Product Manager Paul Arnott takes a closer look at the positive impact Hudl Sportscode will have on users’ day-to-day workings in blog four of our series.
The first time you open a timeline in Hudl Sportscode, you’ll instantly feel how much smoother the scrubbing is. Even with high quality video and data rates, it’ll feel like the kind of performance you’d expect from Apple’s native QuickTime player.
Zooming and scrolling are better. If you use the zoom control on a timeline with a large amount of data, which we typically see with third-party data sources, you’ll now see instances expand and contract in a more responsive manner. Scrolling the timeline, both vertically and horizontally, is much smoother than the current version. Plus the macOS standard hotkeys and mouse/trackpad gestures are compatible with Hudl Sportscode.
All of the video players in Hudl Sportscode are based on Apple’s modern video frameworks. They’re resizeable—simply click and drag on the corner of a video player to change the size. You have complete control over the size, meaning you have more options on how your desktop is laid out.
Hudl Sportscode has also improved the experience working with a larger number of angles and higher quality video. Now video with higher data rates, higher resolution (including 4K), and higher frame rates (including 120 fps) is supported. Modern encoding formats like H.265 are also accepted. This allows for higher quality video at smaller file sizes, which means you can quickly copy video to an external drive, share it to an iPad, or upload it to Hudl. Playback, frame by frame stepping, and skipping between instances are all much smoother.
We’ve also designed a modern playback controller that’s more intuitive. It aligns with Apple’s native QuickTime player controller and the other video players in the Hudl Pro Suite. New users will pick it up much quicker, and existing users will still have the same control when it comes to playback speed.
With more modern video formats to choose from, you likely won’t need to convert video when importing it into Sportscode. We’re excited about how much time this will save users.
Speaking of time, all files load quicker in Hudl Sportscode. If you’re opening a video package, a matrix, a sorter or an organiser, even with large amounts of data, they will open much quicker. You’ll be able to get on with your analysis sooner. And scripting runs faster too. In code windows we’ve tested, there’s been up to five times improvement.
The improved experience doesn’t end there. Capture is more stable because we’re using a modern mechanism for recording—you're much less likely to suffer dropped frames. And live sharing to other computers is quicker—video is transferred in as little as six seconds, data in as little as two seconds.
In the existing version of Sportscode, sorters and organisers reached a limit if you had too many clips or images. The new version can handle much larger amounts of data. But at the same time, CPU usage is lower in all operations, so you’re less likely to see dropped frames or other issues.
Maybe best of all, Hudl Sportscode uses a modern macOS standard mechanism for auto-saving all files. Sorters, organisers, code windows and timelines all autosave every five seconds. If you ever suffer a crash, you’ll now lose a minimal amount of data, if any.
Hudl Sportscode is just part of the capture, data and distribution solutions that make up Hudl Pro Suite. With this complete solution, every Hudl product will now work better together, making life easier for analysts and coaches. As you can tell, we’re pretty excited about how this is going to make your life easier and better. I hope you’re excited too!
