As the title suggests my question is really about 60fps but I'll give the context and overall picture in case it helps anyone give me some pointers/ideas!
I think I can finally coax the budget out of my cricket club to start streaming all our games. I'd hope then to add to it annually until we have maybe 12 cameras but I don't see that happening if I suggest we blow €2000 on an axis cam + camstreamer w/osd for the first step which is the safe option! I've been researching the hell out of this for months now (after years of watching what's out there waiting for the tech to reach a realistic price for no real budget) and only finally discovered this wonderful site a couple of days ago which gave me a lot of extra great reading (and what looks like a reliable chinese vendor), thanks! Hopefully someone finds this an interesting and unusual enough idea to want to chip in with their thoughts!
I'm pretty sure at this point the requirement is an outdoor PTZ camera (vandal proof nice so it's not likely to break the first time someone manages to hit it with a ball, but not worth a lot extra as it will be quite an act of skill and luck) that can get in to maybe 10 degrees or less horizontal fov and can output 720p60 h264 (so it can "just" be lightly repacked to upload live to youtube, maybe with a little audio mixing to allow commentary). "Only" 720p as 10MBit/s would be half our upload bandwidth and hence about as much as I'm happy to use and 1080p60 to youtube at that rate isn't likely to be enough to survive their recoding well. Obviously ideally the camera could do 1080p60 h265 so we could step up in future if/when youtube adopt it but it's not worth doubling the price of the camera for. The 60 fps is my main bugbear now and why I'm posting but with a ball travelling up to 150 km/h I really think it's worth it.
The Big Question: Take a camera like the Dahua SD59225U-HNI which says it does 50/60 fps and on Empire's aliexpress page has only a PAL option (while some have PAL or NTSC options). Does the PAL mean it will only do 50 fps? Or is the 50/60 fps only relevant if you power it with AC where it will lock to the supply rate? Or is it just a way of saying it can't do 51-59 fps?
PTZ btw as each game could be on a different parallel strip, so the idea would be that it would sit out by default on a wide shot that wouldn't be great but better then nothing and each day someone bothers they can stick it on the right preset for that days pitch and tighten up on the action.
The camera will be roughly 60m-80m from the action and ideally be able to hold a manual focus to keep a 20m+ dof around it. If it gets into the tightest zooming that dof can narrow down so I don't think I'm in trouble on this front as long as I can avoid it doing a bad autofocus dance.
The camera is going to end up on a pole (and probably not a massively fat one) so I'm pretty sure we'll want/need some image stabilisation and the lighter the better (squeezing out the IR and heaters etc). One good bit of news is the environment is very friendly, it's not going to be used at freezing temps and wouldn't ever see 30C either (this isn't Australia/India, it's Ireland). IR and night vision are irrelevant here for it's real use, worth a little extra so it could try and watch the pitches overnight (so ~90m of IR range which strikes me as quite unrealistic over a 40mx20m area) and look out for mischief but I'd happily throw them out for a real saving or just to keep it more stable on the pole.
The PC which processes and uploads the stream should be recording but I'd love to have an sd-card in the camera also which can store 10h+ of footage (a 3 hour game followed by a 7 hour game so I think 64G is plenty but I'd probably put in as much as it can take). Likewise I'd probably hope to use something like OBS to manipulate the output stream (putting on scores, maybe dropping in ads/logos and perhaps switching cameras with a hdmi input or go-pro footage). I'm a techie so I'm not too worried about this side of things as long as the cameras output anything sensible for something to digest. I am mildly worried about how to let people set the camera to it's preset for the day but think now (thanks to seeing dahua http api docs here) it should be easy enough to script up something rather then requiring them to find a browser that works with the camera!
Suffice to say if I can find a plan and give it a shot I'll keep you all posted and give you the chance to have a look at the result!
I think I can finally coax the budget out of my cricket club to start streaming all our games. I'd hope then to add to it annually until we have maybe 12 cameras but I don't see that happening if I suggest we blow €2000 on an axis cam + camstreamer w/osd for the first step which is the safe option! I've been researching the hell out of this for months now (after years of watching what's out there waiting for the tech to reach a realistic price for no real budget) and only finally discovered this wonderful site a couple of days ago which gave me a lot of extra great reading (and what looks like a reliable chinese vendor), thanks! Hopefully someone finds this an interesting and unusual enough idea to want to chip in with their thoughts!
I'm pretty sure at this point the requirement is an outdoor PTZ camera (vandal proof nice so it's not likely to break the first time someone manages to hit it with a ball, but not worth a lot extra as it will be quite an act of skill and luck) that can get in to maybe 10 degrees or less horizontal fov and can output 720p60 h264 (so it can "just" be lightly repacked to upload live to youtube, maybe with a little audio mixing to allow commentary). "Only" 720p as 10MBit/s would be half our upload bandwidth and hence about as much as I'm happy to use and 1080p60 to youtube at that rate isn't likely to be enough to survive their recoding well. Obviously ideally the camera could do 1080p60 h265 so we could step up in future if/when youtube adopt it but it's not worth doubling the price of the camera for. The 60 fps is my main bugbear now and why I'm posting but with a ball travelling up to 150 km/h I really think it's worth it.
The Big Question: Take a camera like the Dahua SD59225U-HNI which says it does 50/60 fps and on Empire's aliexpress page has only a PAL option (while some have PAL or NTSC options). Does the PAL mean it will only do 50 fps? Or is the 50/60 fps only relevant if you power it with AC where it will lock to the supply rate? Or is it just a way of saying it can't do 51-59 fps?
PTZ btw as each game could be on a different parallel strip, so the idea would be that it would sit out by default on a wide shot that wouldn't be great but better then nothing and each day someone bothers they can stick it on the right preset for that days pitch and tighten up on the action.
The camera will be roughly 60m-80m from the action and ideally be able to hold a manual focus to keep a 20m+ dof around it. If it gets into the tightest zooming that dof can narrow down so I don't think I'm in trouble on this front as long as I can avoid it doing a bad autofocus dance.
The camera is going to end up on a pole (and probably not a massively fat one) so I'm pretty sure we'll want/need some image stabilisation and the lighter the better (squeezing out the IR and heaters etc). One good bit of news is the environment is very friendly, it's not going to be used at freezing temps and wouldn't ever see 30C either (this isn't Australia/India, it's Ireland). IR and night vision are irrelevant here for it's real use, worth a little extra so it could try and watch the pitches overnight (so ~90m of IR range which strikes me as quite unrealistic over a 40mx20m area) and look out for mischief but I'd happily throw them out for a real saving or just to keep it more stable on the pole.
The PC which processes and uploads the stream should be recording but I'd love to have an sd-card in the camera also which can store 10h+ of footage (a 3 hour game followed by a 7 hour game so I think 64G is plenty but I'd probably put in as much as it can take). Likewise I'd probably hope to use something like OBS to manipulate the output stream (putting on scores, maybe dropping in ads/logos and perhaps switching cameras with a hdmi input or go-pro footage). I'm a techie so I'm not too worried about this side of things as long as the cameras output anything sensible for something to digest. I am mildly worried about how to let people set the camera to it's preset for the day but think now (thanks to seeing dahua http api docs here) it should be easy enough to script up something rather then requiring them to find a browser that works with the camera!
Suffice to say if I can find a plan and give it a shot I'll keep you all posted and give you the chance to have a look at the result!
