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questions: Dance sport event with multiple individual cameras.
I am still new at this and my small company is rapidly growing. We film separate individuals during dance sport and other spots type competitions. We have between 3-12 cameras filming individual competitors and then combining those separate “heats” or “events” onto a flash drive at the end of the event for each person individually. I hope this makes sense. For example, there will be 200 “heats” in a day with multiple people competing in each one. Our clients ask for their heats to be filmed, lets say heats 20, 35, 72, 196 and 197 and they hand us a form with those details. Then we transfer all those files onto a flash drive for the competitor to take home.
We currently do it this way:
Using 3-12 Canon XA20s on tripods (amount depends on size of event) we assign each camera to a specific competitor for each heat. Since there are so many heats in the day, one competitor could have heats filmed on different cameras. All these heats are recorded onto internal SD cards and then transferred to the computer at the end of the day. Then we organize each video by camera and separate the proper videos to each competitor according to their requests. These we put all those videos onto a their flash drive.Im sorry for the redundancy, but I was wondering if there is an easier, faster, more efficient way to run this whole process. Sometimes the competitor wont request which heat until 15 minutes before it occurs. Its gets very hectic, time-consuming and sometimes we loose files or get things misplaced easily.
Is there a way to record from the camera directly into a server or hard drive were someone else can access it and organize it as they come in throughout the day?
I appreciate any suggestions or help. we are trying to have these videos available to our clients same day, and as of now we cannot. it takes a day or we work through the night for multiple day events. Thanks for reading this thill now.
Tyler
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3 Replies
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I’m glad I don’t have this gig. I wonder if wireless technology, streaming these vids to a place in the “cloud” would help. Your bottleneck, according to you, is transferring and searching thru these clips, plus the copy time.
If your cameras all uploaded in real time to a place like livestream, you only “handle” the video one time, feeding and storing AS you shoot, and now searching for specific “heats” becomes the customer’s problem, not yours, and all you have to handle is access control to the specific streams. maybe some kind of password system, I haven’t though it thru past the initial concept. I’m sure I’m missing something.
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Mark,
Thank you! That suggestion does come close to a solution, however, leaving my clients on their own to find their own heats takes away from the value of my service to them. The face that I hand them a hard copy of their videos makes it worth the money they pay me. And as anyone would know, the moneys is what makes this grueling task all worth it.One solution that I have in mind, though not yet tested, is to set up a central server of some sort and have all the videos be recorded directly into there. From there, as they get sorted as they come in. Being fairly new to this, I am unfamiliar with the correct technology that would allow me to do this. Maybe some type of sdi out recorder/converter to h.264
thanks for all your help and suggestions
Tyler
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Well, you could have one person at a table with a laptop, pulling down the streams and copying them off to the flash drive sticks for the customers while they wait. Then you only need one password to get to all the clips, and the streaming server organizes them for you.
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