My son is in an under 12 team, attached to a large club with multiple teams in each age range and across junior and adult ages. Currently there is no particular platform used by the club and very few of the coaches use tracking cams, I suspect because many of them aren’t very tech minded.
The coach of our team wants to record matches and is looking at various options, started with the XBot and Veo, I said I’d help do some research and came by Folocam. I have an iPhone 17 pro max and ordered an Osmo 8 as read various posts and looked at compatibility, although didn’t find this forum and now realise it might not have been the best choice, although I set everything up last night and it all works although using the free version was frustrating (I appreciate the point is to encourage us to buy the premium). I have a couple of questions and some suggestions.
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Is there a way of getting a month trial, the coach is enthusiastic about the potential of folocam but the limitations of the free trial really don’t give a full picture of what this can do.
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Last night I set up to record for the first time, connected to the Osmo 8 and started recording. I completely forgot about checking settings and if I’m honest I think the UI/UX could be improved or tweaked for dummies like me
my suggestions are a couple of options, either when the app is first opened, it takes you to settings to confirm them before you start filming, I had the tripod height wrong, no 2x zoom on and it wasn’t working at all well (no surprise) the thing is once you’ve set this up I appreciate it probably doesn’t need changing much once you’ve used this a few times but as someone trying to get it to work it was really disheartening that it didn’t track that well. By trial and error with lowering the tripod it started working well, unsurprisingly because id dropped the height down. Alternatively, or as well as, the screen could display the current height, zoom, pitch size etc. -
we were training last night under floodlights on 4g pitches, I mentioned issues with tracking, probably due to tripod height but is there a setting for artificial light, the glare off the artificial pitches with floodlights may have also had some impact on the ball?
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Can an iwatch link to the app for a record/stop recording - this would be really helpful for breaks, half time etc.
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Some tutorial videos, even if Ai generated, on a number of things would really help. I’d start with the basics of gimbal set up, app set up, first game recording, set up YouTube (unlisted videos, streaming), suggestions on sharing clips,
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I sent the coach the ten minute clips over what’sApp last night and the footage was so compressed it looked like it was filmed on a turnip, what are the alternatives, again maybe tutorials on what to do, third party editing or integration with 3rd party editors CAPCUT etc, other ways to edit/send footage? Imo sending compressed footage makes the system look low quality, which it isn’t but there is no intuitive or easy way for non technical people to work with the footage. You’re doing a great job on the technical side of the app tracking the ball, but most people don’t understand that part, they just want to see the footage, edit it and share it between coaches and or players/parents and this part is well worth development
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Subscription package tiers? single teams, clubs, recording storage, editing, player tracking?, editing etc, appreciate those are things you might have or are in development though.
For the last half of the session I got things working pretty well at about 9ft tripod height (although it was stuck on 1x zoom). Thanks for the hard work, I hope there might be an option to try the app properly without committing to a yearly subscription first as I think we should use this but the coach is still looking at XBOT. I think this has great potential and there is a huge demand for it, hope you don’t mind the comments and suggestions.
is it possible to buy such subscription other way that via FoloCam KIT?