Breaking down and cataloging volleyball game film

[InfoTime]

I coach my son's volleyball team at his school. We get a short 4 week season and we're halfway through it. We've played played 5 matches and I've got all 401 plays recorded as .MOV files.

In my ideal world I'd create a highlight reel for each of the 11 players on the team. Not to hand to them necessarily, but to be able to sit down with each one as an individual and review some or all of the plays they were involved in. I could also use each player's highlight reel myself to review how I can help each kid.

If I had all the plays categorized and marked up somehow there are probably a few other things I could do.

Can anyone suggest a good workflow and products to do this? Consider these constraints:

1. Mac based software preferred, but have Windows available too.
2. Free or low cost software
3. Don't care about presentation or themes, just want to piece together the raw video.
4. Quick learning curve (only have a couple of days to get this done)

I'm not leaning toward any one program at this point. I have iMovie but have very little experience with it.

I suppose there is some method of tagging and / or cataloging each play. Keywords or tags could include player(s) names involved in the play, type of play (serve or serve receive), features of play (successful bump, set, spike; miscommunication; good hustle; out of position; etc.)

A friend of mine used Huddl for his football team. That would be perfect I think, but it's $800 or more. He may still have an active subscription that I could use for the remaining two weeks. I know there are other sports online websites like that but I'm not sure that's what I want.

Maybe it's way too much to do and learn, given the constraints and I should just focus on teaching in person. But, this is my 3rd year doing this and never thought to film the games until this year. Going back and watching and analysing the film has been great. Just wish I could do it more efficiently.

Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[richwoodrocket]

Tags would work. If you had a tag for each player/each play then there you go.
It would be kind of clumsy, but it would work. I mean or you could use folders and make duplicates of the files, but that's horribly inefficient.

 

[RCAFBrat]

I gather that there is a single, continuous .MOV file for each match or period so in addition to tagging you also need to set in and out (start and end) points for each play?

FCPX would be great but at $299 it is pretty expensive for one project.

Your best bet might be to save (export) each play as a separate file and tag the files. You could then sort and stitch them together. Quicktime or iMovie might be your best bets (free) and there is a more feature rich pro version of Quicktime for about $30. I don't recall what the differences are between the free and pro versions but the pro is recommended often for small projects.

Cheers

 

[Dave Braine]

You can import your videos into iMovie and then create Projects for each player, selecting clips for each player and adding them to their respective Projects.

 

[mtngoatjoe]

If you have the individual clips, then I would import them into iPhoto. I know iPhoto is on the way out, but it's good for managing a lot of clips, and reviewing the footage would be simpler in iPhoto than iMovie.

Tag each video with the player's names, and then create smart folders for each player. Boom! All relevant videos are available for each player.

As others have mentioned, you could get a similar result with just tagging the files in the finder, but I think the playback would be better in iPhoto.

 

[ChrisA]

Final Cut Pro X would be the ideal solution. It has a very good system for cataloging video clips. You can sign multiple categories to each section of a long clip. Say you have a long clip and "Bob" is visible only for a few seconds. You can put "in" and "out" pointers on the clip and tab the selection as "bob" and as the name of the thing he does. You can search and sort on all of this metadata.

----------

If you have the individual clips, then I would import them into iPhoto. I know iPhoto is on the way out, but it's good for managing a lot of clips, and reviewing the footage would be simpler in iPhoto than iMovie.

Tag each video with the player's names, and then create smart folders for each player. Boom! All relevant videos are available for each player.

As others have mentioned, you could get a similar result with just tagging the files in the finder, but I think the playback would be better in iPhoto.

The problem with this method is that tags overlap. For example "big screwup" starts at 0:23 and goes on for three minutes. But "Mary is sleeping" starts at 0:45 and lasts only 15 seconds. So you'd have to duplicate the clip and cut it differently and then assign different tags to each copy of the clip. What a mess. What you want is to have in/out pointers that define a segment within a clip and assign tags to the segments and of course the segments might overlap.

The more kinds of tags you use the better chance the segments WILL overlap.

This applies to still photos too. Lets say yo have a photo of Jane in her red dress and with her dog Spot taken in San Fransisco on Nov 2 1998. Ok where do you file it in the "1998" folder or the "Red Dress" or the "Jane" or the "Spot" folder? It is bad enough with stills. but with video the tags depend on how you cut the clips The better editing systems address this issue.

 

[JuryDuty]

I think about any of these solutions could work for you. But I think it's worth considering how much of a learning curve some of these programs would have. iMovie you could pretty much master in a couple hours because it's simple, yet powerful. Final Cut is MUCH more powerful, but it may take a weekend to feel completely comfortable with it.

If you're just starting out, I'd begin with something like iMovie as it's a good starting tool, and then if you feel you need more, move to another software later. iMovie will give you the basics you need to understand so that programs like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere aren't completely overwhelming.

 

[ToomeyND]

You could also use a numbering system for just naming each clip.

Number your kids - 01, 02, 03, 04, etc.
Number your plays - Serve = 0, Receive = 1
Then you can number the plays - serve = 0, pass = 1, set = 2, attack = 3, block = 4, dig = 5, general floor position = 6, dump (setter move) = 7
And then you can number whether it was a good play = 0, or a bad play - 1.

So if Steve (player 5) had a good pass while in serve receive, you could number it 05110_1 with the underscore just being the first file. Then in list in finder, you could clearly see which kid you are looking at based on the first two digits, and if it was good or bad based on the last digit (before the underscore).

Then you could adjust in iMovie however you like.

It's definitely not sexy, but it could work. I don't think I'm missing any major types of plays in volleyball, but you get the drift. The important thing is that if you have more than 10 of something, that you start the single digit numbers with a 0. For example, list it as play 01 and not just 1 so that you keep the digits in the same place for each.

 

[mtngoatjoe]

Final Cut Pro X would be the ideal solution. It has a very good system for cataloging video clips. You can sign multiple categories to each section of a long clip. Say you have a long clip and "Bob" is visible only for a few seconds. You can put "in" and "out" pointers on the clip and tab the selection as "bob" and as the name of the thing he does. You can search and sort on all of this metadata.

----------



The problem with this method is that tags overlap. For example "big screwup" starts at 0:23 and goes on for three minutes. But "Mary is sleeping" starts at 0:45 and lasts only 15 seconds. So you'd have to duplicate the clip and cut it differently and then assign different tags to each copy of the clip. What a mess. What you want is to have in/out pointers that define a segment within a clip and assign tags to the segments and of course the segments might overlap.

The more kinds of tags you use the better chance the segments WILL overlap.

This applies to still photos too. Lets say yo have a photo of Jane in her red dress and with her dog Spot taken in San Fransisco on Nov 2 1998. Ok where do you file it in the "1998" folder or the "Red Dress" or the "Jane" or the "Spot" folder? It is bad enough with stills. but with video the tags depend on how you cut the clips The better editing systems address this issue.

He said he already had all the plays 401 plays recorded as MOV files. That suggests to me that he's already broken them into clips. Of course, I could be wrong.

If they're already broken into clips, then use iPhoto, tag them with keywords and move on with life.

If they're not already broken up, then he's gonna need iMovie (since he wants a free or low cost solution). I don't do a lot of organization in iMovie, so my inclination would be to organize the clips with iPhoto (since iPhoto is designed to organize this kind of media).