With the recent release of the iPhone 4 video is now so easy to capture from this fun little device.  It captures video in HD quality and the frame rate is actually pretty good. This makes life very easy for the Mac user who wants to take a quick video of their student (whether a golfer, baseball player, tennis phenom, etc..) then analyze the video on their Mac with SwingLoft.

SwingLoft’s easy to use video analysis capability works perfect with video recorded on your iPhone 4.  Here’s how to get video directly from your iPhone to your Mac:

• Capture the video when in the ‘Camera’ app on your iPhone. For best results, make sure your student is completely in the frame and you can rest the iPhone on something sturdy.
• Hit the button on the bottom left of the screen that looks like this:
• Select EMAIL PHOTO and email the video to an email address that you can check from your Mac
• Save the video to your Mac. For better file handling, save your videos in appropriately named folders.  This will save time in the future.
• Now simply open SwingLoft and hit File>Open Movie
• Find the file you just saved and now you can start analyzing the video! To see the video in proper aspect ratio, make sure to hit Edit>Best View Movie

While testing the video that we captured from the iPhone, we found that the frame rate of the video is actually quite nice.  It worked better with slower swing speeds, but that is to be expected. Surprisingly enough though, there wasn’t much blurring going on! This is what really caught our attention.  Most video cameras without CCD capability or a slow frame-rate blur the fast motion of a golf swing. The video captured with the iPhone 4 didn’t really do that! So we were very pleased with the ability to combine a simple smartphone video and SwingLoft Video Analysis Software.

Please send us any comments or tips you have on capturing video with your iPhone so that we can share it with the Mac Video Analysis community!

Download a sample movie captured on the iPhone 4

For additional information check out Golf Web Design’s article on iPhone 4 Tips for Golf Professionals

We are working on Version 3 of SwingLoft, and we want your opinion of what else we need to change!! So far, we are working on stability issues, sizing on 13″ monitors, and a few other small changes. We are looking to our current and future users to help us with any new changes that YOU would like to see on the new version! We want to make this a community effort to bring a better product to the table. Please comment on this post with your suggestions! Thanks to all ~

The month of January has been one of research and development for SwingLoft. We went to the PGA Show and found a few new features that we would like to add to the next version! So keep on the lookout for the Version 3.0 of SwingLoft!

This month’s winner (January) was Ralph H. – who currently uses Dartfish to teach golf and skiing! Congrats Ralph.