Kinovea - Sports video analysis

[joan]

Hi,

I am developping a piece of software called Kinovea. It's goal is to ease the study of videos. It's mainly used for sports.
(I'm spawning a new thread not to interfere with the "Alternative to Dartfish" one. Kinovea commitment is not to be a Dartfish alternative anyway.)

It is Open Source and (so far) Windows only.

I'm always on the look out for feedback so please do not hesitate to speak your mind.
I'm especially interested in ways that the usability could be improved (it's a top priority), bugs, annoyances, etc.
Then, of course, what features are felt missing the most and how existing one could be improved.

The primary audience was the coaches and athletes, but I've heard about several sport teachers using it.
(At least one of them thought it was easy enough that she made her students use it to create their own content during the course.)
I've also received feedback about a 3D teacher, using Kinovea to comment the students works directly on the video of their work. (using drawings to underline mistakes etc.)

So, if you've tried it and didn't like it, I want to know why, if you've found defects, I want to know about them, If you've suggestions write them out

Thanks

[jpwright]

Think its a really good product - have convinced the PE teacher to use it over Dartfish due to cost.

One thing that would be really good would be a dummies guide - something in the region of 10-20 pages (teachers won't read anything over that) - that did all the really simple functions.

Also what is the best format to import into Kinovea? I take it AVI?

[plexer]

welcome to edugeek I think I found your program and previously mentioned it on here. Ben

[joan]

Thanks

One thing that would be really good would be a dummies guide - something in the region of 10-20 pages (teachers won't read anything over that) - that did all the really simple functions.

This is what I try to do with the user's manual (especially the tutorials section). (online copy here) So how to improve it ? Is it too complicated, doesn't countain enough info or too much, not focused enough on the really basic stuff ? A printable format would help ?

Also what is the best format to import into Kinovea? I take it AVI?

I'm not sure there is a best format…
If you need to step back one frame at a time on large videos, some encoding profiles works better than other though.
In these cases it's best to have "intra only" type of encoding, like in DV or MJPEG compression, as opposed to strong time compressed encoding (where to display a particular frame we need to first decode a number of the preceeding ones.)
(This is not relevant for short clips where the frames are extracted to memory anyway.)

Also, HD videos with higher framerate (say 60fps) can be hard to be displayed in real time.

welcome to edugeek I think I found your program and previously mentioned it on here. Ben

Yes, thank you very much

[jpwright]

Thanks



This is what I try to do with the user's manual (especially the tutorials section). (online copy here) So how to improve it ? Is it too complicated, doesn't countain enough info or too much, not focused enough on the really basic stuff ? A printable format would help ?

The user's guide is fine for a techy person, but with a teacher you ideally need something simple in pdf format with lots of screen shots and arrows pointing to where things are.

Imagine you were showing a 12 year old kinovea, then you might just have the level for a PE teacher.

I actually think I prefer the program to dartfish - no gimmicks, and none of that 'database' of videos which just confuses teachers. Simplicity is very underrated sometimes.