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Newsletter
October 2011
Hola
a todos, os adjunto el newsletter del mes de
octubre de Sportstec, en el que podréis conocer
alguna de las posibilidades de codificar
partidos que estemos viendo en streaming (iShowU
o CamTwist), el empleo de la redes
sociales para interactuar con los componentes
de nuestro club o el éxito de SportsCode como
herramienta para el análisis del rendimiento
mediante vídeo, ya que está siendo utilizado
por la gran mayoría de equipos durante el
campeonato mundial de Rugby en Sud Africa.
 
The
Rugby World Cup in
New Zealand is in full swing not only for the
players but also for
Sportstec. Our Sportstec Exchange product is the
heart of the video
exchange between the teams and it is proving to be
a great resource for the
teams. With most using SportsCode as the analysis
tool the seamless
integration is working well.
With the television coverage
showing pictures of the coaching box it is very
humbling to see the Apple
computers everywhere and to know that Sportstec is
having a real impact.
The Users Conferences we ran over the last 2
months have been great
successes. I was fortunate to be at both the USA
and UK conferences
and I found the themes/outcomes of both
conferences converged to reflect
the gain in momentum to Performance Analysis vs
Editing.
This move presents lots of opportunities and we
are here to help you if
required.
Philip
Jackson
Managing
Director
In this Months Issue
Technical Support
Floating in the Mighty Amazon
Cloud
Read
More...
Products
Here we look at another method
to capture online video directly into
Gamebreaker or SportsCode
...
Read More...
Coaches Corner
Using
Social Media as
a coaching aid ......
Read
More...
Case Study
A weekly workflow at Nottingham
Forrest FC ...
Read More...
Technical
/ Support
Floating
In The
Mighty Amazon Cloud
Sportstec continually strives to use the
latest and best technologies in our solutions.
Over the last 3 months, we
have been investigating moving all our online
services from dedicated
hardware to the Cloud. Well, we have finally
made the flight to the Cloud
using Amazon Web Services.
I am sure
most of you have heard this word "cloud" thrown
around a lot in the last
couple of years. So, what is the the cloud? The
term cloud refers to the
concept of cloud computing whereby the end user
purchases computing as a
service instead of purchasing the hardware that
does the computing. This is
quite an incredible paradigm shift in the world
of computing. Let me share
an example to illustrate what this meant to us…
In
September 2010, we were ramping up our Sportstec
Exchange servers for the
big sporting seasons to start in Europe. We
started calculating how much
space would be required to host all the upcoming
schedules and found that
our current hardware would not provide enough
storage and it was not
scalable. So, the only option was to purchase a
second storage server with
4TB of space even though we calculated only
needing an extra 1TB more. Not
only did we have to purchase this, but of course
we had to purchase a
backup to this. So, we ended up purchasing 2
servers for the year. In
total, we had 6 servers in place for the
platform to service hundreds of
users from 15 schedules in 5 separate leagues.
This is not a mind blowing
amount compared to FaceBook or Google, but for
Sportstec it seemed like a
lot, particularly the ~90 terabytes of traffic.
Now
in September 2011,
again ramping up for our even bigger season of
Exchange in Europe. We
calculated our storage requirements, ~18TB. A
fair bit more than last year,
but the difference is that we are in the clouds.
So, all that was needed to
do was to fire up an EBS volume for each
schedule and attach it to the
server. Not really any more difficult than
plugging in an external hard
drive. We did not need to buy extra servers at
all, only the storage that
we required. So, now instead of 6 servers, we
have 2. One is the primary
web server and one mirroring the primary for
failover. Each EBS volume can
be unmounted from the primary web server and
remounted on the failover in a
matter of minutes in the case of an emergency.
It is really simple
and Amazon Web Services products are incredibly
robust.
Making
this flight to
the cloud, will allow us to create interesting
and clever solutions without
investing heavily in hardware. When we need to
scale our services, it is a
simple matter of turning on more servers or
making our current servers more
powerful by CPUs and memory.
We want to recommend to everyone to
take a look at Amazon Web Services. They offer a
free account for testing
and development purposes.
Products
With
each new year
comes new and better ways of acquiring video
into Gamebreaker or
SportsCode. Previously, we have recommended
iShowU for the capture of
streaming video. iShowU is still a great option,
but we have another option
for you. CamTwist. CamTwist is a free
application that allows a user to
capture an online video stream directly into
Gamebreaker or SportsCode with
no costs at all.
CamTwist is best used for sites like: ESPN3,
Youtube,
Ustream, justin.tv, etc. Many of our customers
have taken advantage of this
software to capture professional, collegiate,
and high school games.
Here
are the steps to download CamTwist:
1.
Download CamTwist by going to their site
http://camtwist.en.softonic.com/mac
and
choosing the “Free Download” 
2.
If prompted, choose
Save File 
3.
Once the file is
saved start the installation process by double
clicking on the CamTwist DMG
file 
 4.
Double click on the CamTwist
package
5.
Then Just keep
selecting the affirmative answer: i.e. Continue,
Continue, Agree, etc.
Installation should be completed.
6.
Once CamTwist is
installed, single click on the desktop anywhere
7.
Press
SHIFT+COMMAND+A on the keyboard. (COMMAND =
Apple key). This opens the
Applications Folder.
8.
Click and drag
CamTwist out of Applications down to the dock so
a shortcut is on the
dock.
9.
Launch CamTwist
from the Dock.
You are now ready to begin using CamTwist.
Please
follow these steps to use CamTwist with
Gamebreaker/SportsCode.
1. With CamTwist open go to Preferences
2.
Make sure your
preferences mirror those below.
 
3.
After preference
are set choose “Desktop” and follow these
selections. Uncheck
“Full Screen” if it is selected.
As
you can see a
scaleable window is provided that you move to
cover the area in which you
would like to capture.
 
4.
Once the window is
set, you can select “Done Selecting”
5. You can launch
Gamebreaker/SportsCode
6. Start a capture
7. In the drop menu for input
device choose CamTwist
8.
Start capture as
you normally would, you can now code the video
as it being ingested. End
capture when streaming video is completed.
Coaches
Corner
Using
Social Media
as a Coaching aid
Social media has changed the way we
communicate in todays society. Be it good or
bad, it is here and it does
have some great features which can be used in
day to day coaching. In
this edition of coaches corner we will look at
how Facebook can be used as
a efficient peer to peer communication tool.
We will use the Facebook group tool to create a
private page for our team. In this example I
have a group called High
School Football Team
To set up a group find the Create Group
link .. 
Now
name the group and
assign at least one member, maybe start out with
your assistant coach.
Players can be invited to the group later.
Consider all of the
privacy options - Closed or Secret are
recommended.
Once
you have created
a group you can now begin to manage the group
As
you are the creator
of the group you have Admin rights. As an
administrator you can add and
delete members and view and remove all
attachments and posts.
Once you have built a community of your staff
and players you can use
Facebook to communicate to the members though
the following 3
methods:
1.
Write Post - Here
you communicate to your group about all types of
team issues, eg training
times, changes to schedules, social events etc.
you can create a new topic
for each and allow the group to post threads and
get feedback on the topic
from the members.
2. Add Photo - Here is where it gets powerful.
You have the option of uploading your edited
Sportscode video with
comments. Members can post comments on the video
post. You can also create
a webcam blog to your players. This can be very
useful for coaching players
where distance and regular face to face contact
with a player is
restricted.
3.
Ask Question - you
can post a question to the group about schedules
and add in preset
answers
or
you can use to this
to ask the players to rate their performance
Finally
another handy
tool is the Event calendar, you can use Facebook
group to schedule in your
trainings and games and to notify your players and
their parents about any
team social events or important dates.
Case
Study
Weekly
Workflow of
a NPower Championship team: Nottingham Forest
John Harrower,
Analyst for the Nottingham Forrest first team,
uses SportsCode Elite to
code the last performance of their upcoming
opposition team. This needs to
be ready each Monday / Tuesday. This fully
analysed game is then
transferred onto Steve McClaren’s (First Team
Manager) laptop which
is running SportsCode Elite Review software.
Here Steve can go into the
coding and on any selected row use the Flagging
feature in Elite to
identify the clips he wants. He then selects
these in the matrix and copies
them to a Movie Organiser. Generally there are
about 30 clips that he wants
to keep for the pre-match presentation.
Then
on Thursday/Friday they will go through the
clips to choose the specific
clips which they want to focus on then export
them and show in
keynote for the pre-match presentation.
On a match day, John will code the game live and
use the Mirror Code
feature to copy everything to Steve’s Mac in
real time, so that
straight after the game Steve has access to the
entire movie package and
can watch it on the coach etc. He'll then look
at the clips (he likes build
up from the back, Transition, etc) and again
he'll place them into his
preferred order using the Movie Organiser.
SportsCode is also
used to code and database information on
potential players for the
recruitment department using code windows
designed specifically for
analyzing Player Positions.
Thought
for the Month
Life
should NOT be a
journey to the grave with the intention of
arriving safely in an attractive
and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in
sideways - Chardonnay in one
hand - chocolate in the other - body thoroughly
used up, totally worn out
and screaming "WOO-HOO, what a ride!!"
-- Anon
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