Using an External Camera (Part I)
We recently implemented the capability of using an external video camera with Takedown. By “external” we mean a separate camera rather than the iPad’s camera.
This week we used this feature to capture a high school dual meet
Our verdict: use it if you can, the benefits are tremendous.
Why use an External Camera?
There are many reasons to use an external camera.
The video perspective is decoupled from the iPad position and orientation. Put your iPad in a comfortable position for scoring and still get a great shot.
Separates the scoring and video recording tasks. Some operators struggle to produce quality scoring and quality video. The workload can be overwhelming for one person. Also, if your team has someone who loves videography but not scoring, it’s a perfect fit.
Potentially, better quality and features — zoom or low level light correction, for example — than the on-device iPad camera.
The camera we used was a Logitech StreamCam with a standard tripod mount. This particular camera comes with a small tabletop tripod that you could also use.
We connected the camera to an iPad (10th generation) running iOS 17. Takedown automatically chooses the external camera instead of the on-device camera.
It is necessary to physically rotate this particular camera onto its side get the correct orientation in the iPad viewport.
All normal resolutions — 1080, 720 and 480P — are available. Pinch-to-zoom works the same as it does with the on-device iPad camera.
Surprisingly, the camera didn’t consume much power from the iPad. With our display brightness at about 30% and wifi enabled, two full high school dual meets consumed about 40% of the battery life.
Results
To our eyes, the video quality of this camera was acceptable. Whether this particular camera is suituable for your team is up to you.
Here are a few example videos:
Video Recording Experience
We used the external camera with a dedicated camera operator and without. With a dedicated operator, it’s easy to zoom in and keep the subjects centered in the video. Since this camera doesn’t have a viewfinder, the camera operator needs to keep an eye on the Takedown viewport to know if the wrestling action is centered in the video. Initially, we thought this might be a problem but in practice it wasn’t an issue.
Without a dedicated operator, it was very easy to reach over and pan the camera as required. Mostly though, we kept the camera in its fully, zoomed out setting which captured the entire mat so that we didn’t need to worry about panning to capture the action.
The benefit of decoupling the iPad position/orientation from the camera view is considerable and seemed to reduce everyone’s stress. We placed our iPad in the most comfortable position for scoring and moved around quite a bit without affecting the camera view. That was huge.
Cost
External camera — $130 delivered. Varies with seller.
Tripod — The model shown here is overkill. Pricing for floor standing tripods varies from less than $50 to multiple hundreds of dollars. A table top tripod is bundled with this Logitech camera.
Cable — included with this camera.
Caveats
Not all cameras work in this capacity (iPad-compatible external camera). Only cameras that are ‘UVC compliant’ can be used as an external camera for an iPad.
Not all iPads work with an external camera. You’ll need a USB-C port and iOS 17 at least. The iPad 10th generation seems the most affordable model that works with Takedown and an external camera.
Takedown’s implementation is a bit — technical word here — janky. The perspective shown in the Scoring viewport is rotated 180 degrees around the vertical axis. This doesn’t impact the recorded video; it impacts only the viewport image and can make panning a little counterintuitive. Also, unplugging the camera when Takedown is in the background can cause a crash when Takedown is brought to the foreground. We’ll fix both of these in a future release.