Sports Video Question

[waynelowe]

I'm a part-time video enthusiast for my son's baseball team. I like to make videos and share them with the other parents.

I'm ready to upgrade my camera and would like to resolve an issue that has caused me problems for years. In a typical game when the third basemen fields a ball and throws it to first base, I pan from third to first following the ball. When I do, the resulting video is very blurry - I'm sure there is a video term for this distortion caused by moving the camera. Maybe someone can educate me on what this is called.

What I'm really interested in is what quality do I look for in a new video camera that will minimize this distortion?

Thank you very much for your advice!

[Intrigued]

Forum member Eric would be a good person to ask of this... he does video production for a living. Maybe he will happen upon your post sooner than later.

One idea I would have is can you PAN out quickly enough with that video unit? If so, you can just capture the entire sequence without the motion blurring problem.

[eric_darling]

Hi Wayne,

What you're seeing is a result of your pan move being faster than the shutter speed of the camera. In the US and Canada, standard definition video is in NTSC format, which, for purposes of this discussion, basically means 30 frames per second. That number is locked as a maximum, and there is no way to add more frames.

However, depending on your camera, you may be able to adjust shutter speed up from the standard 1/60 speed. Experiment with that and see what it gets you. Just remember that the faster your shutter, the lower the level of light reaching the camera's sensor chip(s). So, hopefully you can simultaneously adjust the iris/aperture to compensate for that as well.

In the burgeoning world of high definition television, there are better choices available for sports videography, including what ESPN has chosen to go with - 60P - literally twice as many frames per second, and non-interlaced, too. That's a very high temporal resolution for a video camera (the few that can do it today).