Camcorder setups for Football

[MTCWBY]

I'm a fairly experienced youth sports photographer but don't shoot much video. The football coaches have asked me to figure out a way of recording the games for later analysis and I'm in the investigation phase. Of course the season has already started and they'd like it yesterday. I'm leaning towards one of 4K camcorders (Panasonic or Sony) mounted to 12 ft survey pole with a bipod for the camera person to move along the sideline and get high angle shots. My guess is the camera person will probably need a display and control over the zoom level and recording. I understand that many of the 4K recorders can use a smartphone control but I'm slightly leery of the apps being robust enough. My camera people will probably be non-technical moms so it's got to be simple and reasonably bulletproof. Any thoughts? The gopro experiment this weekend was a fail because it was too wide angle and the app failed after the 1st quarter. Thanks,

Mike

 

[basroil]

All depends on how many angles you want and how clear of a picture you need. 1080p should be fine for picking out who does what, 4K will let you zoom in a bit assuming you have the right software. Just check your budget and plan accordingly. Just remember that good tripods are expensive.

You shouldn't need to use apps though, simply leave the camera on and recording, worry about cuts afterwards.

 

[MTCWBY]

Thanks for the ideas. I ended up buying the lower end panasonic 4K camera and it's worked very well. Since I wasn't shooting the film myself the 4K camera ended up being very helpful because the operator's were different almost every week. Some would zoom optically and many would not. In Elements 14 I could easily zoom in to compensate for the operator and field location. I always ended up downsampling to HD anyway due to file size and the end result looked good.

I will differ on leaving the camera on all the time. In football at least the downtime between plays can be huge. Especially if there's an injury. The first game we just left it on and the editing to clip down an 1.5 hour game to just actual plays (35 min) was very time consuming and probably took about 5-6 hours. The next week we stopped between plays and I could get through editing, breaking it into quarters, and zooming in less than an hour of hands on work.

The final configuration used 4, 4ft segments of threaded survey rod with a thread adapter and cheap ball head at the top for the camera mount. A survey tripod was attached but left loose so the operator could rotate the survey rod easily to follow the action. At the operator's level I used a Ram X mount with yoke mount to attach an old nexus 7 tablet running the panasonic app to control the view wirelessly. I also zip tied usb battery pack on the rod to maintain power to both the camera and tablet for both games. From what I saw you could easily shoot 4 games a day.