You found a spot along the wall, propped up your phone, and hit record. Then you watched it back that night and your player vanishes behind a defender's back for most of the second quarter. The far basket looks a hundred yards away. A ref crosses the frame at the worst possible moment.
Nothing was wrong with your phone. The problem was where you put it.
Basketball is harder to film than most people expect. On a field, players spread out and the camera has room to breathe. In a gym, ten players work inside a space smaller than a tennis court, they reverse direction constantly, and everyone is packed close enough to block each other. This is true of a third-grade club game and it is true of a semi-pro game in a 3,000-seat arena. The bodies are just bigger.
Here is the part most filming guides get wrong. They ask where the camera should go, as if there is one answer.
There isn't one perfect basketball camera position. There is a best position for each camera in your production. Once you see it that way, the whole problem gets easier.
Start with height
Whatever else you do, get the lens above everybody's head.
From floor level you are filming through a wall of bodies. Players, coaches, refs, and the people standing along the sideline all sit between you and the game. Every time the play comes toward you, someone blocks it.
Head height is not enough either. A camera at five or six feet is still level with every standing adult in the building, and gyms are full of standing adults.
Aim to get the lens up around nine feet. From there you are looking down into the court instead of across it. You can see spacing. You can see one player cutting through traffic instead of disappearing into it. Coaches film from up in the bleachers for exactly this reason.
Bleachers do a lot of this work for you. Where the seating is low, flat, or already full, a tall tripod does it instead. The BallHawk tripod extends to nine feet for this exact problem, and collapses to nineteen inches so it travels in a bag rather than taking up a seat.
Sit in the back row
This one is about manners as much as footage.
Everyone in that gym came to watch the game. Nobody drove two hours to look at the back of your tripod. When you set up in the middle of the seating, you are trading somebody else's view for yours.
The back row solves both problems at once. You get the highest position in the seating area, and your equipment sits behind everybody instead of in front of them. In most gyms the back row is also where you will find a wall or a rail to work against, and where nobody has to squeeze past your gear all game.
Take the back row whenever it is available. It is usually the best seat in the house for a camera anyway.
One camera: start at half court
If you are filming with a single camera, put it at half court, elevated, toward the back.
Straight across from the center circle is ideal. Both baskets sit about the same distance away, so neither end of the floor looks small and far. Nobody is permanently hidden behind anybody. The ball travels side to side across your frame instead of straight at you, which is easier to watch and easier for any camera to keep sharp.
Pick the side away from the benches if you have the choice. The bench side fills up with standing coaches, subs waiting to check in, and traffic around the scorer's table, and all of that ends up between your lens and the court. If the bench side is your only option, go higher. Elevation solves most of what the bench side breaks.
Here is what that main camera looks like while it is working. Nobody is standing behind it.
When you can't get half court
Show up late to a packed tournament gym and somebody already has the perfect spot. This happens constantly, and it is not the disaster it used to be.
BallHawk lets you set the boundaries of the court before the game starts, and the framing you choose is part of that setup. Say you end up well off center, close to the right side of the floor. When you define the court, you frame the far left side tighter, with more zoom, because it is farther away. Then you pan across and choose a wider framing for the near side, which is right in front of you.
From then on, as the play moves, BallHawk adjusts framing and zoom to match where the action actually is. The far end gets the zoom it needs. The near end does not get uncomfortably tight.
You do not need the perfect seat to come home with good footage. You need a camera that knows where it is sitting.
Two cameras: add the baseline
Here is the angle almost nobody in the gym has, and it is one of our favorites.
Put a second camera low, under or behind the basket, using one of the mini tripods included with BallHawk. Set it on the floor, safely outside the playing area, wherever the venue permits it.
That low baseline view is spectacular for everything that happens in the paint. Drives to the rim. Rebounds in traffic. Blocks. Dunks, which look genuinely cinematic from underneath. And contact, which matters more than the highlight value: from half court you often cannot tell whether a foul was real, and from the baseline you usually can.
This is not a good primary angle. Players stack up on each other from behind the basket, and depth flattens out, so a whole game shot from there is hard to follow. As a second camera feeding your highlights, it is fantastic, and it is a look most families never get.
Two rules on placement. Keep it outside the playing area and out of the way of players chasing a loose ball. And ask first. Some venues are relaxed about a small tripod behind the baseline and some are not.
Why more than one angle changes everything
The reason to run a second camera is not just variety.
The BallHawk app pulls a highlight from every connected camera angle. When you mark a play, you are not marking it on one camera. You are marking it across all of them.
Basketball is where this pays off most, because basketball is congested. A ref steps into your main camera's line at the exact wrong second. A defender's back blocks the shot. From half court the contact under the rim is a pile of arms. With one camera, that play is gone. With a half-court camera and a baseline camera, the odds are strong that one of them saw it cleanly.
You stop betting the whole play on a single point of view.
Add a camera for the scoreboard
When you are picking your spot, look for one more thing: a clear line of sight to the venue scoreboard.
BallHawk's secondary horizontal mount holds another phone aimed directly at it. In the BallHawk app, you set that camera as the scoreboard reader and draw recognition boxes around the pieces you want: game clock, home score, away score, team fouls, timeouts.
From then on the broadcast keeps itself current. The score on your stream comes from the same board everyone in the gym is watching, without anybody courtside updating it by hand. BallHawk follows the action, BallHawk reads the board, and the broadcast practically runs itself.
That is the difference between recording a game and producing one, and it is available to a parent in the back row of a middle school gym, not just a crew with a truck outside.
Tournaments and the court next door
Club tournaments run three, four, sometimes six courts side by side in one building. This creates a problem you will never have at a standalone game.
Two things go wrong. Your frame catches players and stray balls from the court beside yours, which makes the footage confusing to watch. And some automatic systems can get distracted by activity on neighboring courts, following motion that was never part of your game.
BallHawk is designed specifically to avoid that problem. Before tip-off, you define the boundaries of your court. Those boundaries help BallHawk keep its tracking focused on the action happening on your court, instead of treating every player moving in the gym as part of the game.
Height still helps here for a different reason. From up in the seating you can angle down at your court so the neighboring court falls out of the frame entirely, which makes the footage cleaner to watch regardless of what any camera is tracking.
When the gym will not cooperate
Sometimes none of the above is available.
The bleachers are packed. Some venues do not allow tripods in the seating area at all, usually a fire code or sightline rule. Some older gyms have no elevated seating on the side you want.
Ask the tournament director or the athletic director before you set up rather than after. Rules vary a lot by venue, and it is worth finding out where the line is while you still have time to pick a different spot.
Where elevated seating is off the table, a tall tripod on the floor at half court recovers most of what you lost. Getting the lens above the standing row along the sideline is the majority of the benefit.
The progression
If you remember one thing from this article, make it this.
One camera. Elevated, near half court, back row if you can get it.
Two cameras. Half court stays your main. Add a low baseline camera for the paint, the contact, and the highlights.
Full setup. Main tracking camera at half court, one or two baseline cameras, and a dedicated phone reading the scoreboard.
There isn't one perfect basketball camera position. There is a best position for each camera in your production.
And once they are placed, none of them needs you standing behind it. That is the whole point. You picked good spots, the cameras do the work, and you get to sit down and watch the game like everyone else in the building.
Here is five straight minutes of that, with no cuts and no editing. Four cameras, set up and run by one high school student.
That is the whole argument in one clip. Not a highlight reel we assembled to look good, just a game being produced by one student who set the cameras and sat down.
BallHawk is preparing for its Kickstarter launch. The workflow above is how we film basketball with it today.
Common questions
How high should the camera be for basketball?
High enough to clear everyone's head, which in a busy gym means more than head height. Around nine feet is a good target. The back row of the bleachers or a nine-foot tripod both get you there.
Is the baseline ever the right camera position?
As a second camera, absolutely. It is one of the best angles in basketball for drives, rebounds, blocks, dunks, and judging contact in the paint. As your only camera it struggles, because players overlap from that angle and a full game is hard to follow.
Won't players look too small if I go higher?
That is a limitation of fixed wide-angle cameras, which capture the whole floor and then crop. BallHawk zooms to keep the action framed while the height gives you the clean sightline over everyone in the gym. You get both.
What about gym lighting?
Gym lighting is dimmer and less even than it looks to your eye, which is why indoor footage often comes out grainier than outdoor footage on any camera. Framing the action tighter helps more than any setting, which is another argument for elevation and for a camera that fills the frame with the play.
Do I need a separate phone for every camera?
Yes. Each camera angle uses its own compatible device, and the scoreboard reader uses a device as well. That can be a good use for a compatible iPhone you already own rather than buying the newest phone for every angle. It is worth planning for up front rather than finding out at the gym.
Is this only for youth basketball?
No. The same setup covers club tournaments, high school gyms, and semi-pro games. Bigger venues usually make it easier, because there is more seating height to work with.
Keep reading
- Why your iPhone sports videos look so far away (and how to fix them)
- You came to watch your kid play. Not to run a camera.
- How to live stream your kid's game when the field has one bar
Want to know how we actually build BallHawk?
BallHawk wasn't designed in a conference room. We build it and test it at real fields, in real gyms, at real games. If you want to see what that looks like, read Why You Can't Build a Great Sports Camera From an Office.
