Squash is one of the hardest sports to film well. The ball moves too fast for autofocus hunting, the court is a white box that confuses auto exposure, and the action happens in every corner. Get the setup right and a phone produces genuinely useful footage. Get it wrong and you get 45 minutes of blur.
Camera position: behind the back wall, as high as you can
The single most important decision. Film from outside the court, behind the back wall, looking through the glass if your club has it. Elevated is best: a gallery position or a tripod raised to around 3 to 4 metres so you can see all four corners and both service boxes. Court level from the doorway gives you a great view of one player's back and nothing else.
Centre the camera on the middle of the court, not on a player. You are filming the court, not following the action.
Phone settings that matter
- •Resolution and frame rate: 1080p at 60fps is the sweet spot. 4K sounds better but the files are huge, the ball is still a blur at 30fps, and 60fps lets you slow rallies down smoothly.
- •Lock the exposure. White walls plus dark clothing makes auto exposure pump constantly. On iPhone, tap and hold to lock AE/AF on mid-court. On Android, use pro/manual mode with exposure locked.
- •Lock the focus at mid-court distance. Autofocus will hunt all match otherwise.
- •Turn off HDR video if your phone has it on. It can flicker under court lighting.
- •Airplane mode. One call and the recording stops.
Through glass or not
Filming through the back-wall glass is fine and usually your only option. Press the phone or mount as close to the glass as possible to kill reflections, and turn off any gallery lights behind you if they are reflecting. A cheap rubber lens hood or even a dark jumper draped over the camera kills most glare.
What to avoid
- •Zooming in. You lose the far corners, and rallies end up out of frame exactly when they get good.
- •Following the ball. Keep the whole court framed, always.
- •Vertical video. A squash court is wide. Film landscape.
- •Starting and stopping between games. Film the whole match in one take. Dead time is easy to remove later and impossible to recover if you missed a rally.
After the match
A full match recording is roughly an hour of video, of which maybe 30 minutes is actual rallies. This is exactly the problem we built CourtEdit for: upload the raw file and the AI finds every rally, tracks the score and cuts the dead time automatically, so you get a watchable match video without touching a timeline.