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Memorial video
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made with Tailor Chapters
How it works
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What a memorial video is
A memorial video is a short film of photographs, set to music, made to remember someone. It is the same object a funeral director might call a tribute video and a family might call a slideshow. The words differ, the thing does not.
It is shown at a funeral, at a memorial service, at a celebration of life, or simply kept and watched at home on an anniversary. That last use is the one families underestimate: the film outlives the day it was made for.
How long a memorial video should run
Three to five minutes when it plays as part of a service. That is the length of one song, and it is what a room can watch together without shifting in its seats.
If it loops while people arrive, or during a reception afterwards, longer is fine. People come and go, nobody watches it end to end, and the constraint disappears.
Advice recommending ten or fifteen minutes exists, and it is written for that second case. In a service, ten minutes of silence in front of a screen is a long time.
How many photographs it holds
Between 45 and 75 for a memorial video that runs inside a service.
The arithmetic is simple. Each photograph needs three to four seconds on screen: long enough to recognise a face, short enough not to stall. Three minutes holds 45 to 60 photographs. Four minutes holds 60 to 80. Five minutes holds 75 to 100.
Group photographs and any slide carrying a name or a date need five or six seconds, because people are reading rather than looking.
The pace matters more than the total. A hundred and fifty photographs in four minutes gives each one under two seconds, and the room sees a flicker rather than a life.
What to include, and what to leave out
Start earlier than feels natural. Photographs from before your own memory of the person are the ones most of the room has never seen, and they carry the film.
Two categories deserve a decision rather than a delay. Photographs from the illness: families often feel they belong for honesty, then find the room does not want them. A useful test is whether the person would have chosen that picture of themselves. And photographs with someone the family is estranged from: if an image will change the temperature of the room, leave it out. A memorial video is not the place to settle it.
Short video clips are worth asking for explicitly. A few seconds of someone talking or laughing restores a voice, and nobody volunteers them unless asked.
The music
The song sets the pace, the tone and the length. Choose it first and the photograph count is largely decided.
Their music beats appropriate music. A track they played at home for thirty years does more than a hymn nobody associated with them.
If the lyrics are too much for the family to sit through, an instrumental version of the same piece keeps the association without the words.
Getting it played
Ask the funeral director two questions well before the day: how they want the file, and whether they play it from their equipment or yours. Those two answers settle almost everything else.
MP4 is what venues expect. Bring it on a USB stick formatted exFAT, with the file in the root and clearly named, plus a second copy somewhere else.
Check the sound on the venue system rather than on a laptop speaker. Sound is where most of the failures on the day actually happen.
If you would rather not make it
Most of the tools that appear for this search are editors: they hand you a timeline and you do the work. We are not one.
You send the photographs and the song, and we send back the finished memorial video. No software to learn, ready in minutes rather than days.
You keep the file. Play it at the service, share it with family 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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What you’ll need
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Your own photos — JPG, PNG or HEIC
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A song you love — MP3, WAV or M4A
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That’s it — we handle the editing
Questions
€19.90
LAUNCH OFFER
€4.98
one video · unlimited photos
Free unlimited tweaks & re-generations until you love it. Not happy? Full refund.
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