Neil Melville, Author at Dartfish Blog

In HEALTHCARE

One frame at a time

January 3, 2016 No Comments

This article by Larry Jaffe & Gray Cook originally appeared in Training & Conditioning Magazine in 2006. While the Dartfish toolset has since become more sophisticated, the principles and benefits are as relevant now as then. Larry Jaffe, PT, MS, SCS, ATC, a video analysis expert, practices at Memorial Hospital West in Pembroke Pines, Florida, where he is developing a Pediatric and Adolescent Sports Medicine Program. Gray Cook, MSPT, OCS, CSCS, creator of the Functional Movement Screen, practices at Orthopedic and Sports Physical Therapy in Danville, Virginia. Find out more about his work at www.functionalmovement.com. You can also download a PDF of the original article. Successful rehabilitation today is based on outcomes. How quickly do you get your athletes back on the field? How effectively can you react to the individual subtleties of each athlete? How well can you assess and treat the entire athlete, and not just the injury? It’s no longer good enough simply to know anatomy and traditional treatment protocols. We need to understand how to analyze and…

In CASE STUDIES

Dartfish use in physical therapies

December 21, 2015 No Comments

“We purchased Dartfish because subtle changes in motor function occur over the course of rehabilitation and recovery that are often not picked up by numerical scales. Dartfish enables us to record a patient’s performance at each visit, and analyze it objectively to detect subtle changes, as well as provide patients with feedback for further treatment.” – Raghavan & Li, Mt. Sinai School of Medecine Dartfish may be best known for its contribution to sport but that shouldn’t over-shadow its well-established use by those for whose movement analysis goals are performance improvements by the injured or functionally impaired. In this article I have collated case studies from four respected US institutions which together illustrate diverse ways in which Dartfish is called to contribute. You may find yourself surprised to discover that not only is video used for assessment, diagnosis and research but also to communicate and educate – in the same way and for…

In Other Features

Now Express adds still shots to events

November 30, 2015 No Comments

Last week we saw a minor update to the Dartfish Express app, one feature of which might have slipped under your radar but is worth highlighting; it is now possible to add still shots to events. What does this mean and why might you want to do this? An event, according to our definition, is a segment of useful or interesting video, usually part of a longer recording such as a game or training session. Tagging events with Dartfish software or Dartfish Note brings you the advantage that all of these interesting segments are identifiable and searchable – possibly within instants of the game finishing, or even as it proceeds. With the same immediacy, events can also be extracted and viewed in isolation, making the creation of highlights reels feasible without resorting to cutting up the file in video editing software. In other words, events give focus to your match review. Still…

In CASE STUDIES

myDartfish creates new revenue opportunities for Muscle Performance Science

November 15, 2015 No Comments

The stars of our promo movie for Dartfish Express are the staff and customers of Muscle Performance Science, a successful small business operating just a short drive from the Dartfish USA offices in Atlanta. You can see from their website that they don’t have big bucks to splash out on web designers and technology but they succeed in creating a strong message with an off-the-peg solution. All the more interesting then that they have embraced video technology in the form of myDartfish – we asked MPS owner Bronson Walters, “Why?” “Already from a budget point of view, we are finding the solution pays for itself, actually in two ways. The first is perhaps obvious; when performing a biomechanical evaluation I charge a fee. This includes access to the athlete’s own evaluation video in an online locker where both they and their agent can see it, also we provide them with therapies, including appropriate…

In Other Features

myDartfish is more than just a pretty cloud

August 30, 2015 No Comments

In the week that Dartfish releases myDartfish, Neil Melville introduces this new technology and reflects on how we got here. Just a few short years ago, when Dartfish brought out version 6 of its desktop software, we made the call to remove the CD/DVD burning feature. “Nobody is using optical disks anymore”, we reasoned but we reasoned wrongly and a month later the burner was back. I seriously doubt that those who requested its resurrection would still clamour to save it today, such has been the wave of change pushed by the twin forces of fast, reliable broadband and mobile computing on our phones and tablets. These days, when I want to share something, I’m more likely to put it on Google Drive than on a memory stick or disk. It’s not just file sharing which has transformed, it’s anything we do electronically; so I started writing this article on my PC,…

In Baseball/Softball

The next evolution of baseball and softball coaching tools

August 23, 2015 No Comments

Dartfish has an all-encompassing strategy to provide baseball and softball programs with a complete solution which provides coaches with the ability to scout upcoming opponents, develop a game plan and then execute a practice plan that simulates that game plan. We believe that coaches who use this integrated toolset will have a distinct advantage in developing their players and preparing them for competition during the regular season. As we move towards the Fall practice sessions, where the focus will be on player development, this blog will illustrate our practice tools and the new training methods that they will promote. The Dartfish practice toolset consists of two different tools. They are both unique and address the areas that are used to develop a players skills and prepare them for the regular season. Dartfish Express app for visual coaching The first part of the solution uses a mobile app called Dartfish Express. This, together…

In Other Features

About time!

April 30, 2015 No Comments

Dartfish 8 introduces two new ways of recording the time of events: 1) Include the $(WallClock) function within the keyword property of tagging tools to record the time of day that the event occurred 2) Do the same with $(Gametime) to record the time from a match clock controlled by you. Let’s take the opportunity to examine a range of ways that event times can be manipulated by you. Time functions $(WallClock) Incorporating this function into the keyword property of a button, or other tagging tools, records the time of day in the events list. Using a $ function to achieve this may seem obscure, and I confess here that I still occasionally have to look up the Help for the correct syntax for another function $(TeamListSelector#.keyword#) which allows you to include a player’s name within a keyword, but the advantage of both functions is the versatility of choosing whether to include…

In CASE STUDIES

French handball build a fanbase on dartfish.tv

February 24, 2015 No Comments

The frenetic sport of handball has a massive European following, with the kind of support and television coverage that you would expect for a sport of its popularity and therein lies a problem… if you are a female player. In common with many others among the world’s major sports, it’s the top men that get the TV coverage with the women playing second fiddle and, of course, this isn’t just a battle of the sexes – the lower leagues in any sport, so-called ‘minority’ sports and disability sports are all looking to build a fan base and get exposure for sponsors. If this is your problem too, how about taking a lead from the French Handball Federation (FFHB) and their top women’s league, the Ligue Féminine de Handball (LFH)? The LFH harnesses Twitter and other social media superbly well and one of their central messages is pushing fans towards match…