Racketball is played on a squash court with a bigger, bouncier ball and shorter, sharper rallies. The good news: the filming setup is nearly identical to squash. The bad news: the ball's extra speed and height punishes sloppy framing even harder.
Position and framing
Behind the back wall, outside the court, as high as the gallery or a tall tripod allows, camera centred on the court. Because the ball travels higher off the back wall in racketball, frame slightly wider than feels natural. The number one mistake is framing tight on the players and losing the ball every time it lobs to the ceiling, which in racketball is every other shot.
If your phone has an ultra-wide lens, this is the sport for it. Better to have the whole court slightly small in frame than to lose the top of the back wall.
Settings
- •1080p at 60fps minimum. Racketball rallies are short and violent, and 30fps turns the ball into a teleporting smear.
- •Lock focus and exposure on mid-court before the first serve.
- •Landscape, always. The court is wider than it is tall.
- •One continuous recording. Racketball matches are short (best of five flies by), so a single take is easy on storage and battery.
Light and glass
Most UK racketball happens on older squash courts with mixed lighting, part LED, part ancient halogens. Lock your white balance if your phone allows it, or the colour will drift between rallies. Filming through the back glass, get the lens touching the glass or shade it with a dark cloth, or you will film your own reflection for 40 minutes.
Turning an hour of rallies into a five minute watch
Racketball's pace means a match recording is dense with action but still padded with between-game dead time, warm-ups and ball-retrieval wanderings. CourtEdit detects rallies and cuts the dead time automatically, tracking the score as it goes. Upload the raw file, get back a match video people will actually finish.