Simple Method For Calculating Speed Of Spin Bowling From Video

boogiespinner

Active Member
1) Take a ball that hits the stumps
2) Upload video to youtube
3) Adjust the settings so it is playing at 0.25 (quarter speed)
4) Play the video, with a stopwatch record the time from the release to hitting the stumps
5) Calculate 200/[time]

that is the speed from the hand in mph!

roughly.... I make no guarantees of accuracy. It should be pretty close though
 
1) Take a ball that hits the stumps
2) Upload video to youtube
3) Adjust the settings so it is playing at 0.25 (quarter speed)
4) Play the video, with a stopwatch record the time from the release to hitting the stumps
5) Calculate 200/[time]

that is the speed from the hand in mph!

roughly.... I make no guarantees of accuracy. It should be pretty close though
Ah - I wondered how you'd come up with the speed for my bowling! I'll have to upload some more vids using my new faster action.
 
new faster action? already?
Yeah it's something I've tried on a number of occasions and rejected over the last few years, but all the games I got wickets in were with an intermediate approach - faster than the video, but not as fast as I bowled today and yesterday. The McGrath thing seems to have worked for me, I'd tried the Warne 8 step approach before and a Stuart MacGill approach but without any idea of what I should be doing and why. The McGrath explanation was a bit of a potential epiphany - it looks like it may be something to work with? I bowled 4 x 6 balls tonight and using the long run-up/fast technique and it was fast and accurate (hitting the little mat at least 4 times out of the 24 balls). If the weather's good tomorrow, I'll video it.

Too me it feels more MacGill-esque, than anything else, but once filmed I might be embarrassed with making that connection!!!
 
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Any way to calculate the revs on the ball? ;)
hmm maybe!

I propose this method:

you will need:
1) two tone ball (or a white mark on the ball)
2) a camera that films at high speed/slow motion
3) a friend to do the filming

So if you set the camera to film at the highest speed (e.g. my samsung galaxy S4 will do 1/8) bowl the two tone ball with a scrambled seam (actually the red ball with the white mark may be better on the seam) then you might be able to manually count the revolutions in a second of footage. Of course multiply by the slow motion rate of the camera and there's your answer. Putting it into a video editor where you can actually count exact frames (and scroll through them) may really help.

Perhaps the best would be a red/white two-tone ball spun on the seam but with a blue or other coloured marking to track the spin.
 
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