A video you only want to watch back can be filmed from almost anywhere. A video you want analysed has to do more: software, or a coach, needs to find every stroke of one player in an hour or more of play, tell it apart from the other three players, and measure it. That asks a few specific things of the recording. This guide covers those extra needs. For mounting a phone on a tripod, battery and storage, see how to film your padel match with a phone.
What the analysis has to see
- The whole court, the whole time. Both baselines, both side walls and the net. A stroke played in a corner that is outside the picture cannot be found.
- All four players. To know that a stroke is yours and not your partner's, the analysis has to see who is near the ball and who swung. Your analysis is about you, but the others still need to be in the picture.
- The ball. At the far end of the court a padel ball is only a few pixels wide. Good light, a sharp picture and enough frames per second keep it visible.
- You, easy to recognise. Something that sets you apart from the other three, usually the colour of your shirt.
- A camera that never moves. Positions on the court are worked out from the court lines. If the camera moves, everything after that point is measured against the wrong lines.
The position: behind the back glass, raised
Put the camera behind one of the back glass walls, in the middle of the court, and raise it so you look slightly down on the court. High enough to see the far baseline, and so the players nearest to you do not hide the ones behind them. Keep the lens close to the glass so it does not pick up reflections.
Why not the side of the court? On most courts the side fence and its frame stand between the camera and the players, and a camera at the side sees one half of the court well and the other half badly. From behind the glass, one camera sees both halves.
What this angle costs. On the near half, players have their backs to the camera. On the far half, they are small. Both are fine for finding strokes. For technique, the far half gives fewer measurements, simply because a player at the far end is made of fewer pixels. Expect your best technique videos from the points you play on the near half.
Settings that matter for analysis
- 60 frames per second at least. At 30, the fastest part of a swing falls between two frames and the moment of contact is a blur. 120 frames per second also works if your camera offers it in 4K. It doubles the file size.
- 4K. The extra pixels are what make the far end of the court usable. There is no gain from 8K here: most cameras drop to a lower frame rate in 8K, and the files become very large.
- Landscape, the whole court, no digital zoom. If the normal lens cuts a corner off, use the wider lens.
- Stabilisation off on a tripod. Electronic stabilisation crops the picture and is not needed when the camera is fixed. On an action camera on a rigid clamp, switch it off if the camera lets you.
- Lights that flicker. Many club LED lights flicker at a rate set by the mains power: 50 Hz in Egypt, 60 Hz in Saudi Arabia. If a test clip shows bands or pulsing brightness, and your camera lets you fix the shutter speed, use 1/100 s in Egypt and 1/120 s in Saudi Arabia when filming at 60 frames per second.
Recording a whole match
- One recording from the first serve to the last point. Analysis copes easily with the time between points. It cannot recover a point that was not filmed.
- Keep every file. Action cameras split long recordings into several files. Keep all of them, in their original names, and upload them together.
- Upload the original. Messaging apps and some sharing services shrink a video to a fraction of its size, and the ball and the paddle are the first things to disappear. Copy the original file from the phone or the camera's card.
- Do not trim or edit first. An edited export is a new, smaller file. Let the analysis see the match as it was filmed.
Make yourself easy to find
Wear a shirt in a colour that none of the other three players is wearing, and in particular not your partner's colour. If everyone is in the same club shirt, a cap or a sleeve in a clear colour helps. In Coda you start by tapping yourself in a few pictures from the video; a distinct colour makes those pictures quick to answer and keeps you recognisable for the rest of the match.
A five-minute checklist before the first point
- Camera behind the back glass, centred and raised, on a tripod or clamp.
- Far baseline, both side walls, the net and all four players in the picture.
- 4K, 60 frames per second (or 120), landscape, wide lens if needed.
- Lens close to the glass, wiped, no reflection visible on the screen.
- Battery full or a power bank connected, enough free space, Do Not Disturb on.
- Record one minute, stop, watch it back: can you see the ball at the far end?
- Start the real recording and do not touch the camera again until the match is over.
What happens next
With a recording like this, you can upload it to Coda. It finds your strokes, asks you about the few it is unsure of, and builds clips, technique videos and a report. How that works, and its limits, is on the page about Coda's padel video analysis. When your first clips come back, a good place to start is your overheads: bandeja vs víbora vs smash.