Cameras for Streaming Baseball

[Jmbmichael]

I’m the IT Director for a public school and we have mounted Hudl cameras for basketball and football but at the moment we have not found a good solution for baseball/softball. Last season we tested out using a 1080p security cam and it worked decently. So I think this year we will try to use some better quality cameras and see how it goes. We are wanting something that more or less anyone can turn on and it works, we won’t have media personnel available to run a traditional setup. The idea is to have one camera cover the field, I think we would probably need a 3.6mm to cover the entire field. And a second camera to capture the scoreboard, this may need a bit of zoom to get a decent picture. We will combine the two in OBS so we’ll be able to crop the scoreboard if we can’t zoom all the way in. Just needs to be legible. I would like to use Andy at EmpireTech for cameras but it’s not a requirement. Has anybody done anything similar? This will be filming through a backstop net, the 1080 camera did a decent job but did like to focus on the net at times. I wasn’t sure if a 4K cam would do any better. Also needs to have good dusk/night ability. Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[The Automation Guy]

Here are my suggestions for the two cameras.....

First for the field I would suggest getting one of the newer 1.2" sensor size full time color 4k cameras (like the IPC-Color4K-X) offered by Andy. I think it would work really well in this scenario. Obviously the field lights will be on for any night game and while I'm sure they are not at "TV broadcast" brightness levels, they will be plenty bright enough to get an excellent video from the camera. (Here is the review thread on the IPC-Color4K-X Worlds First Review - Dahua - IPC-Color4K-X / DH-IPC-HFW5849T1-ASE-LED - Full Color 4K Camera

Second is the scoreboard camera. You don't say how far away it is, but I assume it is in the outfield somewhere and likely 300-450' away from the press box. I would suggest something like the Dahua 5241E-Z12E (or equivalent from Andy). This is only a 2mp camera, but it has a massive zoom range on it that will easily reach out and capture the scoreboard (At 400' at max zoom, the camera will show an area 28' wide, so you might still want to crop in OBS, but the image quality will be fine). The lower resolution won't negatively effect the image and it will actually help with lower light situations like night games. While the field will be lit up at night, the scoreboard probably doesn't get the same level of illumination, so the low light performance of the 2mp camera will really help.

As far as focusing through the backstop, you really just need to turn autofocus off on the camera. You can set the focus manually to ensure the maximum amount of the scene is in focus and then leave it alone. Having the excellent low light performance of the Color4K-X camera will actually help here because you can open up the iris which will allow more of the scene to be in focus. I'm guessing, but I am willing to bet that you can set it up so that everything past about 20' would be in focus. You might also see if you can mount it high on the backstop (instead of shooting through it). Depending on how close home plate is to the backstop, this might actually give a really good overview of the field and make the focusing issue even easier to solve because even the ground would be 20' or more away from the camera (meaning everything would likely be in focus).

Both cameras are relatively inexpensive (under $250 each).