Well this is an interesting subject matter. I have been doing recording for our local pool room for the local TAP pool league. I record every Monday for about 4 hrs. I have been constantly looking for ways to improve my quality. I started using 2 Canon HV40 cameras which used DV mini tapes. I kept a stack of tapes and rotated them out to film the entire night (approx 4hrs). The camera is good quality and can be used as a streaming web camera with Wirecast. Wirecast is one of the top selling video production softwares out there today. At the time this location did not have any internet service to allow streaming. My next purchase was to lose the tapes and go with flash memory sticks. I was able to buy Canon HF10 cameras online for under $125.00. I now use 1 HF10 camera and replaced the other camera with a GoPro 3+ Hero. I purchased a mini boom micstand online and made a mount in the ceiling to hang the camera. The GOPro has great quality but I find it not very versatile for pool use. The camera wants to shoot a wide shot which makes the lens view fish eye which distorts the table. But I was able to positon my camera so I could shoot overhead using a narrow view and just capture the full length of a 9 ft table. I was looking to achieve the overhead view that would allow the viewer to see the whole table. I bought 2 64gb SDHC video cards and rotate them out so I can just leave the camera hanging. I wanted to be able to position the camera so I just needed a small step stool to reach the camera. I did not want to have to pull out a ladder every week to get the camera going. Also as for powering the GoPro camera for almost 4 hrs I opted to get a Ankler USB power pack for like $40.00 this gives me almost 8 hrs of recording time. Forget buying an extra battery pack. I have since run an extension cord in the ceiling and just use a USB to standard edison plug into an electrical outlet in the ceiling. I really don't use the audio from the GOPro but you can use it if you want to.
The second camera Canon HF10 I run on a tripod that sits on a table about 5 ft away from the end of the table. So I get to run a dual camera shoot which seems to work. As for the sound I picked up an old Nady guitar wireless unit at a local pawn shop for $40.00 and wired it so I could use a standard professional mic with the wireless. So I hang a Shure SM57 overhead off the light. This is great cause you can capture the sounds at the table as well as when league players have time outs you can here what they are saying. I was having a problem capturing too much personal conversation from the railbirds when using the mic built in the camera. So I run the wireless receiver into the mic input on the camera. This works great.
I record using a framerate of 29.97 fps at 1080 resolution which I downscale to 720 for uploading to YouTube to reduce file size and upload times. I also use a software app called Handbrake which is free and compresses the video with very little quality loss. So a typical 60 min match raw video file will be about 2 to 2.5gb after handbrake the finished uploaded file for YouTube is about 5-600mb.
I dumped both cameras into a macbook pro laptop and use Adobe Premiere CS5 to do post editting. I can also have someone sit in and do post match commentating and mix that in with the original video.
file. Recently I had a request for live commentating by the players. So I added a 4 channel mixer and run 2 SM-58 mics on short desktop mic stands that you can buy for around $20 a stand. I would prefer to use a more professional headset mic setup but I have yet to find a good XLR headset mic setup that does not cost more then a few hundred per headset. I run the 2 commentator mics and the table mic into the mixer then run the main output of the mixer into the mic input of the camera. The negative side of doing this is you lose the ability to adjust audio levels for each mic individually in the post edit phase. It would be best to record audio to either an external DAT reorder or direct to a laptop and then have multitracking ability for your audio in post editting. I am not a video guy as a profession. I do this as a hobby and to try and help promote the local league, pool room and offer a great training tool for our players. So you don't need to be a pro to get a decent product. You can view some of the matches here. I use each week as a playlist on youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkMlg1LBXj6QMFMgR7ybweRiEHT9i5vI0
