Next month it will be time for my annual project of shooting some video at after-hours pick-up basketball games during the nearby college's boy's basketball camps. After the campers are through for the day, the main court in the arena is taken over by counselors and others around for the summer for some informal games. Returning players on the team, incoming freshmen, alumni who are playing professionally in Europe, sometimes a guy or two from another school, and an occasional prospect participate. It's been a few years since our guy in the NBA came back and brought his little brother who was playing at Duke, but he's been busy with championships and such more recently.
I have an appreciative audience in other parts of the country who can't get here. For the most part they are interested in the freshmen and sometimes a prospect, but it is always good to see alumni back on the court. The audience is not fussy about technical quality, but I try to do the best I can. I treat it as a learning experience, and I usually use my most recent equipment so I can practice on it and learn how to use it for video. In the past I have used an S95, S120, T3i, 4K on my iPhone 6S, and last year the G7X II.
So this year I will be shooting FF for the first time, and will have less tolerance for focus. I plan to use the 6D2 with the 24-105 STM. I might play around with autofocus options after I think I have enough basic footage. But mainly this is a social occasion for at least one or two of the nights, when I'm hanging out with a few other fans I don't see much of outside basketball season. So I don't want to be paying lot of attention to the camera.
I did the diagram below to approximate the distances. If I sit midcourt about 36 feet away, it looks like my shooting distances will be between 36 and 105 feet, and rarely if ever at either extreme. There is plenty of light, though the colors are a little off because they don't turn on the good TV lights for this. For my angle of view, I'll want to see most of the half court where the ball is. My diagram suggests that I will use between 50mm and 70mm on the zoom about all the time.
I'm inclined to use manual focus. I could have it track faces, but I don't know how well that will work at that distance, and the shooter could be facing away from me. Regular autofocus would probably be OK, but does risk that some footage might get lost from focus hunting. DOF calculators tell me that at f/5.6 60mm, if I focus about 70 ft. away, everything from about 35 feet to ∞ should be in focus, with a circle of confusion 0.03mm.
The rim of the basket will be around 75 feet away, so if I focus on that or a bit closer, I should have enough margin of error just to leave the focus on manual.
Any comments or suggestions or disagreements with my reasoning? Any suggestions for when I'm trying out other alternatives and learning more about the equipment?
As for color balance, the lights probably have gaps in the spectrum, but I've not had any trouble with flickering in the past. The mostly empty seats across from me, and thus the background, are red, and so auto white balance tries to compensate by making the light look even more greenish. I'm thinking of trying a custom balance from shooting a white piece of paper or a gray card. Is that a good idea? Does the video on the camera support that, as the manual seems to me to suggest?
I have an appreciative audience in other parts of the country who can't get here. For the most part they are interested in the freshmen and sometimes a prospect, but it is always good to see alumni back on the court. The audience is not fussy about technical quality, but I try to do the best I can. I treat it as a learning experience, and I usually use my most recent equipment so I can practice on it and learn how to use it for video. In the past I have used an S95, S120, T3i, 4K on my iPhone 6S, and last year the G7X II.
So this year I will be shooting FF for the first time, and will have less tolerance for focus. I plan to use the 6D2 with the 24-105 STM. I might play around with autofocus options after I think I have enough basic footage. But mainly this is a social occasion for at least one or two of the nights, when I'm hanging out with a few other fans I don't see much of outside basketball season. So I don't want to be paying lot of attention to the camera.
I did the diagram below to approximate the distances. If I sit midcourt about 36 feet away, it looks like my shooting distances will be between 36 and 105 feet, and rarely if ever at either extreme. There is plenty of light, though the colors are a little off because they don't turn on the good TV lights for this. For my angle of view, I'll want to see most of the half court where the ball is. My diagram suggests that I will use between 50mm and 70mm on the zoom about all the time.
I'm inclined to use manual focus. I could have it track faces, but I don't know how well that will work at that distance, and the shooter could be facing away from me. Regular autofocus would probably be OK, but does risk that some footage might get lost from focus hunting. DOF calculators tell me that at f/5.6 60mm, if I focus about 70 ft. away, everything from about 35 feet to ∞ should be in focus, with a circle of confusion 0.03mm.
The rim of the basket will be around 75 feet away, so if I focus on that or a bit closer, I should have enough margin of error just to leave the focus on manual.
Any comments or suggestions or disagreements with my reasoning? Any suggestions for when I'm trying out other alternatives and learning more about the equipment?
As for color balance, the lights probably have gaps in the spectrum, but I've not had any trouble with flickering in the past. The mostly empty seats across from me, and thus the background, are red, and so auto white balance tries to compensate by making the light look even more greenish. I'm thinking of trying a custom balance from shooting a white piece of paper or a gray card. Is that a good idea? Does the video on the camera support that, as the manual seems to me to suggest?
