Easy, Economical Visual Feedback

Most of you know have seen my videos and know I'm pretty competent with Dartfish. Great software, but it is expensive and in order to use it in the gym (via In The Action) you have to have your camera streaming to a laptop via Firewire cable or an IP camera set up. This can be a problem if you cannot leave things set up in the gym and there are other things and people flying around the gym. I'm not interested in leaving my laptop or camera around chalk, bouncing barbells or bounding bodies.

What to do? Well, I've used my circa 2000 Sony DSC camera quite successfully to take basic video, but the screen is really too small to see well, and there is no easy way to slow down the video or to quickly get it to people without importing the images to the laptop and emailing them after the session.

I've considered the Flip video cameras, but again, you need to connect the camera to a computer to send the files. The Flip Share / Library is very, very nice, but the screen is still small and you cannot slow down the video or go frame by frame.

Enter the the iPod Touch (gen 4) and VideoPix app! I broke down on Black Friday and went to the Apple Store to get an iPod Touch. I love it. I can take 720p HD video and then open VideoPix to slow the video down to any speed you desire (30 - 1 fps) or scroll through the video frame-by-frame. Now you cannot render and save the video in slow motion--easy to do with Dartfish, Movie Maker or iMovie--but you can capture beautiful sequence stills and easily email the raw video to the athlete if you have Mifi or Wifi in the gym.

I also have iMovie ($4.99) on the iPod, but I think VideoPix ($.99) is much more useful. You simply capture the video with the iPod camera and then VideoPix grabs the video file you want to use and let's you view it with frame grabber and scrolling tools.

So there you have it. Great little tool you can easily carry around the gym. Yes, it doesn't have digital zoom or anything, but it allows you do capture movement and give your athletes quality immediate feedback on the go.

And a giant thanks goes out to my client Mike Roswell (pictured above) from Combat Crossfit in Liberty, MO for alerting me to the VideoPix app!

Comments

Joe Przytula said…
So you're saying you get slo mo on demand without having to break down the video first? Very cool.
2:07 AM
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