Very Specific Camera Needs...

[m240guy]

I stream Tabletop miniatures games and am having trouble finding a camera that will give me very sharp focus throughout the entire FoV. The camera is placed about 24" above and 12" behind the 3'x3' game surface at about a 50 degree angle down.

These games involve dice with special characters and it has been a real challenge to be able to achieve a nice sharp focus so that the image is as good as of standing next to the table. The rooms have varying light conditions, but I have LED light boxes that adequately light the play surface.

I am using a Canon Vixia hf G40 right now, but i still have depth of field challenges. Will I need to significantly upgrade my camera to get what I'm looking for, or am i just not setting things up right?

Here's a recent stream that is pretty good so you can see what I mean.

https/youtu.be/uGUlBGG0qkk

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[kanewolf]

Depth of field is a function of aperture. Aperture is a function of brightness. If you can manually set the aperture to a small size (high number) then you will get greatest depth of field. But you may need even more light to compensate for the small diameter aperture. Could you use a second camera specifically for the dice (by controlling the area then can bounce (like a craps table) ? Put that camera perpendicular to the table top so that depth of field isn't as critical. That then creates the problem of merging the video streams.