Silent, so everything else can be heard.

Every montage is delivered mute. That is a decision, not an omission.

A stock track fights the organ. It fights the piper at the door, the granddaughter reading badly and bravely, and the recording of his or her voice telling the same story again. Those things are the service. The photographs sit under them.

It also means one file plays on every screen in the building at the same time. Four televisions in the chapel, two in the lounge, one at the wake. No sound bleeding down a corridor, half a second out of step with the room next door. Nobody standing at a laptop with a hand over the spacebar, and nobody hunting for mute on a fifteen year old chapel remote while the family walks in.

In a church with good acoustics it matters more, not less. A room built to carry sound does not need another source competing in it. The montage adds nothing to the air, so the organ, the singing and the readings land the way the building was made for.

And every service has music in it somewhere. Because the montage carries no audio of its own, the music can start whenever it needs to start, run as long as it runs, and finish where it finishes. Nothing has to be cued to the video and the video never has to be cued to anything. It is simply already right.

Where the family has home video or a recording of his or her voice, we use it. It goes into the silent cut as picture, and we supply a separate version with the sound for the family to watch at home, where they can choose the moment.