I want to video the big-field outdoor ball sports my family members participate in. But I also want to get enjoyment out of watching them play. I don't want to spend the games having to focus on being a full time cameraman.
The Veo software has plenty of cool options for sharing video, creating your own highlights and even focusing on off-the-ball activity.
The only problem is the price - it starts at $US1450 for the camera and stand, and an additional $US35/month for the subscription that generates and stores the watchable videos. I might consider it if my family members were treating sport as a career and doing things like aiming for sport scholarships, but they just aren't. I could try to persuade schools, sports clubs or teams to fund one collectively - but that's starting to sound like effort. I already said I didn't want to be a full time cameraman, so you can probably guess I don't want to be a part-time committee worker either.
OK so how about an object tracking camera that sits there and rotates around to follow the action? The cheapest one I could find that made confident claims about being able to track a soccer ball reliably on a big field was the Soloshot 3, but this costs nearly $US1000. The much cheaper Zhiyun or DJI also have object tracking, but reviews weren't great for even quite simple scenarios. I wasn't going to go with them unless I found someone who had successfully used one of these for sports.
I tried attaching an action camera to my head using a head mount strap. This was actually not too bad for pointing in the right direction, as the camera obviously turned in whatever direction my head was facing. The image was pretty shaky, but I used the Animotica software to stabilize it adequately. The biggest problems were the lack of zoom - players on the far side of the field looked like ants - and swaying horizon. I never realized it, but my head leans as I turn it side to side which creates a nauseating ship-in-a-storm effect in the video. I haven't found any free software that fixes swaying horizons.
Then I came to the realization that my run-of-the-mill smartphone is actually better than my action camera in most of the respects I care about - it's not fisheye, it has higher resolution and more digital zoom, and has way longer battery life. My action camera has better built-in image stabilization, but I still had to fix it up with software so there was no advantage there.
To avoid the swaying horizon I bought a Momax Selfie Stable which is a selfie stick with built-in gimbal. If you're not aware of gimbals, they're devices to keep things level. Possibly the most famous would be a Segway which keeps itself upright via motors, gyroscopes and software. Gimbals have really come down in size and price recently - to the point that you can now get them as part of a relatively cheap selfie stick.
So for my next experiment I mounted my phone on the stick and held the stick in my hand. As expected the video quality was better with the digital zoom helping a lot, and the gimbal kept the horizon perfectly level. The footage was shakier than with the action camera, but Animotica dealt with it. One problem was the recording would keep stopping because of maximum file size. Unlike with the action camera, there is no looping recording capability and I had to manually start recording again - annoying but not a showstopper for me. I have not found a smartphone setting or app equivalent to the action camera recording mode.
However the biggest problem I had was continuously ensuring the camera was pointing in the right direction. I had to keep checking the screen to make sure the right things were in frame, and when I got lost in the game the camera would be pointing in the wrong direction for a while before I realized and corrected. The footage despite being annoying was watchable, so as a lazy amateur cameraman I think I did better than expected.
But I decided I had to solve the orientation problem by reincorporating the head mount concept from my original experiment. The problem is, there is no head mount kit for the Stable. The action camera head mount strap isn't designed to support something as heavy as the Stable, so I was going to have to jerry-rig my own head mount. I settled on a bicycle helmet because it's cheap and rigid, and I used some of the straps from my action camera accessories kit to fix the Stable to the helmet.
The major decision to make was what orientation to mount the Stable in. A typical action camera with head mount strap rests on your forehead, and to monitor and control it you use a smartphone app to get the positioning right and start/stop the recording. A phone doesn't have an app to stream to another phone, so I needed to be able to see the screen. I ended up mounting it like this:
Pros: hands free, access to controls, ability to check the framing, ability to restart the recording when the max file size is reached
Cons: tired neck from all the offset weight of the stick and phone, furrowed brow from pressure at the front of the helmet, strange and arguably dorky appearance (but people said that about Youtubers and selfie sticks back in the day and now they're kinda mainstream so...maybe I'm just a trailblazer?)
If I had just put the Stable on the helmet like this straight out of the box, the detachable bluetooth remote would have been pressed up against the helmet and inaccessible. Luckily the hinge on the Stable is detachable, so I was able to unscrew and reverse it so the remote would be on top of the stick.
I'm satisfied with the quality I have been able to achieve with this setup. All up it cost less than $US100 which is nothing compared to Veo. And if I want better quality, I can just buy and mount a better phone or camera.
My next challenge is to video from a greater height to improve depth of field. But I really think this is going to be by standing on something instead of mounting some telescopic rod on my helmet, so it's not going to be very interesting for a blog.
