How to execute a Zoom at wedding for guests who are not able to attend?

My vendor offers a live version for $$$, and I am not going to pay a couple hunderd bucks for it.


I have our adult son to use my phone to organize the zoom wedding renewal. We will wed on the beach just with out kids, so he will put my phone on a tripod and secure it. This way my imidiate family and besties could be there for us.
Do a trial before.
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I like the idea of what pp said where you can have a tripod or this one couple literally just put their laptop on a stack of books! you can set up some functions within zoom where everyone is muted while you're doing your ceremony. and you can set up a virtual background as well and record the whole thing via zoom as a memory.

View Quoted Comment I love the idea of the tripod! Yeah why should I pay a vendor if a family member can just prop my phone on a tripod and start the Zoom meeting on their own. I would totally have it recorded especially since I won’t have a videographer.

A couple potential downsides of doing it yourself is risking technical issues such as audio quality/interference or a wind blowing it over mid-ceremony. Like someone said earlier, do a trial to make sure everything works and is how you want it. My friend did this for her wedding and we couldn’t hear any of the vows during the ceremony because the camera was far away and they didn’t have mics. We could see the couple’s mouths moving but mostly only heard ambient noise of the guests rustling in chairs. A professional would make sure the video angle is right, sound equipment is ready, have backups in case network/device is not working, etc.

View Quoted Comment Good point, I’ll speak to our officiant. She provides audio (she’s proving mics for our ceremony too), so I’ll see what she says.

View Quoted Comment And another bit of advice from my tech support fiancé, he says depending on the number of people watching the zoom and the venue’s internet strength, it would be good to ask viewers to turn off their video to free up the processor so your ceremony video stream is nice and clear (doesn’t buffer).

Really good advice Kim! I didn’t even think of that component! I’ve been using zoom at my job for a year and a half so I already know how to create a meeting where only the host has video and audio and guests are automatically muted. Will definitely do that. And will test it all out the day before during rehearsal.

View Quoted Comment Sorry for hijacking this post, but I will ask here since op might want to know too.


1. Since my wedding is at the beach, I am thinking to buy a portable wifi. Any he recommends?
2. How many is too many zoom viewer?
Thank you in advance!

Good question, I’m not sure how many is too many. Let’s see if anyone else knows.

View Quoted Comment 1. Tech fiancé says it depends on the cellular data quality in the area of the event. Purchasing a dedicated hot spot would be better than a phone hot spot like you’d get with Verizon through your cell phone. Here is a good guide on how to determine how much data is used in a zoom call by video quality https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.whistleout.com.au/Broadband/Guides/How-much-data-does-Zoom-use/amp
2. The Basic Zoom plan (the free one) can host up to 100 participants but the meetings only last for 40 minutes. The Pro Zoom plan is 14.99/month and max 300 participants. Several factors might affect the quality of video and audio using Zoom. Bandwidth of the wireless networks connecting to device, bandwidth of the remote participants (guests), etc. Fiancé says in short, it will depend on the speed of the host’s internet to handle all the guests sharing their video screens before it bottlenecks and affects quality. That’s why I recommended having guests turn off their video while watching the ceremony to make sure everyone can see the video with the best quality!

Hope this helps!

Btw I know at work we’ve hosted Zoom webinars and had about 100+ people attend, just the host used audio and video. Put it’s a special paid account to host more than a certain number of people (I think free might host like below 50 or 35, not sure)

Thanks Kimberly!

View Quoted Comment Happy to help! Good luck!

View Quoted Comment Thank you, Kimberly!
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I have same question