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Aki
Aki

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DIY Veo camera

I've been wanting a to get videos from my kids football games for while now, but all of the options I've ran into have seem to be either lacking or really expensive. They still play on half or quarter size fields, so getting a camera to on the sidelines to record them was something that seemed possible.

Hardware

The golden standard here in Finland seems to be the Veo camera. I've been told it's easy to set up and you get a decent quality video stream that follows the game and can be looked at later. It also costs a lot of money. The price of the camera is hefty, but you also need a subscription.

In the beginning I ran with a tall tripod meant for setting up lights and an old GoPro I had lying around. This kind of worked, but I had to spend games holding the tripod and turning it to follow the action, since it obviously couldn't span the entire field. Also the image quality was really bad, since the camera was old.

I wanted something self-hosted that I could tinker with. I wanted no subscription costs. I wanted the camera to be able to record the entire game without manual turning. I didn't need streaming.

I ended up buying a DJI Osmo 360 from a black friday sale for 300€. This allowed me to put it on top of the tripod I had, and record a game in 4k. This was obviously going to be cropped, but I figured it was enough.

Next steps

One of the killer features on Veo is the ability to set it up and it follows the game on its own. I wanted that. I filmed a few games with the Osmo 360 and now I'm going to see what can I do next.

The plan I have, is to have some neural network look at each frame and find the ball. Then once I have the coordinates, I can use ffmpeg to crop the video. We'll see how it goes.

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