In the US. Live in Socal. Specifically looking for the 3rd (Black kit), The home (with the white thing over the red on the front), the away (the cream one), and the retro (checkerboard).
Anyone have these in their stores in an XL? I could probably do a L too. Please let me know. My stores are cleared out or never got them.
So a little background first: I wanted to get my son's games recorded to make highlights on in effort to keep "game tape" (that I owned) for whatever potential opportunities may come down the road for him (whether it's a different club, Academy interest, college, professional play, whatever). He's currently playing MLS Next HD, but hasn't started high school yet. His club team uses a Veo camera to record games and it's been great - however, the quality is sometimes spotty (all the kids look the same) and the club for some unknown reason restricts access to the files - so you have to go to the club to get clips. It's a pain.
So I wanted to get this for personal use, and offered it up to the team to use in the interim - there was interest, so I purchased it. 100% with my own money, I'm not representing XbotGo in any way, shape or form here. Just a parent with a big background in soccer who had an interest in the camera for reasons mentioned above.
Ive put this thing through its paces, so I'm happy to answer any questions you guys have.
First off, the good things:
- There's no subscription model attached to the camera. You purchase it, it's yours, you don't pay a monthly fee for access to the software, etc. That was one of the more appealing things to this. Granted, I think it retails for like $650 or something, so it's not cheap - but - in the long run, I think this is the cheapest "plug and play" type solution.
- The software has it's drawbacks (I'll get to that later) but it's relatively easy to navigate and use once you figure it out. I'm not a rocket surgeon with computers or tech and I was able to generally get the hang of it - so I'm sure most people will be able to do it, too.
- It's small and portable. It comes with a connector that fits the universal type tripods (I use a cheap one I got from Amazon) and everything fits into a small carrying case. Our Veo camera lugs around in some giant fort-knox type box for some reason. I can toss this into a backpack, carry the tripod, and be up and recording in 30 seconds or so. It's not a big deal at all.
- Video quality is great. It records at 4k at 30fps. I don't know what the means compared to what the Veo or others can do, but the I like the quality of the video much better than the Veo's quality. Players are more clear, the surrounding is more vibrant, it seems to do a great job capturing the image and isn't as "grainy" as other video types I've seen.
- Software is being worked on and updated. I had a complaint (which I still have, and I'll get to it later in this post) and an update came in on Saturday addressing it. While it didn't 100% fix it (it made some progress on it), it's nice to know that feedback is being listened to and worked on - rather than just forgetting about it.
- The camera has the functionality to pan vertically, horizontally, and zoom in and out during games. This currently has issues (I'll get to those), but the fact that the functionality is there presents some exciting potential if they can work out the kinks.
- The live stream function is easy to work. I've used the XbotGo site for live streaming, and it's a simple button you push while you're recording, and then you get a link you can distribute via copy/paste to whoever, or you can set it up to automatically send to certain apps if you want. I wasn't able to figure out how to get YouTube streaming to work, but the XbotGo option works just fine, so I didn't put a ton of effort into it. The streams are actually really good - and have been a nice option for parents who can't make games to be able to watch.
- Battery has been really good with this. Better than our team's VEO camera (although that's simply based on me having experience with our Veo "dying" and not having had that happen with the XbotGo).
- The XbotGo requires an SD Card (that's actually a negative - as it's an additional cost), but it also means that you don't run into the risk of running out of storage if you have a multiple game weekend at a tournament or something. We ran into that issue with our Veo for one tournament last year (3 games Saturday, 2 Sunday) and since the camera wasn't cleared Saturday night, it stopped working midway through the 4th game). I put a 1 TB card in the Falcon, and I currently have 12 games and 4 training sessions on the card with plenty of space left. It's a better workaround for this problem imo.
The bad things:
- The AI Tracking has gotten better (it was just updated this past Saturday), but it still needs work. For 11v11 full field games, it generally does a good job (at least it did for my son's game on Saturday). Prior to that, it would often lose tracking of the ball and you would have to manually adjust the area of recording with your phone. Which is a pain if you're having to do that for an entire game because that nullifies the point of getting the camera for most people. On Saturday's game, it kept track of the action for the most part pretty well. I didn't adjust the camera at all during the game, but did notice that there were times where it lost the ball and had to stop and think before tracking back to it.
On small sided games (5v5) where the ball is moving fast - the tracking needs a lot of work. I think this mode is set up moreso for youth (where the ball moves relatively slower) vs something like adult indoor/futsal (where it failed miserably picking up a pick-up game I brought it to).
- The AI Zoom has some issues. Sometimes it zooms in and doesn't zoom back out. I don't know what causes this, and you can turn it off in the settings - but that has to be done PRIOR to starting a recording. Even with it off, it still sometimes zooms in. To be fair, the last game we had - zoom was on and it did a pretty good job - zooming in when the ball is far enough away so you can see the action, and zooming back out as the ball comes to midfield. It still had a few times where it zoomed in too much at certain spots, but wasn't as bad as previous recordings. Still an issue.
- While you don't need a phone mounted to the camera like the other XbotGo camera (which I have no experience with), you do have to have a phone to run the camera's software while it's recording. You can still use your phone for other things (texting, calling, whatever) but you have to have the phone on and the hotspot activated (if you want the livestream). That's kind of a pain, but not a deal breaker in my case.
- The software has no tablet mode. A tablet would be perfect for a coach to operate this camera with (or a foldable phone) - but they don't have that option. They really should.
- The videos, download to the app (at roughly 7-8 GB a piece) and then you have to download them AGAIN to your phone's gallery in order to edit. That means every game takes up roughly 15GB of storage on your phone. It's insane and there's absolutely no reason it should be like this. I haven't been able to find where the video files are stored in the app in order to manually delete them - so I've just been clearing the app's data every couple of games. It's a huge pain, especially during a tournament where there's multiple games in a weekend.
- Set up is plug and play and easy - IF you only have one game. If you have a second game, for whatever reason - the app/device/whatever holds on to the previous game and it's settings and you have to reboot the XbotGo Falcon, disconnect everything, toggle your phone off so it's completely disconnected, close the app, and start completely from fresh in order to have a "clean slate" for a new game. It's a giant pain in the ass and seems like something that could be fixed with a "new game" button. I haven't had this scenario yet, but in a game that's "back to back" - having to stop and set up a new team would likely result in a recording happening late.
- Minor quip: The Scoreboard has to be input manually during games. Set up takes all of 1 second to do, but you have to manually input the goals (via a "+" sign on a giant counter that toggles on and off the screen). It would be nice if there were some feature that did that automatically.
- The device is very quality and well made (it doesn't feel cheap in the hand) - but everywhere you work with it, you get this "This is really a temu type Chinese product" feeling. There's typographical errors all over the instruction manual, misspellings in the app and device settings, and just a wonky way of going about things that makes you feel like you're dealing with a bootleg GoPro camera vs a quality product. It takes away from the feeling you get working with it, but - also - once you get used to it, none of that bothers you too much.
- This thing was advertised with the ability to track certain players for highlight creation. It says it on the box, in the advertising for it, on their website, but just recently changed it to "basketball only" (maybe due to my furious emails to them haha - likely not). This is extremely disappointing as it was one of the selling points of the camera for me. The original diagram on their advertising had it tracking a soccer player. So...this feature isn't available (who knows if it will be patched in).
- Editing videos in the software isn't possible. You have to use Capcut or something similar to edit. You also can't pull videos direct from the SD Card (THAT would be great if you could). You have to do the whole downloading process to get it in your phones gallery - then you can move it around as needed.
All in all, I'm happy with the purchase. Outside of individual player tracking, it does everything it should do and does it reasonably well. I wanted something that I wouldn't be tied to a subscription to forever - and this has worked well so far. However, there's a significant up front cost - right now it's $699 + an SD Card + a Tripod. I DO feel that after an end user spends that much, they should have a bit more of a streamlined experience but the end product you get is, for the most part, exactly what you would want out of the camera. A clear video capturing the action (mostly) and is relatively easy to set up and take down.
Would I recommend? I'm hesitant to tell people to go out and get this because a lot of these quirks add up to be a somewhat uncomfortable experience using this, but I'm generally satisfied with it. I'd like to see individual tracking in soccer, that was a bit thing for me that isn't available currently.
I'm happy to answer any questions if anyone has them. I've seen several threads on FB/Insta/Reddit and no one has really seemed to do this (at least not in a way that was an obvious shill for XbotGo).