friends. My husband and I had been engaged for about 6 weeks when we realized we likely won’t be able to get married for another 1.5–2 years, given COVID-19 and our global community of family and friends and the need for a vaccine to bring them together. We didn’t want to wait that long and decided we’ll get court married now and later do an in person celebration when there is a vaccine. Seemed like a simple enough idea, little did we realize what all it entailed.
The Five Must Do’s of a virtual wedding:
- Legal — marriage license and virtual ceremony
- Virtual video streaming service
- Location with good internet connectivity
- Key hardware or equipment necessary
- Guest invitation and management
Legal
Firstly, Shelter in Place is a special time for many reasons, one of which is that you can’t actually get married even if you wanted to. The usual rules of applying for a marriage license and then meeting with an officiant at the court house in person just do not work. Recognizing this lack of basic human right (yes, the right to get married is a human right), some states enabled virtual weddings. Our state of California enabled virtual weddings for 60 days during Shelter in Place. However, just because your Governor says you can do something, doesn’t mean you actually can. During Shelter in Place, our County of San Francisco did not accept online marriage license requests nor conduct virtual ceremonies. We checked across California, and the few other counties that did allow for this, required at least one part of the couple to be a resident of that county. Lucky for us, Alameda County, had just released they were willing to wed couples virtually as long as the wedding ceremony occurred in California. To apply fill out this form here, the whole thing costs less than $200 (marriage license and ceremony fee)
We later found out, if you can drive down to Socal and meet them in person, you can get your marriage license from this private service here and then they’ll do your wedding ceremony virtually anywhere. In case some of you prefer this option more.
We applied more than 2 weeks in advance of our chosen date of Friday 22nd May, 2020. We did not hear back till Tuesday 19th May — 3 days before our wedding date! At which point, we were sent a form to pay our dues (including name change forms — imagine making that decision in 3 days) and select between one of two remaining time slots available that date. Now to be fair, I’m sure if we’d asked we would’ve been allowed to change our date. But we had our heart set on that date. So we decided to continue and recognize this will be one of the first tests of our newly wedded life.
With 3 days to go, and both of us working full time we had a lot to get on with. Luckily we had the best bridal and grooms party that really stepped up to help us. More on how your bridesmaids and groomsmen roles change at a virtual wedding — there is a new type of help needed!
Virtual Video Streaming Service
Alameda County Clerk Officiant will only use Microsoft Teams as their video streaming service. They do allow you to invite your guests to this link and use it for as long as you need. When we tested it, we found it to be very difficult to sign up. And this experience convinced us we could not ask our guests to video call in using Teams — we would lose more than half of them on the sign up process!
We needed a solution that could allow us to dial into Microsoft Teams for the Officiant part, while our guests log in via a different video streaming service which could telecast the Teams session so our family and friends can follow along. This is actually pretty hard to do!
For our guests’ solution, we settled on Google Meets. Mainly because most people already have gmail accounts and know how to use this solution and partly for sentimental reasons, because I work at Google. Zoom could also be good if your friends and family have had practice with it before. Zoom also gives you much more functionality over Google Meets like it is easy to share emojis, has built in grid view or the brady bunch view where your family and friends can see each other, ability for host to create a virtual breakout room if you want a virtual reception and the ability to easily record your full ceremony.
Of the above functionality, Google Meet offers them all through third party chrome extensions. And this is what we shared with our guests. If you choose to use Google Meets, suggest to your guests that they download the following extensions before your big day
- Grid View or use Tiled Layout
- Emojis
Some of our more technically competent guests did do this. But for those that didn’t it wasn’t a big loss. As they could still scroll down to view others and comment in chat. Which is what most did.
We were not interested in creating virtual break out rooms, which we believe is the main value add of Zoom over Google Meets.
The most important feature is actually your screen recording. You want your big day on screen captured so you can watch all the moments you were there for and not (like the posts in the chat dialogue during the ceremony), again!
We didn’t realize that only the business version of Google Meets allows for screen recordings. We were using our personal account and by the time we realized, the invites had been sent out.
How did we connect Microsoft Team to Google Meets?
We used OBS virtual webcam plugin to capture the screen from Microsoft Team and display it with some funky graphics in Google Meet. We had my husband’s best man do all this remotely for us. Below is his set up. Best Man responsibilities took a whole new different meaning for a virtual wedding.
If this seems too technical, you could avoid all this by picking a single virtual wedding streaming provider (and hope your County Clerk’s office does not make you use Microsoft Teams)
How did we screen record on Google Meet given we were on a personal account?
We used OBS screen capture for this. Again, if this is too technical for you, you can use Zoom (paid account) and Google Meet business accounts as they do offer a screen recording functionality that is much simpler to use!
If we had to do this again, we’d send out the invites using a Google Business account or pay for the paid version of Zoom to get access to the above functionality.
Can you just hire for this?
We didn’t know of a service at the time, as we had 3 days to prepare and minimal time for research. But since then one of our friends is using this private service that helps you do all of the above for a minimum price of $800.
Luckily both of us and some of our close friends are fairly technical so we could pull it off without any private service’s help, and hopefully for couples that aren’t technical this post will help you pull off an amazing memorable event. So you can save those $800 and spend it on your mini-moon after like we did!
Internet Connectivity and Location
Due to the virtual nature of this wedding and according to Alameda County Clerk, we could conduct our ceremony anywhere as long as it was in California. This is actually one of the silver linings of Shelter in Place — we could choose to do our wedding from anywhere! We strongly recommend to couples to get creative and personal with your venue choice, as you normally won’t get the chance to do this.
Constraints
There are two options to a virtual wedding, you could do it indoors or outdoors. During Shelter in Place, most normal wedding venues are shut. So the only options left were for us to do it indoors in our home or outdoors in a public space. Weirdly, our home actually has very poor internet connection. Very often our calls drop during virtual meetings. So we knew our home wasn’t a good place to do this. Also, during Shelter in Place, we were not allowed to leave our County. Luckily that didn’t matter too much, as we had plenty of beautiful spots to choose from within San Francisco.
We had no ‘older’ in person guests arriving as both our parents live overseas and we would not want anyone else to risk COVID for us, which meant we could also choose from hard to reach places.
Internet Connection Testing
We went to a few spots ranging from Chrissy Fields, to Palace of Fine Arts to Bakers Beach. We downloaded the Speedtest app on our mobile phones and used it to test the download and upload speeds at the various spots. We recommend finding spots with download speeds of atleast of 30MB/sec and uploads speeds of atleast 10MB/sec. All three spots we tested did have areas which did comply with this.
We choose a very secluded beach spot in San Francisco with the Golden Gate Bridge behind us that requires a 30min hike to get down to. You’ll read later if this was a wise decision or not.
Key hardware and equipment
There are three important sets of people at your wedding, you and your partner, those in person and those virtually. Each will require a different level of care in terms of hardware equipment.
The type of equipment you need is:
- Visual input — Capturing your ceremony on video livestream so your friends and family can see you
- Visual output— Captures your friends and family on video so you can see them
- Audio input — you need a mic to capture your sound
- Audio output — you need a speaker so you can hear your virtual officiant as well as your virtual guests
Since we were at the beach with some wind, audio equipment actually becomes very important for both capturing sounds and being able to listen to others speaking.
For the couple
Visual Input — We had two tripods, one very close up with our phone attached that was dialed into Microsoft Teams. The second a little further that was a dialed into Google Meets.
Visual Output — Our friend Gopal, also brought his laptop and the screen was facing us so we could see everyone
Audio Input and Output— We used a bluetooth speaker/mic combo and placed it near us so we could hear and help others hear us. We also considered wearing Airpods as that we could capture our sound more crisply for our virtual family and friends. But ultimately decided against it as it would just look weird with our fancy attire on. Still, if you like them, give it a try.
For the virtual guests
Visual Input / Output — we used Google Meets for both here
Audio Input / Output — We used our blue tooth speaker for this
And interestingly it worked for most of our guests. They had a smooth experience. However, some due to their own internet connectivity issues had were dropping in and out. Unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do to control for other people’s environments. So plan to let this one go.
For the in person guests
This was the surprise element for us! Due to shelter in place, we had a very small number of our closest friends in person. Because we were so worried about how to pull off a virtual wedding having no prior knowledge of how to (part of the reason I’m sharing this blog so others can have an easier experience) with the right set up, we didn’t think too much about our in person guests. We assumed they’d be fine as they can see and hear us. We forgot, they also need to see and hear our family and friends virtually, otherwise it’s hard for them to follow along.
We learnt the hard way, you actually have two sets of audiences, one in person and one virtually, each with their own technical needs.
Our in person friends were not able to see or hear our family and friends virtually well because we hadn’t set up a screen that was facing them too. You should have other laptops or screens spread out around your venue so your in person guests can all also see your virtual friends and family. In retrospect, we could’ve also asked them to log in via their phones. As for sound, due to the slight wind at the beach spot, they also weren’t able to hear the audio well. We had asked them to bring their own blue tooth speakers to pair with the main feed but in the rush of the actual wedding day, we could not get to it in time. In retrospect, we should have placed other blue tooth speakers spread out around the venue spot so they could hear as well as we did. We should’ve also had one of the brides maids or grooms men take care of the on the day in person technical management (like the best man was doing for our remote guests — see picture above).
Guest Invitation, Time Zones and Management
This is extremely personal to each couple. Since it is a virtual wedding you could choose to invite everyone, because there is no marginal cost for each new guest. Or you could chose to keep it small to stay intimate. On the technical front, Google Meets allows for only 250 guests to sign in, while paid Zoom accounts allow for upto a 1000.
We decided we wanted to keep it relatively small because we still wanted to use this time to help introduce our family and friends to each other and build our community. P.S. we also only had three days, so we also forgot a few people that were important to us in the rush of things.
Whichever way you choose, what’s important is that you give them your invite link. We sent this out over an email invite with timezones of wedding included. We also added their emails to the Google Calendar invite which included the Google Meet Video link. This is because our family and friends are very global. We had guests dial in from every corner of the world, at different hours of the days including middle of the night. To ensure everyone dials in at the right timezone, a calendar invite was the best option as it automatically converts the time to their timezone.
Video Rehearsal
Our parents did a pre-wedding day rehearsal video calls with our older family members to get them acquainted with the technology and ease their transition on the day. Still a couple weren’t able to join as they couldn’t work it out. If you do a virtual wedding, you too will have to be ok with this, as going online does have its limitations for participation. We will be sending our family our full length wedding video so they can still enjoy the festivities afterwards.
Below is the invite we sent out to guests with the technical requirements for them laid out, feel free to use it as an example:
We can’t wait to celebrate with you in a very select, unique video wedding in keeping with the times. Please find below the schedule, instructions on how to set up technically and other things for fun.
👇 For all the info click read more
🗓 Schedule:
We will be logging in on Friday, 22nd May at 11am PDT (San Francisco time), with the civil ceremony beginning sharp at 11.30am PDT followed by Hindu prayers and a picnic reception.
This will be, 4AM Australia Time, 6AM New Zealand Time, 7PM UK time, 9.30pm Kenya Time and 11.30pm India Time.
How to set up technically for maximum fun:
🤳 There is the Google Meet video link, this is what you’ll need click on to join the wedding on the day.
👩👩👦👦 To ensure you can see a grid view, download the chrome extension (simply click add).
🔲 If you can’t do this, switch to a tiled layout. instructions here
😍 To ensure you can use emojis during the ceremony & reception, download the chrome extension (simply click add)
💻 If possible, use your laptop/computer to sign in. As most of the above extensions won’t work on the phone.
🔇 Put yourself on mute during the civil ceremony. There will be an interlude after for us to celebrate and talk together.
🧺 Set up for your own picnic and toast:
🥂 Have a glass of bubbly ready or your favorite beverage. We will do a toast at the end of the Hindu prayers
🍽 Have some picnic food ready so you can join the reception with us
💃🕺 Dress like you are at the wedding. We will be!
🙏 Thank you for being with us! We are so excited to celebrate our civil ceremony with you.
❤ Lots of love,
Now that we’ve covered the Technical Must-Dos’s of a virtual wedding, in the next post, we’ll learn about how we actually pulled off a wedding in 3 days during COVID-19 Shelter in Place (the non technical stuff that’s equally important)! We will cover:
- Schedule for the day and importance for having a virtual emcee
- Guest participation and community building
- Wedding attire and wedding rings (optional)
- Flowers and decorations
- Videographers, Photographers and Drones to capture your special day
- Reception food
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