Split-screen closed-circuit sports recording We want to make recordings of high school hockey games for coach and player reviewing.  However, getting a good shot of the entire rink with one camera is impossible.  Using a student to record the game live has proven to be a problem, because the student usually will watch the game and forget he's recording it, so a lot of the action is missed.  So, I was thinking about putting two static cameras at the centerline, one shooting one side of the rink and one shooting the other, then combining into a split-screen video, and then recording that video, so that it can easily be played back at a later time.

So, I have a couple of issues with this:


How to combine the two video streams into a split-screen video.
How to then digitally record these videos for later viewing (digital is preferred, due to the ease of copying and playback).
I would actually prefer HD video... Is that even possible?
Prefer hardware rather than software based, due to the environment.


Any ideas would be appreciated!  I have been googling this and am having a very difficult time finding pro-level equipment made for this... There's a variety of i* apps, and in-car mobile video products, but none of them seem like the right fit.
Your best bet to easily do this is probably to set up two cameras with half the field of view being used.  Then simply setup a simple project that can combine the two and encode it for electronic distribution.  If you want to do an all digital route, you are still going to need to run an encoding after the fact to get the size down, so doing the combination of two feeds as a fixed project in post is probably the most straight forward.  Should be able to just copy the files and hit go.