Making a Simple Sports Video
/Hey folks. I hope that you are all well. I’ve been having a great conversation with one of the members on the KelbyOne Community this week about making a sports video. The member is an amazing photographer with massive expertise in astrophotography. He’s been photographing amateur sports for some time and because he is always challenging himself, has taken on a self assignment to make a highlight reel for a hockey player to help that player out as he progresses.
So this time, I’m going to offer some simple to use and easy to apply guidance on shooting video with your interchangeable lens camera for making a sports reel. It could be for your own kids, for grandchildren, friends, family, whatever, the goal being to try some new skills and come up with something that you like and that you may share with others.
The Core Principle
I should say that for sports video, the core principle is the same as for stills. You need to have a good understanding of the sport. All sports have places where the action is peak and the gestures most exciting. For skateboarding you might look to a skater coming off a ramp or a rail, for soccer or hockey it’s the shot on goal, for basketball it could be going for the layup, for horse jumping its the horse clearing the barrier, for archery, its the draw and release. Even if you are not into the sport, watch without camera at the eye for fifteen minutes or so and you will get a pretty good sense of where the action is going to happen.
Fill the Frame Not So Much
In photography we understand that the name of the game is to fill the frame, but when shooting video, while the compositional guidelines still have enormous positive impact, it pays to leave yourself a little room for cropping in during editing. You won’t be changing the frame ratio, so that extra space is helpful when the subject moves more than you might expect.
Noise Does Not Exist
In video we are talking about frame rates of frames per second. If you were looking at a JPEG for 1/30th of a second, would noise register? It really doesn’t and at the common frame rates in use, no one watching action sees noise and that means that you spending time worrying about ISO is time wasted. So tech step one is Auto ISO
Frame Rates
Since most of us are not concerned with broadcast time clocks, NTSC and PAL frame rates mean nothing to us. 24 FPS looks like cinema with a good amount of motion blur that is subtle but comfortable. 30 FPS is normal video, a bit less motion blur but not out of the norm since so much of what we see these days is shot at this frame rate. 60 FPS is now commonly available and is ideal for faster subjects like sports. If your camera has it, use 60 frames per second for sports
Camera Settings
Video is easiest to shoot in Manual mode. Set the ISO to Auto as discussed. Take your frame rate, double the number and put one over it to get the shutter speed, so for 60 fps, a perfect shutter speed that your camera understands is 1/125th of a second. If you were shooting at 30 fps your shutter speed would be 1/60th of a second. Easy peasy.
The aperture setting in video is not about how much light enters it is only about depth of field. Use a table or something like PhotoPills to find an aperture for your camera and lens that will deliver the depth of field that you want for your subject. Set it
You now have ISO, shutter speed and aperture set and ready to go. Set your camera to record video and learn where start and stop are activated
What About Focus?
If your camera is mirrorless, the AF in video is going to be better than on a DSLR because the AF sensor is at the sensor. However, AF in general works a charm and you already set an apertured to give you the depth of field that you want. Use the Continuous AF function and keep your subject in the AF selection and you are good to go. This is one place where face recognition can be truly beneficial.
Shoot!
There’s no need to always be recording. Start as your subject is getting to the point of most interest and stop when it’s done. This creates a clip. Most clips are between 6 and 10 seconds long. Think about the end in mind, so if you want a final video that will be five minutes in length, you will want to record about 50 minutes of clips to be safe
What About the Sound?
Since you are doing this for fun, use the camera’s built in microphone and don’t talk while recording. You will get the surrounding noise and can always dump it later but it can be interesting to hear a cheer on a goal or a basket. You rarely hear the actual athletes in professional sports because some yahoo is talking over the event all the time. Amateur sports are different and the real world audio can be a boon.
White Balance
Automatic White Balance is a good general setting unless you are working in scenarios with drastically different lighting such as amateur hockey arenas where ever bulb is a different colour temperature. Just as with stills you can adjust the white balance in editing.
So What About Editing?
You will want to view each of your clips, select pieces of them and then organize those pieces into what is called a timeline. Just like a real movie, the timeline does not always follow the clip shooting order (in cinema, it never does) so what you want is a basic simple video editor that works using a timeline. This is called Non-Linear Editing and it is magical. If you use a Macintosh computer, you get iMovie free and there is no tool with a shorter learning curve and more power at this price. It also does titles, special effects, audio editing, and a bunch of other functions only found in professional editors in the past.
Now if you are a Windows user,. Microsoft offers something called Clipchamp for Windows 11. Full disclosure, I’m not a heavy Windows user and if I am working on Windows, I am using the same professional editor that I use on Mac called DaVinci Resolve. While Resolve Basic is free, it is a Hollywood grade editor and with great power comes a significant learning curve. With that said, Clipchamp is in my opinion pretty lame, very slow and requires purchasing stuff to get things done. Instead, I recommend a free open source application called OneShot. It has a really nice interface, has a number of tutorials on hand and does effects, audio, titles and more. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and if interested you can learn more here.
To be fair for every minute of final video, you should plan for 10 minutes of edit time. Part of that is learning, part is trying things and then final assembly and rendering for playback. You can share your video with friends and family via a private Youtube link or one of the other sharing services like Apple iCloud or Microsoft OneDrive.
It’s A Wrap
It’s a sad reality that most of the innovation in still cameras over the last decade has been in their video capabilities and that over 80% of camera buyers never even try video. How sad is that? Having a project like a simple sports video gets you into a brand new space where you can learn, be challenged and demonstrate your creative capability.
Thank you as always for reading. Please leave a comment or send in a question. If you shop at B&H Photo Video, please use the link on the main page. It costs you nothing and pays me a small commission. Until next time, peace.
