Need a setup for college recruiting volleyball videos

I do a lot of sports photography, and my daughter is at the point where I need some video highlights for potential college volleyball recruiting (which I have never done). I am not looking to go pro on this, and will probably try to get some short high quality clips from my 5D3, but need the whole match video from the back corner of the court. I see several of these going at every match, but not sure the best to get. What I'm looking for is a small compact camcorder and tripod that will extend reasonably high, be light enough to carry for a 3 day tournament, and can get me decent video of the whole tournament in digital format without spending a mint on flash cards. I would like to get something for a 3 day tournament this weekend. For still images, most of the venus I'm shooting around ISO6400, f/2.8, and 1/640s if that makes a difference. I don't need 1080p for this I don't think.

Hi Mike,

What is your budget? If you need to record the whole match, a camcorder will be the best (maybe the only) way to go as opposed to a dslr.

This little guy will do a nice job for about $1K, but there are plenty of options for about half the price and double as well.

http://www.bhphotovide​o.com …2_VIXIA_HF_G10_​Flash.html

Thanks for your reply. That is a little more than I want to spend. I ended up getting the following and will try it at a tournament this weekend. I needed a kit that will be very lightweight, and not sure if this monopod is going to be tall enough to get the best coverage, but will give it a shot. I see people with some pretty elaborate rigs that put the camcorder up about 15' in the air. I really want to try and not get crazy carried away with this.

So here is what I ordered:

Sony HDR-CX260V + extra battery and travel charger
Manfrotto MKC3-P01 Compact Tripod
Sandisk 64G SD cards, which I already use with my 5D3

Mike will you have someone minding the camcorder? Just thinking that one bump from a loose ball might be expensive...

Joel, you would think that would be necessary but I can tell you that I've seen anywhere from 1 to 4 setups at the corners of volleyball courts at nearly every match and never seen anything get broken. I have seen a few take a tumble, but usually they fall onto the rubberized floor and survive. Some of them are quite impressive... tripod stands that go up about 15' in the air, with HD LCDs and controls down at normal level and the camera up high. I guess if the end goal is a college scholarship then losing a few camcorders isn't that bad of an investment. Oh, and I intend to get a SquareTrade policy I think.

Just received the items and not tried them yet, but I am really digging this tripod. It is amazingly light, and yet still somewhat stable when full setup. Also, I'm 6' 3" tall and its right at a fairly comfortable level for me to frame a shot. Ideally it would be good to get a little higher so that if people are walking between the camera and the court, they don't show up in the picture... but in many tournaments you can set the camera in a position so no one would go between it, and in that case this should be fine.

My next issue will be figuring out how to set focus so that things are generally going to be in focus across the court. Will try fiddling with it after the battery charges. I want to be able to set this and leave it alone at the beginning of a match, and then I can go take still images.

I think you'll find that with the smaller sensor, focus won't be critical especially if you are shooting wide to cover the entire court.

OK, so completed shooting about 8 hours of video at the tournament and wanted to report back. First off, the quality of the video coming out of this Sony camera is excellent. I ended up picking the highest setting and 1080p, and was able to get 4 matches on a 64G card. The knock-off Chinese 8 hour battery also handled it fine. This little tripod also proved to be perfect for the task. It was light enough and compact enough that I didn't really notice it added to my backpack, and it was very stable. My camera actually took a hit from a shanked ball and it didn't fall over, though the camera ended up pointed in the wrong direction. I can live with that.

Because my MacBook Air hard drive doesn't have a ton of empty space, I offloaded the video files to an external drive while on the trip, and processed them when I got back. As it turns out the AVCHD, is extremely high quality, but a bit of a pain to deal with on a Mac. The files play beautifully on a Mac. But, you can't deal with them in iMovie in any way that I've found. Supposedly they can be imported, but I think because I did 1080p, that doesn't work.

So what I decided was that I'll archive the large AVCHD files on my NAS so that if I want to play them back in all their glory I can go to them, but for playback on my TV I used the Elgato h.264 Turbo software/hardware to convert them to m4v files, which I was also able to upload to YouTube for the girls to see. I think that is also sufficient quality to send to coaches, but will still investigate if I can find away to edit the AVCHD files without losing any quality.

So overall I'm quite happy. I spent under $500 on all this stuff and got a kit that is very compact/lightweight and can do very good quality video while I'm running around taking photos with my Canon gear.

AVCHD is generally a pain to edit in my experience.

There is a free piece of software called MPEGstreamclip that provides trimming capability (open file, set in and out points, do a save as) and batch exporting functionality (uses the built-in Quicktime engine).

I haven't tested it with AVCHD files myself yet though.

I'll have to play with that. I have QuickTime Pro, and that's what I used to break up my m4v files because one of the converted AVCHD clips was actually meant to be two clips. Of course then when I saved it it made a mov instead of m4v. I tried to export to m4v again and it was trying to reencode it, so I just left them as mov. This stuff is so confusing.