Stop editing match videos, draw on them instead
Prefer watching? Check out the video version of this post.
If you’re doing football match analysis with a video editing tool like Metrica or KlipDraw then you’re really doing it the slow way.
If you’re trying to show people what’s going on, it doesn’t need to be that complicated. With Video Pencil you can just load up a video and draw on it.
And last week I released a brand new Football Toolkit to make it even quicker.
And now you can add football (soccer)-specific tools with the Football (Soccer) Toolkit.
A teaser. Before and after.
The tools
Arrows
First thing you’ve got is three kinds of arrows: a run, a pass, and a run with the ball. When you draw them, they always come out smooth. If you draw a pretty straight line you get a straight line. If you draw a curve around the side or over the top, the line follows the arc. You can change the thickness and colour of each kind of arrow.
Space
Next, we’ve got the Space tool. This lets you mark where there’s some space available. Start drawing from the middle and pull out to size it. It sits in perspective on the pitch. You can change the colour from the little pop-up editor.
Names & Numbers
Tap on a player and you can put their name or number in. Press play and it follows them around. It’s saved with the clip, so next time you open it, it remembers who they are.
Video Processing
Something I should say is that the first time you load in a clip, it needs to be scanned to find all the players. It doesn’t take too long, but if you have a really long clip, you might need to go and make a cup of tea. If it gets interrupted, don’t worry, it won’t start all the way from the beginning again next time.
Highlights & Connections
Next we’ve the player highlight tool. Two of them, in fact, so you can switch colours quickly. You can tap on a player to highlight them, and the highlight shrinks as they move away from the camera, so it looks right on the pitch.
If you drag your finger over two or more players, they get highlighted and joined with a line. When you press play, the line stays with them.
You can tap a player again to stop higlighting them
Move Player
The last thing I added was this fun one. If you want to say “You should have been here, not there” you can just drag them to where they should have been.
Live Workflow
All this works as part of a live workflow. You play a bit of a clip and pause it with the shuttle wheel. You might be recording your voice as you go. Or you might be in a room with the team. You’d pause the clip, draw some arrows, highlight a player, then shuttle or press play. Highlights stay but the arrows disappear, which I find pretty natural.
The undo button works if you make a mistake.
Zooming In
You can zoom in by pinching on the screen. That can be really handy.
Demo
Here’s the demo.
https://youtu.be/avz3edIVv5Q?si=nCx_HaAwQ52aHgn_
This is way easier than editing clips
Compare this workflow that with doing it in a video editor. You’re asking "Have I got the plan that lets me auto-track players? Okay, I can auto-track the player, but then what? I'm gonna go to my presets or my library, drag in a player highlight, decide how many segments the inner part has and how many the outer part has and what colour each thing is, then drag it out in the little timeline for how long it's gonna appear, and then try to make that match up with what I'm saying. But it probably won't.".
If you ever want a voice over, it’s usually better to record that first then edit all the visuals to match afterwards, but it’s a really convoluted way to work.
This way, you just tap on players, “look how the defenders bunch up and spread out again”; draw a line “he’s looking left, right, behind him, he’s spotted the winger coming in”. “This player took too long to make the cross, here’s the defence getting back into position”.
It lets you think about football, not the tool
Where you can use it
Send a clip. You can your explanation in the app and send it to one player or the whole squad, on WhatsApp or your coaching platform.
In the room. You can mirror the iPad to an Apple TV and it shows just the footage and your drawings, not the buttons.
You can hand the iPad round. It’s so easy that it isn’t only the analyst who can draw on the footage: anyone can take it and go “You should have been here!” Everyone in the changing room can make their point without waving their arms about or shouting, and everyone sees the same thing.
On a call or a stream. On a Mac, CueCam puts Video Pencil into Zoom or a live stream today. A Zoom app is coming, which will also work on Windows.
Before the match, too. Use the other team’s footage. “These two always do this. Look.” Draw a line between them: they stay tight, so either pull them apart or stay out from between them.
Who’s it for?
I’ve talked to a lot of football people recently. Some are paid analysts or consultants, and they use video editing tools that cost thousands a year to make polished clips.
Some of them are just helping out, like one guy I met who used to be a player, now he’s in hit 40’s, he’s getting the hang of coaching but there’s no way he spends his weekend editing clips. But he might grab an iPad if it was there.
Something like this really makes it worth learning to get clips off your pitch-side camera. Figure out how to download them to the iPad, trim them in Photos, bring them into Video Pencil. Once you’ve got a bookmark to your platform and you know where to go, what’s going to stop you?
What’s next
Now listen, I'm not a football coach. I've been talking to coaches and different people about what they'd like to see in Video Pencil and what they already use, and designing the first version of a solution that I think will make their lives a lot easier. But this isn't the be-all and end-all, and it isn't the end of the road. The more feedback I get, and the more examples of where something was a bit awkward, the more I can feed that into the design of the software and the user interface, make it even better, and support different situations better as time goes on.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about.
Pre-match diagrams. I’ve talked at length with one coach about this, and I’d like to add it to the toolkit.
Live from the side of the pitch. You can already do a version of this. Put an iPhone on the sideline with Shoot and select it in Video Pencil, or bring in an NDI feed from a camera that follows the action (Shoot doesn’t follow the play yet). When something happens, pause, save the clip, and it’s analysed when it lands in the library. One day I’d like that to happen straight away: “Everyone round the iPad. Look what just happened.”
Live game analysis, with the score on screen. There’s a lot we could do, but I need to hear it from you first. So give it a go.
Anyway. Let’s talk about how much this is.
Prices
The Football Toolkit is an in-app subscription, $19.99 a month or $149 a year. It isn’t cheap, but it’s a lot less than the editing tools which can run into the thousands!
For clubs there’s a club plan: for the coaches, or for a couple of iPads that live in the team rooms. With the club plan I help get you set up. I’ll talk you through how to get the iPad on the screen in the room, whether your Wi-Fi is up to it, and the quickest way to get footage off your platform. Maybe I’ll add a button that pulls in your latest clips; once I know who I’m talking to, that sort of thing becomes possible. If you’re near enough, maybe I’ll come and visit!
The Elephant In The Room (if you’re from the US)
I’m English, so I call it football. If you’re American you call it soccer. When I talk about it, I’m gonna say Football. But the app is smarter than that. Thanks to a bit of extra technical jiggerypokery, it’s translated into American, just for you!
That means you get to buy a Soccer Toolkit.
For fun…
If you’re an American Football or hockey coach, it might be fun to see if it still works! The AI is trained on football but it will probably manage other games just fine… (unless they’re not played on grass?!). Tell me how you get on!
Have you tried it?
If you use it, especially on clips you can make public, please send them to me. One coach sent me his edited analysis and the original clip, and I rebuilt it in Video Pencil in far less time than the original took him. It took me a bit longer to work out what was going on, though. Every example teaches me more about how coaches explain the game.
Get it now
It’s out now. Enjoy it, tell your friends, and tell your brother who coaches a youth team. It’s fun.
Personalised App Store Link
https://videopencil.com/soccertoolkitstreamstop-editing-match-videos-draw-on-them-instead