End Zone video

[sgirard]

My name is Shawn Girard and I am a newbie to the site. This is gonna be a little bit of a long post. I currently am a videographer for a local high school team and have been for the last 6 years.. I have been filming from a tower in the end zone with a Sony Handycam HDD and then taking the camera home and downloading and transferring to DVD for the coaching staff. We are now moving to a new field and will be looking to use an telescoping 20' tripod to video the games to a laptop . My question to you guys is is it possible to record directly from the camera to DVD in real time and then finalizing at the end of the game to give the coaches a copy immediately afterwards and if so what would be the best software to use. Would it be easier to download directly to the Laptop hard drive and then burn the disk afterwards? Thanks for your help.

[transporterfan]

Short answer: no. The DVD software would need the final length of the video to maximize the compression ratio to fit the DVD/media.
So, yes, you would have to download to the laptop and burn when the game is over.

Question: does it really have to be a DVD? Why not upload the stream to a website and have them view it online?

EDIT: why not make their day and just copy the files onto USB flash drives? You could include a portable player like VLC.

[sgirard]

Thanks for the suggestions. Figured as much. I was just hoping there was something out there that I hadn't ran across yet. We do use the Hudl website for our sideline films but normally with Opponents game video to break down, which is normally 3 game films, it takes up a lot of our available capacity. I hadn't even thought of the USB route but I will have to check into that. Thanks for your help.