Video Best Practices – Football

Some people simply want to make their youth sports memories last for years to come with a fun, professionally produced highlight video they can share; others are looking to leverage their athlete’s skills with a nice skills or recruitment video for their college recruitment process. The great news is that the days of hiring a highly priced professional videographer to spend hours at your practices and/or games is over. Most people in the world today have a high quality, High Definition (HD) camera with them at all times and when following some simple best practices can capture great video.

While there is no “one size fits all” approach to what video shots to capture for either general highlights or recruiting videos, there are some best practices and general tips you can use to get you started and there is lots of advice out there from professionals and those in the sports field, and best of all, the really good stuff can be found FOR FREE on the world-wide web.

Through both research of professional best practices and being practitioners ourselves and recording hundreds of hours of spots footage, we’ve compiled the below list of tips:

1. Practice and research: just as your athlete is taught that improvement only comes with good reps, the same goes for your parent/video recording skills. Practice, practice, practice. Find your rhythm, do some research and find out through trial and error what works best for you – become a skilled practitioner.
2. Invest in a tripod.
3. Keep It Short and Simple (K.I.S.S.): Do not record an entire game, an entire quarter, or even an entire series. Keep your clips at 30 second intervals or less, in the end, this will be easier to find the good footage, purge the footage that’s not needed and easier to upload, download, etc. for whatever your intended use of the footage will be in the end. Also remember, the shorter your clips and the more you’re able to purge the less data usage will be taken up in your devices memory.
4. Be Sure There Is Variety: be sure you capture different types of plays to display the athletes range of abilities and skills.
5. Stay organized, or as we like to say in sports, stay ready so you don’t have to get ready AND separation is in the preparation. The most daunting task with sports video editing is getting it all organized for whoever is doing the editing, yourself or another person or business. With that, what we’ve learned over the years is that most cameras have some sort of “tagging” feature, so as you go, if the video clip is an actual highlight you know you’re going to want to keep, “tag” it! Then when you have time, preferably in between innings or in between games, PURGE everything that wasn’t tagged. Trust us, this one step will be a game changer for you!!!
6. Capturing Game Highlights for Football:
   • As a very general rule in most sports, it will be better to be set up in the middle of the court or field at as high as your able to get from he ground level. For football, ideally this is in he stands and you’ll want to be high enough to avoid obstacles such as light fixtures, and canopies which are very common at youth games now. If stands are not available, we recommend that you are prepared to be mobile, moving from corner to corner of the end zones, again getting as high as possible with your tripod.
   • Do not zoom in too much, you want to record the plays taking place in the game, not just the player, you want those viewing to have a good perspective of how your player is reacting to the bigger picture. Good video editors will add a highlight spot, circle, or arrow later to clearly identify your player.
7. For a more advanced and technical “skills” video very specific for recruiting, we recommend following the best practices set forth by one of the nation’s leading recruiting organizations Next College Student Athlete (NCSA). Their guidelineswill offer specific footage to capture for each position. Their video guidelines will provide position specific advice for Defensive Backs, Linebackers, Offensive and Defensive Linemen, Punters and Kickers, Quarterbacks, Running Backs, and Long Snappers.

Remember, once you’ve captured the footage, send us your clips and we’ll do the rest. Our video editing services are competitively priced and we guarantee you’ll be happy with the end result. Visit www.NumbersDontLie.biz today to start your project.

Here is a one of our favorite videos, all footage was footage was captured by our client and sent to us for final production, enjoy!

Here is another example:

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