Practical
The Tailor Chapters team
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The slideshow is finished. This is the part that goes wrong.
Not the editing, not the music, not the photographs. The five minutes before the service when a file will not open, a laptop will not connect, or a video plays with no sound in a room of two hundred people. Almost all of it is avoidable with two questions asked a few days early.
The two questions
Ask the funeral director these, and most of this article stops being relevant to you.
“How do you want the file, and on what?” A USB stick, an email, a link to download. Each venue has a preference and it is usually firm.
“Do you play it from your equipment or ours?” This single question determines everything else. If they play it, your job ends at handing over a file. If you play it, you are responsible for a laptop, a cable and a sound path.
The format
MP4 is the answer nearly everywhere. It plays on Windows, on macOS, on the media players built into venue equipment, and it is what funeral homes expect.
Avoid MOV files if you can. They come out of Apple devices by default and they are perfectly good, but venue laptops are frequently Windows machines that will play the picture and skip the sound, or refuse the file entirely. Convert to MP4 rather than find out on the day.
Two more details that cost nothing to get right:
Resolution. 1080p is right for essentially every venue. 4K is larger, slower to copy, and no projector in a funeral home will show the difference.
File size. Keep it under a couple of gigabytes. Large files are slow to copy onto a USB stick and are the usual reason an email bounces back.
The USB stick
Format it as exFAT if you are given the choice. It is the format both Windows and macOS read without complaint. A stick formatted on a Mac in the Apple format will not be read by a Windows laptop, and that is a common and entirely silent failure.
Put the video in the root of the stick, not inside folders. Name it something a stranger can identify under pressure: the person’s name and the word slideshow. Not “final_v3”.
Put nothing else on the stick. Someone will be looking at it on a screen at the front of a room.
Bring a second copy. A second stick, or the file in your email, or a copy on your phone. Sticks fail, and they fail on the day rather than the day before.
Sound
Sound is where most of the remaining failures live, and it has nothing to do with your file.
If the venue plays from their own system, they have it covered. If you are bringing a laptop, ask what you are plugging into. A cable that carries picture but not sound is the classic outcome, and it is usually an adapter problem rather than a cable problem.
Bring your own adapter if your laptop needs one. Venues rarely have the right one for a recent laptop.
Check the volume before the room fills. A laptop at forty percent through a hall system sounds fine in an empty room and disappears once there are people in it.
Test it, at the venue
If you can be at the venue beforehand, even briefly, play the first thirty seconds and the last thirty seconds on the equipment that will be used.
The last thirty seconds matter more than people expect. It is where a file that was exported incorrectly reveals itself, and it is the part nobody thinks to check.
If you cannot get there, ask the funeral director to test it when you hand it over, and to tell you if anything looks wrong. They would far rather find out in the morning than during the service.
Who presses play
Agree this in advance and say it out loud, because it is routinely assumed and rarely assigned.
Someone has to start the video at the right moment, and it should not be the person who is about to speak. Ask the funeral director whether they handle it. Usually they do, and usually nobody thought to check.
If a family member is doing it, they need to know when, and they need to be sitting somewhere they can reach the laptop without walking the length of the room.
A short checklist
File as MP4, 1080p, under two gigabytes
USB stick formatted exFAT, video in the root, clearly named
A second copy somewhere else
Adapter for your laptop, if you are bringing one
Sound confirmed on the venue’s system, not on your laptop speakers
Someone named to press play, and they know when
If you would rather not hold all of this
Send us your photographs and the song. The finished video comes back as an MP4, ready to hand over, in minutes rather than days.
You keep the file. Play it at the service, share it with anyone who could not travel, and keep it afterwards.
Tailor Chapters is part of Tailor Tune, which holds a 4.97 out of 5 rating across 61 customer reviews.
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