| By: Carolyn Braff, Managing Editor | Published: August 20, 2009 |
For college coaches, video analysis has evolved from a hobby to a requisite daily ritual. The more detail a coach can see, the better that coach can scout opponents and prepare the team. So, when Sportstec released the latest version of its SportsCode software with native-HD capabilities, college coaches across the country began taking their game to the next level.
Sportstec is a video-analysis company that works with nearly 4,000 sports organizations worldwide, ranging from Manchester United and the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team to Division I college programs and high schools. Sportstec specializes in Olympic sports: softball, soccer, and, in the US, college basketball.
Version 8 is the newest release of SportsCode, Sportstec’s signature Mac-based video-analysis tool. More than 100 customers are now running SportsCode 8, the first formal release with HD.
“We’ve supported certain HD workflows historically, but we’re now native in HD,” says Global Support Manager Rex Proctor. “We’ve always been able to handle HD files, but we haven’t been able to create them inside the software. Now you can capture the HD using Firewire technology right on a laptop.”
No matter what codec a user is capturing into, users can play the file and code the video at the point of capture.
“As the video is being streamed in, we can log points on the fly,” Proctor says. “You can also go back into the video file live and have full access to the video in the timeline that’s being built on the go. You can code back in time as well, so you have a lot of workflow in there.”
The coding interface allows users to code live events from a Mac, iPod Touch, or iPhone and works with any Quicktime format.
“Our users are able to keep track of innumerable categories live,” says Mike Willard, CEO of Sportstec’s American division. “That’s one of the greatest pieces of feedback we get, that they’re able to track a ton of things in real time.”
SportsCode V8 allows users to export video to the Web, push it out to iPods, or host the content on a Web sharing platform, all during capture. All of the data and video logged from a single laptop is available from any station on the local-area network, so one coach does not have to log off for another coach to access the video.
Just as important, the software is as easy to learn as it is to operate.
“If a coach can turn on a computer, they can pretty much figure the system out,” says Andy Assaley, director of basketball operations at Kansas State University. “The nice thing about SportsCode is, if you want the computer to do something, you tell it to do it, and it does it. If a coach wants to watch or edit, it’s pretty simple for them to fire up a computer and make it start creating clips.”
Assaley and his team use SportsCode for both self scouting and opponent scouting. He captures as many games as possible on both Kansas State and its opponents, creates edits based on what the coaches are looking for, and presents the clips to the coaches.
Assaley is currently training on Version 8 of the software. “We’re going to mess around with the direct capture with HD,” he says. “Every TV in our office is a 42- or 50-in. HD plasma or LCD, so why not use them to the best of their capabilities with these videos?”
Sportstec’s code-matrix filtering tool gives users access to all of their videos in a matrix format.
“Our matrix is available via HTML Web page or even an iPhone Web page,” Willard says. “So you’re looking at this matrix online, and it looks like a stats chart, but you can click on the cells, and the cells retrieve the associated video.”
The latest version of SportsCode includes a revamped matrix that allows more interactivity within a single window, and the ability to export the entire matrix into an HTML page that can be pushed to any Web server.
Another new feature Assaley will take advantage of is the ability of files to dynamically update during capture.
“If we’re capturing during a game and we make a mistake — let’s say we capture two points made for the other team and it should have been made for our team,” Assaley says, “there is a timeline for the video similar to a DVR, so you can scrub the timeline, find your mistake, and easily switch it out.”
The timeline also syncs through the team’s iPod devices, so he can update the timeline directly from his iPod Touch, without being connected to the camera capturing the video.
“We can have a bunch of different eyes on the practice,” Assaley points out. “Everybody can be coding something different on their iPod touch, and we can sync it up to the video. Instantly, we’ll have a bunch of clips already set up from practice.”
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