This month, we look at some of the pros and cons of hiring a company to shoot video highlights of an event or game.

When hiring an outside company or freelancer to shoot game highlights, it’s probably someone who shoots sports in his/her spare time, or it’s a service that’s more convenient to the athlete in some way. Maybe your school already has a service that you want to use to capture game highlights. Maybe you have someone in the family or a contact at another company that will shoot multiple games for your athlete at a good rate. These are all valid reasons for using a third party when gathering highlights.

At All Star Video Sports, many of our clients come to us with video of their athlete already captured. Our job in this case is to simply edit the highlights together for them with the video they already have.

Sometimes, All Star is able to put together a highlight video from these plays without any problems. The quality is good enough to use and we export the recruiting video ready to be sent out to college coaches. Other times though, individuals will send us footage of their athlete that is severely lacking in multiple areas. We sometimes receive video that the video quality is too poor to see anything clearly. For instance, with HUDL, it’s a great service for high schools and colleges to keep track of game highlights, highlight descriptions, and data. But HUDL’s highlights are only as good as the videographer shooting the game. Every school places a different emphasis on the quality of its highlights. Some are good and frankly, some are terrible.

Sometimes we receive footage that has been shot in low resolution. All Star uses the latest tools to do our best to scale the video files up to today’s HD standards. Sometimes, it’s so small (i.e. video shot on a cell phone) it is unusable. Sometimes video is sent to us that was shot by an amateur, and game action of the athlete that is being highlighted is missed, going in and out of the frame! These are the legitimate risks you take when hiring someone other than All Star (or another professional sports video production company) to shoot your game highlights.

These are all common advantages and disadvantages of having a third party shoot your sports video highlights. All Star is always happy to receive any video footage you have and evaluate it’s usability and consult with parents about how to best achieve their goals. But if you want the professionals to shoot the video, you know who to call!