We purchased a decent HD camcorder from Best Buy for about $350. We considered ordering the video packages from the various tournaments but when you add the costs for multiple tournament video packages it actually ended up being cheaper to buy the camcorder ourselves and we can use it outside of lacrosse as well.
At tournaments we filmed only when she was in the game. If possible, we tried to film from high up on bleachers to get a better view. We stayed somewhat zoomed out in order to see how the play developed. This is not a home movie, coaches can care less if they can see your daughter's face.
We own a Macbook which comes with iMovie. We simply imported all the video into iMovie and then watched each clip. IMovie allows you to cut and paste portions of the clip you think is good into a movie timeline. After reviewing each clip we were able to distill 5 or 6 hours of video down to about 25 minutes or so.
We then reviewed the 25 minutes to further refine the video down to 8 minutes. The hardest part was figuring out how to highlight our daughter in each clip so that coaches knew where to focus their attention. We did this by using Paint (from my work computer) to create an oval with a solid border and a transparent center. We imported this into iMovie and dropped the oval over our daughter at the beginning of each clip. So basically the clip would start, my daughter would be highlighted with the oval and then the oval would disappear as the play progressed.
Honestly this sounds harder then it was. We did the video over a weekend, it was fun watching her previous games and bonding with her as we did the video.
Kudos to you! Our video skills suck. We split the cost of professional videos with 2-3 (sometimes more) other parents on our son's respective teams, which was a little more expensive than doing it ourselves, but we discovered that the quality was much better than what we could create on our own and it allowed us to watch the games instead of worrying about getting the right video at the right angle, focus and zoom.
Then my son did exactly what you did - imported a red oval graphic with a transparent center and used it in conjunction with iMac to create his own BRIEF highlight videos. The editing process was easy. Once he started the process, he had his first video done and posted in less than 90 minutes.
