High School Soccer Video

I am very new to video and am hoping for some direction… My son plays varsity high school soccer and I would need to get some footage over the next few years for his college recruiting video. The video does not have to be great quality but what I found is I am much happier with 4k video which allows me to zoom… in post.

I am hoping to find a solution that does not require cameras at multiple locations on the field or require someone consistently turning a camera on a mono-pod (or tripod) .

One thought I had was to have 3 cameras on a mono-pod (or tripod) covering the whole field. For that to work, I would need to merge the three videos and then I could zoom… in post. Is there software to merge videos (like Photo Merge for pics)?

Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks,
tom

PS. Owned Equipment: 2x 1DX MII, 24-70 II, 70-200 2.8 II, 400mm 2.8 II and a smattering of other lenses. Historically I only take photos so I could easily re-purpose (or sell) a camera to help fund this if necessary…
 

ethanz

1DX II
CR Pro
Apr 12, 2016
1,194
510
ethanzentz.com
Hi again TAW,
I don't know much about sports, given that I just take pictures of them and never played them. How much video footage is a college recruiter going to watch of a single player? I mean are we talking about an hour, 10 minutes, 40 hours? Your setup of having three cameras and merging them to have the whole field, then cropping in Post to follow your son across the field sounds like a ton of work. I just don't know if putting all that work into having hours and hours of soccer footage is going to get you anywhere. I would think that having a short video with the 'best of' clips of your son is better. To do that, I would use a good tripod and your 70-200 in 4K to follow him around the field. Or use your 400 and tripod from on top of the stands.

Regarding your three camera setup, you could use Premiere and make a New Project (1920 x 1080) with a Sequence One that is 12,288 x 2160 and then place that sequence into Sequence Two (1920 x 1080) and just move the crop around as the clip is playing to focus on your son. Not sure how seamless it would be given distortion, gaps, etc of the cameras. And that sounds like a lot of processing to be done on a computer.

P.S. I think soccer is one of the most fun sports to take pictures of.
 
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ethanz

1DX II
CR Pro
Apr 12, 2016
1,194
510
ethanzentz.com
I see you don't necessarily want to be standing at the tripod moving the camera the whole game... You could then just setup one camera with the 24-70 on top of the stands and get a whole field shot. Then crop (zoom) in Post. Of course you wouldn't be getting as close a shot then, but it would be less work and I do not think recruiters are looking for broadcast productions here?
 
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Hi again TAW,
I don't know much about sports, given that I just take pictures of them and never played them. How much video footage is a college recruiter going to watch of a single player? I mean are we talking about an hour, 10 minutes, 40 hours? Your setup of having three cameras and merging them to have the whole field, then cropping in Post to follow your son across the field sounds like a ton of work. I just don't know if putting all that work into having hours and hours of soccer footage is going to get you anywhere. I would think that having a short video with the 'best of' clips of your son is better. To do that, I would use a good tripod and your 70-200 in 4K to follow him around the field. Or use your 400 and tripod from on top of the stands.

Regarding your three camera setup, you could use Premiere and make a New Project (1920 x 1080) with a Sequence One that is 12,288 x 2160 and then place that sequence into Sequence Two (1920 x 1080) and just move the crop around as the clip is playing to focus on your son. Not sure how seamless it would be given distortion, gaps, etc of the cameras. And that sounds like a lot of processing to be done on a computer.

P.S. I think soccer is one of the most fun sports to take pictures of.
 
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Thank you for the good ideas…

I agree – I love taking pictures of soccer (especially my kiddo). It is one of the reasons I am trying to figure this out so I can continue shooting pics while the video records (e.g. I am hoping not to have to “follow” my son). I am planning a 5 minute highlight video but I wanted to pull out good clips of other kids as well and share them with their parents.

What I have tried and seems to work well was taking a picture of the turf after I see a play that I want to review in the video and then I go directly to that spot on the timeframe and don’t have to spend a lot of time reviewing the entire video. It seems to work well provided I make sure the cameras (one video, one picture) are in exact time sync (lesson learned the hard way!)

I will give the PP suggestion a try.

Thanks again for your post!

tom
Soccer (7 of 12).jpgSoccer (10 of 12).jpg
 
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