One of these AI new features is Automatic Player Tracking for Soccer. When a user imports a clip into Coach Paint, they can now decide if they want to track the players in the clip. This means that, once the calibration process is completed, he will be able to link a graphic tool to any player in the clip (for example a cursor, a light cone, etc.) and this graphic will follow the selected player(s) as the clip is played.
Before this feature, the graphic tool placed on the video would be “static”, so the user would have to place the tool on the clip, press play for a couple of seconds, drag and drop the tool to the new player position and so on, repeating this action for however long he wanted the graphic to stay on the video.
We know that the tracker will never be perfect as there are situations where the tracking of a player is lost, for example when two players cross over. For this reason, we included a variety of tools that allow the user to edit the players’ paths that are picked up by the automatic tracker. In that way, a “hybrid” approach (combination of AI and manual corrections) allows our users to cover any type of video footage.
We currently support automatic player tracking for soccer only and only on Mac computers, with the aim to expand the array of sports that support this feature in the near future.
See how Automatic Player Tracking works here:
The other AI Feature we have recently launched is Automatic Pitch Calibration for Soccer.
What is pitch calibration? It is the process during which the user “tells” the software where the pitch is in the imported video (for example, where is the halfway line, where is a penalty box, etc.).
Why is pitch calibration needed? Coach Paint has a vast number of 3D graphic tools. The difference between a 2D and a 3D graphic tool is that a 3D graphic tool when placed on a calibrated pitch, will take into account how far from the camera it is and it will adjust its dimensions accordingly.
Let’s see a use case of this exciting new feature: if we select a 3D graphic tool (e.g. a 3D cursor) and we place 2 of them, one very close to the camera and the other one very far towards the opposite side of the pitch, the two cursors will have different dimensions as they will be shown in the video taking into consideration where they are on the pitch relative to the point of view of the camera.
If we select a 2D graphic tool and we place two of them on the pitch, they will both look the same, no matter where we place them. The same will happen if I select a 3D graphic tool and I place it on a pitch that is not calibrated. Because the software does not know the coordinates of the pitch, he is not able to adjust the dimensions and perspective of the graphics.
Therefore, calibrating the pitch is a necessary step in order to have better-looking 3D graphics in the clip. Before the release of Coach Paint 9.2, the user would need to calibrate the pitch by dragging and dropping at least 3 reference points in the clip, so that the software could understand from which perspective/angle the footage was filmed.
With the release of our 9.2 version, this calibration process is automatic so the user can import its clip and this is calibrated automatically in a couple of seconds. As for automatic player tracking, this feature saves time for our users so it improves the quality of their work.
Automatic Pitch Calibration is only supported for soccer and only on Mac computers, but we’re going to expand the array of sports that support this feature in the near future.
See Automatic Pitch Calibration in action:
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