Hello, I wanted to start a thread where people can share their own recording and live streaming experiences and lessons learned apart from the discussion on GOLS.
I’ve been live streaming water polo over many years for both high school and club. There is a small A/V community that discusses this stuff on the top row of the bleachers passing on tips and tricks. I’ve tried a few solutions and settled on this two years ago for the relative simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and reliability. With this setup, you can live stream anything, anywhere.
I use the Scorecam app (frankly, I rarely use the embedded scoreboard that gives the product its name) with my iPhone and stream to YouTube. Seriously, anyone can do this for as low as $50 ($30 for the app, $20 for a cheap tripod).
Scorecam allows you to create separate highlight videos on the fly. I can quickly send these to the social media team for rapid posts, give to players for their own purposes, and facilitate the creation of the team’s year-end highlight videos.
I then edit the 4K source video, add my own scoreboard and share that with the team.
I’m happy to answer any questions or share more details.
With JOs over and my career as a youth sports videographer coming to an end, I made this video to help anyone else. I’m not in anyway associated with Scorecam nor am I an accomplished YouTuber.
When upgrading to something new, research “overheating” issues during 4k recording. I use a Lumix GH7 which has an internal fan and has never complained about socal / east bay heat.
LOCATION: Film up high in the bleachers. I prefer to be off-center as this keeps the ref out of frame when they setup around the 5-6 meter line.
If you are doing a 12u or under game, you might need to be behind the goal or the corner of the pool. (I hate filming these games.)
Location of the sun changes everything. I’ll take a sub-par filming location to keep the sun to my back or off to the side.
SETTINGS: Record in 4k if you actually want to see cap numbers. 60 frames / second is ideal if you want to do slow-mo replays. Drop to 30 fps in a low-light situation.
Stay away from the free youth sports apps (game changer / sideline hd). They make things easy, but they limit you to 720/1080p. Grandma is not going to find Little Jonny at 720p.
I have not personally used these, but both scorecam / SportCam support 4k and streaming. There is a nominal monthly fee.
FRAMING: Keep the majority of the play in frame and minimize adjustments once the players get set. My old videos will give you motion sickness. Your videos will be horrible at the start and will improve with repetition.
AUDIO: A shotgun mic is a huge upgrade. This will directionally pick up sound and reduce a lot of the background bleacher chatter. You no longer hear about uncle mike’s love life or “that mom” trash talking the coach in the audio. (If you are using a cell phone, this snaps into the could shoe of your mount)
EDITING: Edit the final “replay” of you game and respect your viewers time. Strip out timeouts, technical issues and quarter ends. Alternatively, if you stop filming during these stoppages, stitch everything back together. On a mac, quicktime can do some basic trimming/merging. If you want to add replays, scoreboards or other creative elements, imovie, premiere or resolve can be used.
Note: I usually just let it roll for the entire game. I’ve forget to hit the record button after some breaks.
DISTRIBUTION: Youtube is a great place to host your videos and they will happily take hours of 4k footage. With fast internet, I can have a 4k video uploaded and processed in about 30 minutes. (This used to take 3-4 hours.)
I recommend you upload “unlisted” as the default and videos are only available via direct link as:
I do not want to be responsible for putting someones else’s kid on the internet
public videos makes it very easy for the competition to scout your team
Playlists should be used to keep everything organized. I usually do:
One playlist / season
One playlist / tournament
STORAGE: Backup all source material and edited footage to local hard drives. It is much easier to work with raw footage for future highlight films.
AI RANT. Have you seen the price for SSDs??? These used to be $200 for 4TB. I’ve had to go back to spinning platters
ccl, you and I are tackling this completely differently. Respect to your setup. Mine is more for the Everyman/woman. How are you getting the video to OBS for live streaming? HDMI to a laptop?
I used a Zhiyun gimbal in the beginning with integrated low quality streaming. I loved having the gimbal functionality but the streaming ease and quality from Scorecam won me over. I still use a gimbal but basically only as a steadycam.
hdmi output from the camera → hdmi capture card → macbook pro → OBS → youtube
It’s a pain in the ass, but I can do:
live steaming
replays
scoreboard
random graphics like goalie blocks
I can also do ~13 minute game recaps from the replays created from the game. During the live steam, I only show replays from scores, but I create replays during the end of each series. All replays are copied to another location for a game recap that are stitched together and sent to youtube.
For final game replays:
Camera → editing software → youtube
If I am lazy
hdmi output from the camera → hdmi capture card → macbook pro → OBS → [minimal editing] → Youtube
With OBS, I can also pull in the shot / game clock into the feed. An iphone will show up as a capture device using the “continuity camera” feature and can be added as an additional (wireless) video source. You can point your camera at the scoreboard and crop/zoom it into place.
This screen grab is from centennial (corona) and I used a tri-pod pointed at the scoreboard. Santiago is one of the best locations for this as the scoreboard is directly across from the bleachers and you can prop the phone on the railing/ledge across from the bleachers.
When I create the final high resolution version post game, I can optionally pull in the clocks using a mask in adobe premiere from the live video source.
For 4k / 30fps, you need at least 10 mb/s upload, but ideally 15-20 mp/s. I find fast/free public wifi is the exception, so your options are cell providers or starlink. Even if you do have enough upload bandwidth, you can quickly chew through your hotspot data cap in 2-3 games. For the big three networks, I have used:
Visible (verizon): unlimited hotspot data. They do limit it to 15 mb/s which should work for 4k streaming.
US Mobile: They support all three carriers and with at&t (darkstar) they support up to 100gb / month.
Shield internet: Non-profit that provides hostpot devices through Tmobile with up to 100gb / month and dirt cheap (Computers 4 People). Just make sure you qualify: "Shield Internet is built for people who need affordable, reliable service - including students, families focused on education, and those working toward new career opportunities." Water polo filming is a career opp, right?
(You can also change your network TTL settings on a laptop to bypass mobile hotspot detection, but I’ll let you google that on your own.)
If one individual device does not have enough bandwidth you can bond multiple devices with something like https://speedify.com/.
!!! We are barely talking the same thing at this point. I’ve got an iPhone and a $100 gimbal. . You’ve got a production van . My buddy has a tower camera controlled by a Xbox controller. Thank goodness it’s not a competition.
I’ve actually migrated the other direction. I used to use a laptop running OBS connected to a cellular modem with mangled TTL to get around hotspot caps, but have gone back to using a phone on a tripod.
The main reason I favored OBS on a laptop before was the ability to use HEVC / NVENC / H.265 compression. The streams are vastly better when using H.265 or AV1 than when using the H.264 compression nearly all steaming apps used to use. Now phone apps are starting to support H.265 and I think AV1 support is just around the corner.
The app I currently favor is Larix Broadcaster. It supports H.265, lets me manually set the bitrate, and supports third party scoreboards.
I would note that TTL mangling violates the terms of service and if carriers catch you doing it, they’ll ban you. Steaming directly from the phone does away with that risk.
Mostly, it is a lot less work setting up and breaking down when all you have a is a tripod and phone. My phone holder is magnetic. I don’t even need to tighten anything down to attach the phone to the fluid head. I can go from sealed camera bag to tripod being set up and filming in under 60 seconds.
One tip I would give to phone streamers is to bring a power bank. If you need your USB-C to attach microphones, then get a splitter so you can charge at the same time. Most of the heat from filming comes from the battery. In using a power bank and a tiny camera shade over the phone, I’ve never had a heat shut-down.
Where streaming water polo falls on its face are the compression algorithms. The fact that every pixel of water is likely to change color in each frame is a massive bandwidth hog. Remember watching polo on ncaa.com? The time outs look great but the play looks like blurry Minecraft. The algorithms can’t handle all those pixels changing color. I’m on an iPhone 13! Newer ones may be better equipped for this.
Agreed. Moving water is brutal for compression algorithms. H.264 is terrible. Even at 720p, it isn’t uncommon to have issues making out cap numbers. H.265 is much better, but even that isn’t magic. Even when clocking a stable 40Mbps upload speed, I never go above 1080p. Instead I increase the bitrate to better handle the requirements of capturing the splashy surface of a swimming pool.
My preferred settings when I have 40-50Mbps upload showing on Ookla is 1080p at 8,000 Kbps using HEVC H.265.
Belated question here - trying to film games, no streaming, and on a recommendation purchased an Insta360 X4Air. Using a single lens mode, the footage is very clear, but I had to put the camera on a tripod at either end because of referee and crowd space. The end result is that it looks good on one end and is basically impossible to see on the other. Does anyone here use a 360 capable camera? I’m trying to figure out if I put it in 360 mode and aim it towards each of the goals (basically sideways in the middle of the pool) and put it somewhere in the middle of the bleachers will it be better?
I’m regretting the purchase of the camera and kind of wish I just stuck with an iPhone on a tripod. The editing studio and exporting the footage is great using Insta360, but I think a 360 camera is a waste for filming water polo, and the single lens is too fisheye looking to get it done.
This is all fantastic information. Here’s a data point just about using iPhone 17 for filming, not streaming. I decided to go all-in with resolution and frame rate, shooting Apple Prores at 60 fps, with the Procamera camera app. It requires an external high data rate SSD drive. I used a MagSafe Orico SSD, which worked fine when it worked at all.
The good news is, if it wasn’t too hot out I got pretty nice results - very clear, sharp, and able to be zoomed in and slowed down in post. The bad news is, on a hot day it barely worked at all.
Plan for this year: am researching SmallRig gear - would need a cooling unit, variable neutral density filter (it is often so bright that the iPhone sensor is overwhelmed), non-magsafe SSD Drive (the cooling unit takes up the magnet area), a USB-C Hub, and a big battery. We’ll see how ambitious I am.
The real question is, is ProRes overkill? Would a smaller format be good enough? The ProRes files are absolutely gigantic. A 1 minute clip is something like 15Gigs, so a whole game would be a TB. I I went straight to overkill without testing an easier alternative.
You can always double down and get another camera for the other end of the pool. Someone on 680 does this [1], but the perspective change is rather jarring as a viewer and you have to do a ton more editing work.
This might work better with two cameras on the same side of the pool at the different 5-meter lines assuming you have the space to setup.
Arroyo Grande has one, the issue is the transition at half, becomes blurred, a player has the ball then disappears and then the ball appears at the bottom line like magic. It is also mounted awkwardly, so it is not always clear who has the ball by cap number.
I’d vote overkill. In theory, you are getting improved color depth and editing is snappier, but if your target is youtube in SDR format all of the gains will be downgraded (4:2:0 / 8bit). It will look incredible on your laptop/TV, but no one else will benefit from the higher quality unless you are delivering the final edit via fileshare or another service.
Now if you are shooting in log and color grading, that would be a different story.
I recorded all last year in 4k. It is nice because I can crop and zoom on edits, but without paying money I dont know of anywhere you can post 4k video, it winds up at 1080P or less.
My wife and I have been using the Water Polo App (Apple AppStore) to record or stream games. My wife uses the app to score the game, records goals/assists/blocks/etc, and then I use it to record the game. With my wife scoring, the video capture, which just uses the iPhone camera, has scorebox overlays, athlete action callouts, stats overlays, etc.
I always do a quick 5G network Speedtest, and only stream if I have about 15 to 20 Mb/s upload. If not, I record locally to my phone only and then the app has an option to upload to YouTube later. So convenient. If I stream, I only use “unlisted” and share the link with friends and family, straight from the app. I only use 4k30fps and have never had an overheating issue.
The nice thing about the app is because my wife captures all the data, we have a permanent record of game and athlete stats for all the games my sons play in.
Disclosure: I am the developer of the Water Polo App. My mission with the app is to make water polo more visible - “Every game visible,
Every athlete recognized”. If you try it out, I hope you find it useful.
. You’ve got a production van 
. My buddy has a tower camera controlled by a Xbox controller. Thank goodness it’s not a competition.