Hey all, I know there are a lot of request to "view my swing" on here, and I thought I'd offer a few tips to help film them so we can see the proper positions. Analyzing swings on video is pretty tough - youtube is hard to stop in certain positions, and it's more difficult if the camera angle is off - even slightly. If you'd like to video your swing, here's a couple tips:

1) from down the line (DTL), place the camera directly in line with the butt of the club at that height. If you don't have a tripod, use your bag or bag stand - those are about the same height. It's really important to aim the camera at the butt of the club and parallel to the target line - if you align the camera on the target line, the swing will look very different. Please don't have your friend hold the camera at eye-level - that doesn't work very well. Laying a club or alignment rod down below your hands, parallel to the target line tends to help when you're setting up the camera.

2) from face-on try to align the camera again directly at the butt of the club, perpendicular to the target line, again at butt of the club height. This is important for weight shift and ball position. I'm not trying to be nit-picky with angles, but it's pretty important to get these as close as possible if you want the best (and quickest) analysis.

Since youtube makes it almost impossible to stop frames at the right places, and I know most of you don't have super high-speed cameras, I've asked Spenda to chime in on how he slows down his videos. He mentioned he uses a software that allows him to slow it down to 10% & it is awesome for analysis. I'm sure he'll post on here & can share some insight on how to do it. If you can slow your swing down on video that would be really helpful!

The last thing is, please describe your "misses" - if you usually hit hooks, slices, tops, whatever, drop a little description about the ball flight - example "My driver usually starts left of the target and curves hard right, and when I mis-hit it, it is usually low on the face or I top it." - Believe it or not, that goes a long way to helping us diagnose the cause of the problem & we can get you playing your best much faster!

Once again, thanks for all the videos that have been posted so far - I enjoy helping, and don't want to sound picky, but it takes a while to really look at a swing, and getting those camera angles correct helps a ton! The same camera angles apply for wedges & putters. Now that I mention it, I don't think we've had a putter video since I've been on here - does no one have putting problems? Ha Ha! Feel free to post those as well!

Keep on posting - just thought I'd try to make the process a little easier for everyone and hopefully Spenda can provide some insight on how to slow the action down.

Thanks again - looking forward to seeing some new swings soon!

There is a website (and here is where I become useless because I can't remember the name) specifically for posting golf swings, where you just post it at regular speed and then people watching it have the ability to slow it down as much as they want.

My googling isn't turning up anything, but I will keep thinking about it.

As usual, you remember just past when it mattered.

http://www.swingacademy.com/web/grou...aspx?GroupID=1

Is there a way to get your swing videos off of GolfTec's website and post them here? I'm pretty technologically challenged when it comes to video.

Right click/save iirc from when I worked there.

I shared this with doc at some point, and have been meaning to share it with the forum for some time now. I suppose this is a good enough opportunity as I'm going to get, so here it goes. I have an add-on for Firefox that allows you to download videos from YouTube and other similar sites. It is called Video Download Helper, and it's actually pretty awesome. If you have QuickTime, I find that it's an excellent program to slow down the swings with as you just need to keep the video paused and use your left and right arrow keys to move frame-by-frame forward or backward. Of course, to use QuickTime you'll have to download and convert the YouTube vids to .mp4 format, which the add-on will do for you once you install the converter. It's pretty awesome because you can literally download and have videos ready to analyze in a matter of seconds and line them up side-by-side with some of the pros if you so choose.

If anyone has any questions about this, how to get it working, etc. just let me know.

I should have been able to figure that one out, manbear. Thanks.

Nah, definitely still matters

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Dagolfdoc, do you have any advice for someone who'd like learn how to be able to look at their own swing on camera themselves and figure out how they are doing?

Also, following the above advice about recording our swings, can you give me a rough description of zoom level? Maybe % of frame the golfer takes up would work?

Yeah there are some checkpoints for viewing your swing, but if I shared them with you, I'd be out of a job!!! Just kidding. yes there are several checkpoints for your swing & positions that I consider, good, acceptable, and problem zones. I wrote most of them out a couple years ago when I was preparing my Master Professional Thesis, I'll see if I can find them on my external hard drive, and if so, I'll post on here. If I can't find them, I'll write them up again (although I'll have to have a really good bottle of wine & a great cigar by my side to type that up again!!). I'll see what I can find over the next couple days.

As far as zoom goes - I like to get as close as possible and still the clubhead throughout the entire swing. It doesn't always happen, but if you can, try to keep the clubhead from getting cut out at the top. Nothing worse than missing a key position because you zoomed in too much, but, at the same time, I don't want to watch a swing that looks like it's 100 yards away. I don't have a % or a certain view, I've done it for so long, there's just a way I personally look at a setup on a camera and adjust it to my preference. If you check my youtube videos, you'll see how I setup my camera (it seems they all look pretty much the same) - I'm not saying that's correct for everyone, but for me, that's how I like to view them.

I'll take a look for those checkpoints, but you have to promise me you're not trying to edge me out of my gig! ha ha. If I can't find them, I'll write something up for you this week that will give you some checkpoints.

In addition to everything doc said, if you follow my instructions above there are countless numbers of professionals' swings on YouTube that you can download and line-up side-by-side with your own. I started doing this over the winter and just watching some of those guys and their technique really helped my understanding of the swing.

lol, nice.

I would definitely be interested in reading that if you wouldn't mind sharing. What was your thesis topic? Something dealing with the mechanics of the golf swing, I presume.

I know you are kidding, but I think you sell yourself short. I'm just looking to understand the mechanics of the golf swing myself. How to explain what needs fixing to another person and get them to properly correct things is a whole 'nother ball game. My understanding would do diddly squat for them because I still wouldn't have the knowledge and experience required to be a proficient golf instructor. I've tried teaching other things before and learned that teaching is clearly not for me.

Well, seems like its about time to go wash my nose.

really need to sticky this until I can put together a video or some visual aids for the forum

It has been stuck.

Here's an easy way to slow your swing down for those of you that have Windows 7 (probably on vista too).

1. Open Windows Live Movie Maker
2. Click on the big box to browse and find your swing video
3. Go to the edit tab
4. Click play until you get to the beginning of your swing and hit pause
5. Click set start point, set the speed to .125x, Click play until you get to the end of your swing, then click set end point
6. Click on the home tab, then go to save movie and select for computer
7. Should save as a wmv file which you can upload to youtube

If anyone has any trouble let me know, but it's got to be pretty easy if I could figure it out.

can you use any kinda video camera? i want to vid my sons baseball swing. so we can fine tune it.

also anything special i need to be able to draw lines? is it hard to do split screen? what i want to do is similar to this:

To do something like the above, you'll want a higher speed camera (higher frames per second). To draw lines & split screen, you'll probably want a simple, home version of some teaching software - V1 or JC video works great with pc's (about $30-50), for mac's Analyzr is the way to go. You won't need a pro version with any of them.

thank you very much for your help

Thanks for the pointers on setting up the videos.

Big news on this front from Apple yesterday. The new iPhone is going to record at 120fps in 720HD. While it's not going to be quite professional camera speed, it's plenty fast enough for analysis for 99% of players.

Makes me depressed that I just spent $400 on a P7700 which only does 120fps.... @480p

Samsung Galaxy Note 3 will do this also. And the 5.7" screen makes it a viable option for actually being able to look at fairly well on the actual range. I'm probably gonna get this phone in the near future.