If you’re looking for a great video analysis phone application, look no further than “Coaches Eye”. The “Coaches Eye” application is very simple and intuitive. Any athlete, personal trainer, or performance coach can download the phone application and start immediately using it. So let’s jump into our review on “Coaches Eye”!
The Good
Cost Effective
It’s $4.99 for Apple, Android it’s free, Windows it’s $9.99. If you compare this to Dartfish a very sophisticated software used on your computer can run you from an annual subscription of $380 or $1k flat fee. While you can do a LOT with Dartish, the convenience factor of coaches eye and price makes this phone application very popular.
Slow-Mo
From a personal trainer and performance coaches stand point this really makes the application. Analyzing fast and explosive movements such as the start of a sprint, golf swing, or weightlifting movements such as the clean sometimes can be difficult. Being able to do a frame-by-frame analysis makes your coaching that much more effective and if the athlete is videoing themselves they can get immediate feedback too. It’s also EXTREMELY beneficial to show the slow-mo recap to the athlete so that they can visualize what went wrong and how you’d like them to fix it.
Comparison
The comparison option is something that some personal trainers and clients may find useful. Personally I haven’t found it all that useful because the videos are vertically compared. I’m not sure why that small little detail bugs me but I like side-by-side comparisons. Even if you turn your phone side ways the application comparison will remain vertical. But I still can see value in it for other performance coaches and personal trainers.
The Bad
Can’t Trim
There isn’t a trim feature directly on the application. To do so, you need to send the video to your gallery, then trim it from there, and if you want to reanalyze it you’ll have to upload it once again to coach’s eye. Then you’ll have to delete the original video off your memory so that you don’t have a double. Not a lot of people really care about this, but I HATE videos that you have to fast forward through to get to a 2 sec movement.
No Video Editing
One of the best things about Coaches Eye is that you can manually slow or speed up the camera but the problem is if you want to send the video of a slow mo section that you want to focus on, it won’t let you. This means you’ll need another application for that- which sucks. While there are many applications for Iphone, there really isn’t a great application on Android, at least that I’ve found. This issue is easily avoided if the athlete is right in front of you, but if they need to re-watch the analysis, you’ll need to do that on the computer or another phone application. For the computer I use Adobe Premiere Elements 12 and Screen flow, both great tools.
Sharing
This is a real pain in the ass, if you want to share the video on YouTube or share it via email you need to manually do ONE video at a time. Not a problem if you have a few videos but when I’m out on the track I’m shooting pretty much every run and same with the lifts = MANY videos. With that said, you’d think you’d be able to pull the video directly from the phone, nope doesn’t work that way either. For Android users, this will easily kill your memory since the videos can NOT be saved on your SD card. This means, you’ll have to share the video to your gallery, then delete the video on coaches eye, go back to the gallery, and then save it on your SD card. Of course that’s if you want to keep the videos.
Coaches Eye Review
In the end, for such a cheap price this application is pretty damn good. If they would just fix some the little details this application would be AMAZING. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like there will be an fixes coming soon, considering some of these common errors were given feedback in 2012- see HERE– and nothing has been changed… But like I said, despite the little nuances, this application has been extremely beneficial for many of my personal training, Olympic weightlifting, and sports performance clients. I’d give it 4 stars!
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[…] them to do and to see themselves doing the movement via video feedback (we typically use the “Coaches Eye” application). The video feedback allows the athlete to see how it looks and relate it back […]