Record your Games / Make a Youtube Channel
There are a lot of ways you can get into airsoft with arguably the most common way is watching YouTube videos. After you’ve played airsoft for a while, you may decide you’d like to record your games and potentially make your own airsoft YouTube channel to entertain and educate your fellow airsofters. And it’s actually pretty easy to do!
First of all, you’re going to need some cameras. GoPros rule this space as they’re small, lightweight, easy to waterproof (if they’re not out of the box) and by design are action cameras so they can take a beating. You can run as many or as few cameras as you like. The more you run, the more you’ll have to manage, the more footage you’ll have to go through (which is both a good and bad thing) and of course, the more they’ll cost.
GoPros are great for showing your perspective as a head camera and your expression as a face camera mounted on your gun, but they’re not great at showing where your BBs are going. Instead, for these, you’ll want scope or zoom cameras. RunCam is generally the best option to go for as their zoom cameras provide great quality footage in a small form factor. They also come stock with Picatinny mounts so you can quickly, easily and securely attach them to your guns. Another option is Foxeer, but they’re a fair bit more expensive than RunCams.
For the ideal setup, you’re best off getting GoPro Hero 10 Black cameras for your head and face, however, if your budget is tight, you can always get older generation GoPros. Even footage from the GoPro Hero 4 Silver can hold up today under certain circumstances. And for the scopecam, the RunCam ScopeCam 2 4K (3.6mm for pistols and CQB, 25mm for SMGs and ARs, and 40mm for DMRs and snipers) is a fantastic option.
The GoPros will need either lots of batteries or an external power bank so it can last for the entire day. We recommend the power bank route so you don’t have to lug around a load of batteries and keep track of which ones are charged and which ones aren’t. The only downside is you’ll need to mount the power bank to your gun. If you don’t want to have a power bank mounted on your gun, you can instead use the RunCam ScopeCam 2 3.6mm as a face cam. This camera, similar to its longer lens counterpart, will last all day without additional power but doesn’t have as wide a view as the GoPro does.
You’ll also want to be careful of the GoPros overheating which can happen if you record at high resolutions and framerates for a long period of time. To help with this, it’s a good idea to stop and start recording when you’re not in-game or walking back to spawn. This will give the camera a chance to cool down so it can film for longer. The RunCam ScopeCam 2 (both normal and 4K version) have large built-in batteries, don’t overheat and generally do not need external power to last all day, but you may want to turn them off when they’re not being used, such as when you’re walking back to spawn) to ensure they do last all day.
If your budget is limited, you may want to start off with a single camera. In this case, you have two options. One is to buy a headcam and the other is to buy a scopecam. The headcam will allow you to watch your gameplays and review your own playstyle which is great for trying to make improvements to your game. Whereas if you get a scopecam, you can watch to see which shots you hit and which ones you miss. This type of post-game review can be quite humbling as once you start doing it, you’ll realize you don’t hit as many shots as you think you do which definitely impacts how you react in the field in the future.
Single-camera gameplay videos aren’t impossible, but it can be difficult to create engaging content with just one perspective. That being said, the story is the most important part of any video, so if you can nail that, it doesn’t matter too much how many cameras you have or how good they are.
