The Highlight of my week

This from a post I made to the BX forum, the CF mainsite forum and the comments of one of Coach Burgener's excellent O. Lifting videos.

Definitely trying to spread word of this fantastic app around!

Warning, overexcited geek alert!

You know how in many Olympic lifting videos they show the lift from the side on and superimpose a wiggly line on the clip which traces the path the bar takes?
That’s normally done using an application called Dartfish, which costs US$1000 for the basic version and does so much more than just bar path tracing that it’s a minor feature.

Well after a year of searching off and on I’ve just found an open-source application called Kinovea (http://www.kinovea.org/en/) that does some of the same thing.
Given a side-on video of an Olympic lift you can select the end of the bar and let the software track it for you and draw the path of the bar throughout the lift.
Dartfish will also give you data on bar speed etc, but for most of us, it’s the bar path that is most telling.

I’ve uploaded a video I processed of Annie Sakamoto cleaning to YouTube.


Not even remotely criticising Annie’s technique, ;-) it just happened to be the first video in the Olympic lifting section of the mainsite exercises and demos page.

In this case all I had to do was select which segment of video I was interested in, click on the image of the end of the bar and tell it to trace the path, then save the resulting image.
The output file format is not a common one, but it’s also not unusual and it’s not hard to find something that will view it. YouTube sucked it up without belching.

I used the experimental 0.8.4 (http://www.kinovea.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?id=132)version of Kinovea. The trace feature is available in the stable release too, but may not work as well?

I think that this is so cool!

Actually there is some ability to export data to spreadsheets for analysis, but I haven’t explored that.

Now I'm not sure how to use it.
Not as in how to get it to draw the wiggly lines on the screen, but where in my training this is useful. Right now it would be a waste, I don't need software to tell me my O. Lifts have issues, but do I wait until I think I've got it right and then start watching more closely (when I'll have embedded even more bad habits) or start at some earlier stage when I still have grossly (and I do mean that literally) bad technique?