Meet Your Merchant: Starling Video captures the moments you miss

Growing up, Rolf Starling was enamored with the home movies his parents made of their vacations to Zion National Park and Disneyland.

"It was just fun to watch on film and relive that," he said.

So it made sense that when he got older he picked up a camera, filming events in his and his friends' lives until filming lives became his livelihood.

It started after he filmed a friend's wedding as a gift and the quality impressed them enough to show others.

"Word got out and we were being asked to do more," he said. "So we turned it into a business."

Now, Starling Video Productions is a four-camera operation, capturing the moment in high definition and widescreen, and the testimonials keep coming. One couple, Keith and Erin Gelini, wrote that he "captured all the perfect moments" on a card that Starling keeps at his home studio.

Another customer, Michele Leonis, used his service for both her daughters' weddings and jokes that Starling can't retire until he films her son's wedding also, whenever that may be.

"They got the reception, the ceremony, the funny parts, everything," Leonis said, adding she "can't say enough good about (Starling and his wife and business partner). They were just excellent."

One particular point of praise from Leonis was that the Starling crew made it so no one ever felt there was a camera in their face or that they were a spectacle.

Starling said a good video gives the bride and groom an opportunity to see a wedding they largely missed in the current of emotions and wedding-day duties.

"I hear that time and time again, 'I didn't see that happen, I love how he winked at me,'" Starling said.

He said getting good audio is also half the work of capturing the wedding, so they put "a lot of microphones everywhere."

He also tries to give the customers as many options as possible, including long-form videos and highlight-style reels.

"I know 20 years from now (the bride and groom) are going to want more," he said.

Aside from weddings and event filming, Starling said they are doing more media transfers also, such as transferring old VHS or even 8 mm home movies onto DVDs. He said he's even been transferring oral histories from grandmothers and fathers recounting how the family ended in the United States.

"More and more people are realizing that their old film is getting brittle," Starling said.

The digitization process also lets him smooth out imperfections that have arisen over the years, or help with colors and editing.