Recording Practice: What camera are you using?
- Thread starter coxcol15
- Start date
Polaroid Cube+
50 dollar wall mount from ebay
Down Angle: JVC Everio HD320u
Side: GoPro Hero 4+ Silver
Side: Logitech c922x (VERY short focal length)
I can run either the JVC or the GoPro as my current capture card only has 1 input.
The GoPro is mostly used for table-level stroke/bridge/spin capture. I just download the videos after and remove the fish-eye with their software.
Side: GoPro Hero 4+ Silver
Side: Logitech c922x (VERY short focal length)
I can run either the JVC or the GoPro as my current capture card only has 1 input.
The GoPro is mostly used for table-level stroke/bridge/spin capture. I just download the videos after and remove the fish-eye with their software.
I have a Mevo running through my iPhone. It works great because of the simplicity of it.
Now that I’ve grown comfortable, I wish I had something else because it would be cool to play with a second camera and OBS but the Mevo doesn’t play nice outside its own bubble.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
Now that I’ve grown comfortable, I wish I had something else because it would be cool to play with a second camera and OBS but the Mevo doesn’t play nice outside its own bubble.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
How is the quality from the view above the pool table? Does it have fish eye?
I’m not sure how I would mount it directly above. So I’m not sure how that would look.
I have it wall mounted. That looks like this.
https://youtu.be/P8gQN1pAsm0
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
No need to even buy a camera if you have a high end smart phone.
Cameras on those phones are amazing how good they work.
Just check out some of Roy's Basements videos on Facebook, all he uses is his I Phone and a tripod and they look great.
Cameras on those phones are amazing how good they work.
Just check out some of Roy's Basements videos on Facebook, all he uses is his I Phone and a tripod and they look great.
what terryhanna said: i use the frontfacing camera on an old iPhone 4; works super, the resolution is just right plus the videos take so little room i can leave it run for hours, uploads fast. i've got 2 newer iphones but greatly prefer this one for practice.
Someone at the Expo last week turned me on to Yi, they seem pretty good:
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CW4EYIK
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CW4EYIK
THIS^^^
I use my iphone 7 on a small tripod with a ball head.. one key thing is
pairing the iphone with a little bluetooth remote, that way you can start
and stop recording without having to walk over to the phone... if you're
on a Mac you can even transfer video and burn it on a dvd, so you can
watch it on your flat screen. Video looks great.
Here's the little remote I use...
Attachments
Not to get techie'ish here for the overhead view, but FFMPEG has an overlay option that as long as you use the same settings (resolution, bit depth, A:R, etc...) you can join images based on X,Y. This does allow you to use cheap cameras to step around the distortion (barreling) of fish eye lenses. Any modern computer *should* be able to join 3 images at 1080p.
I'm just sort of going to add some non-billiard advice here in case you're interested in doing that..
Nvidia GPU's typically won't allow more than 2 streams to be encoded via hardware, so get a cheap Quadro P1000 or P2000 (P1000 is like $200usd, or will be soon) if you want to used the onboard hw encoder of an Nvidia (AMD cards have work-arounds last I checked). You kinda only need 1 decent GPU to do this, so not a crazy investment.
If you use FFMPEG _AND_ want to _SAVE_ the video, draw/generate a blank image (solid black) using the final dimensions you want and put the overlays over that to save it. This will help buffering between the GPU and storage device while the physical write occurs.
Optional if saving the file, use a virtual RAM drive if possible for "scratching". SSD's are fast, but if you have a lot of streams you're going to bog down either the capture rate (dropped frames) or the write speed to permanent storage. In Linux this can just be a tmpfs and it is just another directory, but under Windows it will be a device so use something like imdisk (creates a virtual device in memory, but you need the memory... 16GB or don't bother honestly).
I'm honestly thinking about creating a little web interface to do the above using node as the back end. I was playing around with a few old ps3 web cams the other day and got it to work with 2 cams (this machine doesn't have a workstation card, but my other does). It worked fine, but setting the X,Y was actually a little deceiving as 1 of the cameras somehow is affected by focus breathing (very unusual, probably faulty), so I had to keep changing it from time to time based on the time of day.
A fish eye works, but if you don't want that distortion, FFMPEG can help you with a few cheap cameras.
EDIT: You actually can use different Aspect Ratios (A.R.) if you want. So, you could have a 5:4 image from a ~50mm lenas and a 4:3 image from something like a macro lense (or vice versa). So not only do you not need the same exact camera, but you can use different A.R.s if you must (but I'd keep the other general format settings, surely don't mix color depth ie. 4:2:2 with 4:4:4 might not even work.... or very slowly).
I'm just sort of going to add some non-billiard advice here in case you're interested in doing that..
Nvidia GPU's typically won't allow more than 2 streams to be encoded via hardware, so get a cheap Quadro P1000 or P2000 (P1000 is like $200usd, or will be soon) if you want to used the onboard hw encoder of an Nvidia (AMD cards have work-arounds last I checked). You kinda only need 1 decent GPU to do this, so not a crazy investment.
If you use FFMPEG _AND_ want to _SAVE_ the video, draw/generate a blank image (solid black) using the final dimensions you want and put the overlays over that to save it. This will help buffering between the GPU and storage device while the physical write occurs.
Optional if saving the file, use a virtual RAM drive if possible for "scratching". SSD's are fast, but if you have a lot of streams you're going to bog down either the capture rate (dropped frames) or the write speed to permanent storage. In Linux this can just be a tmpfs and it is just another directory, but under Windows it will be a device so use something like imdisk (creates a virtual device in memory, but you need the memory... 16GB or don't bother honestly).
I'm honestly thinking about creating a little web interface to do the above using node as the back end. I was playing around with a few old ps3 web cams the other day and got it to work with 2 cams (this machine doesn't have a workstation card, but my other does). It worked fine, but setting the X,Y was actually a little deceiving as 1 of the cameras somehow is affected by focus breathing (very unusual, probably faulty), so I had to keep changing it from time to time based on the time of day.
A fish eye works, but if you don't want that distortion, FFMPEG can help you with a few cheap cameras.
EDIT: You actually can use different Aspect Ratios (A.R.) if you want. So, you could have a 5:4 image from a ~50mm lenas and a 4:3 image from something like a macro lense (or vice versa). So not only do you not need the same exact camera, but you can use different A.R.s if you must (but I'd keep the other general format settings, surely don't mix color depth ie. 4:2:2 with 4:4:4 might not even work.... or very slowly).
Last edited:
Mine is mounted above the garage door. The angle is a little steep but I can lower it another day. This is a test of a split camera setup for stroke drills. I can expand either camera to full screen for normal play.
Slow Motion Camera Test / Stroke Drill
This setup is the Logitech c922x facing downward on the left and the JVC Everio table-view on the right.
Stroke Practice 02
Stroke Practice 02
No SD card?
No HDMI/Firewire?
How about S-Video/Composite/RGB?
I know there is a way, even if you have to capture it with an analog card. Back when Mini-DV and DVC where all we had, I used something called "DV Deck" to capture directly to a laptop via Firewire. DV Deck was bought about long ago by Adobe, but there are alternatives. iuVCR used to be magically back in the early 2000's for analog captures, but that would be a last resort.
Sony has always made good sensors, so try to get it to work if you can. Ironically, today you can transfer video in many standard formats easier than ever, but the quality of low priced cameras has dropped drastically when it comes to the actual picture. There's a whole lot of noise removal, scaling, distortion, low light problems etc. in modern cameras at prices well beyond the prices of inflation. This is only to make a camera more of a 1 size fits all. Now some of the older 1080i/p cameras from circa 2008 are just as good if not better at capturing the image, but they don't have SD cards or USB or anything like that. So sadly, you'd have to have a direct feed via HDMI or Firewire to use them.