Recording Equipment - tried a successful mirrorless camera setup today

[puppybutts]

Finally got around to bringing my camera on court. This post is for anyone who's been wanting to try with their camera but doesn't know what to use. This isn't a perfect guide, more a starting reference, and it came out very usable for a first try.

Setup

• Camera: APS-C mirrorless
• Lens: 14mm (IMO this was the right mm to go with...sometimes players ran off screen, but rarely. you could do 12mm but any wider will make the game look too small I think and potentially introduce distortion. don't forget to convert for whatever size sensor you have)
• Settings:
  • Aperture Priority: f8
    • ISO ended up as 2000
    • Shutter Speed as 1/60
    • For a night match with lighted court. Noise wasn't bad at all and depth of field sufficient for both players.
    • Shutter speed could have been faster but didn't cause any issues. I didn't want to increase noise or shrink DoF...maybe I will experiment with larger aperture to see how wide i can get away with
  • Focus: Manual, set to infinity. you don't want your camera's autofocus constantly refocusing.
  • FPS: 60 (which was enough for me to slow down clips as needed without dealing with 120fps for everything)
• Tripod with a bubble level (wow I found out how not level my court is today)
• I used the camera's built in mic which turned out very usable for a non-windy day. I might experiment with a dedicated mic on the hot shoe next time, maybe with a dead cat if it's windy. Get those sexy cannon noises off the racquet

Tips

• Turn on grid display and make sure the baseline looks parallel to one of the horizontal grid lines to help your shot look straight
• Center the T using the vertical grid lines for reference
• Raising your tripod higher generally isn't an issue, depending on what view you like. But too low and it will be difficult to see the shot from the person on the far side due to body block of the closer player. It can also be difficult to make out close line calls if using for that purpose. I would start higher and lower as preferred.
  • Remember if using for line calls, a camera recording isn't necessarily 100% reliable. For example, if your FPS is too low combined with a weird viewing angle, it might give a false impression of where the ball actually landed. Think about whenever you watch a challenge on TV and you think a shot looked totally in/out, and you are shown to be way off. Don't take it too seriously
• Nobody needs to see a shot that is 50% sky, give as much real estate to the court as possible without cutting off serve toss
• My camera never once got hit during the match, but I put a lens hood on the lens to help reduce the likelihood of a ball directly hitting the glass
• I just realized I didn't secure the tripod at all...a shot might have been able to knock over my camera even with the legs spread, especially with a light mirrorless camera and equally light wide angle prime. Oops, dangerous. Protect your equipment. My tripod has a hook for attaching weight to help stabilize it. I will hang something heavy on it next time so a ball can't knock it over. Luckily a ball never touched it.
• I'm still figuring out the best way to do file management. Is it easier to navigate through fewer, but longer clips, or more, but shorter clips? I think if you're casual about camera use or your tennis, longer clips are better so you don't have too many files to click and scroll through. But if you're the type who is very aware of points from certain games or sets, you might prefer to reset the camera every changeover or something so you have an inherent structure already built into your files (e.g. File 123 is games 1-3, File 124 is games 4 and 5, etc.).
  • Either way, be aware of your camera's recording limit, whether the limit is due to legal reasons to circumvent import duties or due to heat (usually ~30 minutes), or worse because you forgot to charge the battery or empty your memory card.

Conclusion
Sorry, I do not plan to publicly upload my videos to avoid accidentally giving away personal details. But my shot ended up looking something like this, but wider with both double alley corners just in view:

Of course you can use your phone, fence tripods, etc. I just used the equipment I had instead of buying additional accessories. Also, with a tripod on the ground, you don't have to worry correcting a tilted camera every time a ball hits the back fence. Maybe if you play at a super high level with intense rallies all over the court, a tripod on the ground might get in the way, but at my level it is not really a concern that the tripod against the fence will regularly interfere with a point, if ever (I mean even in pro play with linespeople lining the back wall, you rarely see them get in the way of players).

Anyway, hopefully some of this was helpful, for any others who were procrastinating to try. I would imagine most people are just using their phone, but oh well this is for my own reference too.

 

[Chas Tennis]

There is too much motion blur with a shutter speed of 1/60 second.

Conversion factor to remember.
100 MPH = 1760 inches per second

Shutter speed in seconds X 1760 "/s = MOTION BLUR for 100 MPH object

MOTION BLUR 100mph = 29"

For lower speeds use their % of 100 MPH.

For 50 MPH

50% X 29" = 14.5" motion blur.

(Google acts like a calculator if you type 0.50 X 29 into the Google search box.)

I used used an old Aiptek Action camera that had a very fast shutter speed. You could video a match at 60 fps and get clear frames with small motion blur, maybe the shutter speed was 1/2000 second? See if the camera spec shows the fastest shutter speed.

They design video cameras to not have automatic exposure controls select a shutter speed that is very fast, as it makes the video look choppy.

Does it have manual shutter speed control? If so set the fastest.

If only automatic exposure control, shoot in bright sunlight, and set what you can, highest ISO, wide aperture, ... ?

 

[puppybutts]

Does it have manual shutter speed control? If so set the fastest.

If only automatic exposure control, shoot in bright sunlight, and set what you can, highest ISO, wide aperture, ... ?

Like I said, shutter speed could have been faster, but it was a night match. I can't play during the day all the time, nor do I want to during the summer. With the max ISO limitation of my camera, it wasn't even possible to shoot 1/2000 unless I shot at something useless like f/2, which would render most of the scene out of focus. Shooting at 25600 ISO at f2 with extremely noisy, shallow DoF is far worse than a little motion trail on the shots. Motion blur really wasn't that bad for personal use, it was similar to the YouTube video I posted (except more of my scene was in focus, and he had autofocus enabled which was hunting throughout the video).

 

[Chas Tennis]

Like I said, shutter speed could have been faster, but it was a night match. I can't play during the day all the time, nor do I want to during the summer. With the max ISO limitation of my camera, it wasn't even possible to shoot 1/2000 unless I shot at something useless like f/2, which would render most of the scene out of focus. Shooting at 25600 ISO at f2 with extremely noisy, shallow DoF is far worse than a little motion trail on the shots. Motion blur really wasn't that bad for personal use, it was similar to the YouTube video I posted (except more of my scene was in focus, and he had autofocus enabled which was hunting throughout the video).

There are different purposes -
1) stroke analysis
2) match analysis
3) attractive videos
4) other ?

My advice is for optimizing stroke analysis. If you determine the inches moved for various speeds, that tells you the frame rate and motion blur requirements.

If you might be interested in stroke analysis in the future, the frame rate is in the camera specs but the shutter speed is harder to know. The most challenging time for stroke analysis is the racket meeting the ball. It is also very important. You will never be able to video a kick serve impact with a low frame rate and motion blur. I just noticed that Thiem closes his eyes before impacting ground strokes from an internet HD high speed video with a very fast shutter. You can't see that with a low frame rate and motion blur.

A camera like the Aiptek Action camera I have was designed for 60 fps and to have a very fast automatic shutter speed. It does a very useful job on strokes during a match. Motion blur was small in bright sunlight but you would miss the faster parts of strokes taking only one frame every 17 milliseconds.

For stroke analysis, I still recommend the old Casio FH100 camera. It has a manually controlled shutter speed down to 25 microseconds which works well in direct bright sunlight. It has a very low resolution in high speed video mode of 240 fps. I bought two used ones last year at $85 & $115 because the ring switch on mine was getting shaky.

One likely hazard to the camera is the tripod being hit and falling over. You can tie a rope between the tripod and the fence to stop the camera from hitting the ground. For more protection you can shoot through a hole in the fence. You might make a wooden bracket to hold the camera or to hold a small tripod with an elevator for aligning the camera to a hole in the fence.