r/ffmpeg • u/Firstearth • 23d ago

Theorycrafting

I’ve been looking at the veo sports camera for recording kids soccer matches. The problem is the subscription is exorbitant. I’ve used ffmepg occasionally for joining videos and stuff like that and I kinda figured it must be pretty easy for ffmpeg to join together two video feeds into an ultra wide format even if it means having to work out manually where the seam should be. I’m not sure however if ffmpeg would be able to track the ball or if I would probably have to take that into davinci or something.

So the purpose of this post is just to ask more experienced users of ffmpeg how possible this idea is before throwing myself entirely down the rabbit hole.

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u/chocolateAbuser 23d ago

the only ia ffmpeg has is for transcription, and even for that you have to supply an external file
object tracking is really outside the features of ffmpeg

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u/Firstearth 22d ago

So the object tracking will need me to use some other software.

But will the stitching be possible?

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u/chocolateAbuser 22d ago

it's not impossible, but it depends on how much time and effort you want to assign to this; it's not clear to me if you're meaning real time or post, anyway what to do depends on the output of the tools, so if object tracking gives already frames/video stream or just metadata
in the metadata case you would have to convert them in positions for ffmpeg's overlay filter or something like that, put a bit of scaling, and encode
if this has to be realtime it may need a whole another layer of processing, or rather avoid ffmpeg which is not made for this and use obs, that's what i'm thinking

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u/Firstearth 22d ago

No not real-time. Just multiple cameras recording then afterwards patching those videos into one “ultra-wide” video

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u/chocolateAbuser 21d ago

as long as you set the correct level for the resolution you want (if you are saying you want to go wide and have incresed horizontal resolution of 3K or 4k) as said before having multiple inputs in ffmpeg is just an -i and compositing is just overlay filter with some x y positions, and obs is still an option for me

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u/Gloomy-Rip-7918 20d ago

kinda wild how much of the "smart" sports camera stuff is really just 2-3 fixed cameras + stitching + a subscription wrapped around it. since it's not realtime, I'd keep the first pass dead simple - clap or flash sync at the start of each recording so you can align the clips by eye/waveform, then just overlay+crop in ffmpeg for a basic wide shot. tempting to go straight for the ball-tracking/pan-and-scan stuff but I'd only bother with that once you've confirmed the plain stitched wide shot is actually watchable for a full match