How Can You Share Your Tennis Videos While “On the Road”?
I was asked this question – how to share videos while traveling – a couple of times lately, and thought I’d just address it as a blog post, looking at the various options for this.
So, you just filmed your match and you don’t want to wait until you get home to share it with your coach. Maybe get some feedback to help in the next match. Only thing is, your coach is 500 miles away! What’s a player to do? Following are some thoughts and ideas on how you might proceed.
YouTube: A simple option, however, the 15 minute limit of most action cameras means you can upload just one file at a time. To upload an entire match, you can do one file at a time, OR, use a video editing software program that will stitch the various files into one larger file. Not all that hard, but it does take a few minutes. One program for this is Quicktime. Just open up all the files with Quicktime and put on one timeline. First open the file in QuickTime, then hit the share button and sign into your YouTube account. It’s as easy as that.
Click here for a YouTube Example
Google Drive:
One college coach I talked with simply uploads his videos (four camera’s worth!!) onto Google Drive. Sometimes it runs all night, but his players can then just check out the videos at their leisure. For a single player, such as a junior tennis player on the road, this would seem to be a very simple solution, probably the easiest.
TennisAnalytics:
Another option is expensive and quite honestly, I’ll earn a commission if you opt for it. You can upload your files to TennisAnalytics and have them sliced and diced in any number of ways, all customizable by you. For example, if you want to see all your forehand errors, you can sort out just those video showing forehand errors. Or choose winners…. One drawback is that it takes a day to do all that analysis, so it’s not immediate. But you will, over time, build up an invaluable database
At $85 per match, with discounts for multiple matches, it’s not cheap, but it’s a great solution for those wanting the best. Just go the menu bar above and click on Analytics.
Cizr Tennis:
Another “Analytics” website is http://www.cizr.com. Close to the same product, but only $60.00 per match. I like this service!
Some low-tech solutions:
You could upload to Dropbox, or WeTransfer, then the coach can download the file(s), but that takes a lot of upload/download time, which can be fairly slow and tedious. Good in a pinch, but cumbersome in my viewpoint.
Vimeo:
Vimeo is great as far as it goes, but there are some severe restrictions on free uploads, like 2.5 gbs per month. Not nearly enough. To get enough storage for tennis videos you would have to upgrade to the Premium edition for $240 a year. That’ll get you 20 gb per week, maybe two matches depending on your setting.
GoPro Cloud:
Buy a GoPro 5 or 6 or a Sessions. Videos upload automatically from your camera to a wifi connection. This sounds great until you see the quality. We haven’t tried it yet and would love to hear some feedback on how this works for tennis, but here’s a review from Wired Magazine:
GoPro Review from Wired
Plus One
GoPro Plus is the name of new subscription cloud service designed to help you publish your footage. When you plug in a Hero5 camera (Black or Session) it can automatically start uploading your photos and video footage to the cloud via your home Wi-Fi network. The footage then gets stored in your GoPro Plus account, which you access via GoPro’s website, but these files will also appear in the Quik app for mobile or desktop.
It’s a really great idea, and fairly intuitive to use. Plus, you don’t have all those videos clogging up your hard drive, right? Well… there’s a catch. The videos saved in the cloud aren’t full resolution. In fact, the file sizes were half the size of the originals. This means you’re losing a lot of quality for the sake of convenience. The quality isn’t god awful—good enough for Instagram—but if you’re putting it on YouTube you’ll see the difference, and that sucks.
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