StatsManager is a video analysis tool designed to improve sporting performance by the analysis of game videos. StatsManager runs on the Windows platform.

A companion iPhone / iPad application called iStatsManager has also been created by the StatsManager team.

StatsManager uses the concept of “tags” on a game that has been captured on video. Each event (or action) of interest during your game video can create a “tag” on the video timeline. StatsManager supports any sport and set of sporting actions with its tags. You can have an unlimited number of sports (e.g. Football, Rugby, Hockey,…), actions (“tackle won”, “tackle lost”, etc., …), teams and players.

Once a video is tagged, a “Summary View” is generated automatically giving a high level analysis of all the players and tags in your game. The “Timeline View” allows you to view your video as a set of “clips” at all the points where tags have been created. Clips can be played singly or in groups (e.g. show all the clips for a specific player). “Tags” can be grouped (e.g. “All tags by Joe Bloggs”), can be sorted (e.g. by Player, by Event type, by Time) and can be filtered (e.g. Show only “goals for”).

Tags can be exported as video clips making it easy to export and share the important parts of your game with others. Individual or multiple clips can all be placed in one “export file” that can be emailed or shared with file sharing services (like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox). There is also a facility to export all the clips in your game by player or event type with a single click.

Viewing clips inside StatsManager is also covered with full screen options and “on the fly” editing of tags when reviewing. Pause, rewind, skip and slow motion are all supported.

Tagging information can also be exported in Excel format and then reimported by another user of StatsManager to instantly share a set of tags for a video with other analysts in the team.

'iStatsManager' is a companion iPhone / iPad tagging “app” available on the Apple app store to make the process of tagging videos as simple as possible.

Using the same type of actions or lists of players that the main StatsManager application uses, tag files can be generated for your game videos taking advantage of a touch interface.

Once created the iStatsManager tag files can be emailed to the computer running StatsManager and added to the game video.

A typical setup will include a video camera, a tripod, a computer and StatsManager. The camera should have a good optical zoom and record to memory card. The best tripods include a hand held zoom adjuster rather than having to operate the small controls on the camera (more expense, but definitely worth it). The computer needs to run Microsoft Windows but anything from XP onwards will do although the newer the better.

NOTE:

Many club members may well have an older video camera that they are not using although it will probably record to tape. The main reason for preferring the “memory card” cameras is the time it takes to get the video off the camera. To get started and simply see if “Sports Tagging” is for you, there may be no need to buy a camera at all. Just factor in the extra time to get the video onto your hard disk from the tape.

The “Summary View” is a single screen “roll-up” of all the players and tags in a specific video. It shows the totals of each tag (e.g. “number of tackles won”) for each player as well as the total for the whole team. It gives an “at a glance” overview of the teams and each player’s performance.

The summary data can be viewed either as raw data or charted by player or by event type. This makes it very easy to visually compare how different players performed during a game (e.g. the defensive line, midfield, etc.).

The “Timeline View” is where you can see a list of all the tags in your video and watch a clip of each tag in the video. Clips can be viewed individually (by double clicking on the tag) or as a group (by selecting more than one tag and pressing “Play Selected”). As the video clip for the tag is played, the corresponding tag is highlighted in the list of tags. Tags can be sorted by Player, Event Type (e.g. “tackles won”, “goals for”…) or by Time (when they occurred in the video).

Tags and player names can also be edited while viewing clips by clicking on the Event Type or player name to change the tag (e.g. from “Touch” to “Tackle Won”).

The “Timeline view” is where you will spend the majority of your time in the StatsManager application.

1. Get a video of your game onto your computer. Put the video file in the “My Documents\StatsManager\Videos” folder.

2. Now use the “Create Game” wizard by clicking on the “Create Game” button on the main application toolbar. This will ask you to enter the game name, team, sport and video for the game in a series of step by step questions.

The easiest way to tag a live game is simply to tag all the “touches” of each player. This is recommended if the sport you are tagging is very fast moving (e.g. Field Hockey). It is difficult to tag many different events when watching the video back at full speed in fast moving sports. When reviewing later, either all the tags or tags for a specific player can easily be edited from the “Timeline View” (e.g. to change the “touch” tag to “Tackle Won” or some other more meaningful event).

If the sport you are tagging is slower, you can tag specific events and player touches as you watch the game video replay. The “Tag Window” provides you with access to both the players in your selected team as well as the actions for your selected sports. Both the player names and sports can be changed as desired while tagging depending on your needs (e.g. tagging different functions at different times).

1. Highlight the desired game from the “Games” list.

2. Select “Tag Video” from the toolbar. The “Tag Video” window will open and your video will begin to play.

3. For each “action” in your game click on the name of the player involved. This creates a “touch” tag for that player. If it’s a team event (e.g. “Goal For”) click on the action and a tag is created immediately for that event.

NOTE: If you “miss” an event, pressing the “z” key will move the video back 3 seconds. If you want to move forward, pressing the “x” key will move the video forward 3 seconds.

If you have a fast moving sport, don’t worry about tagging the individual event types while the video plays “live”. Just tag the player “touches”. You can always edit the tag names later when reviewing.

In fast moving sports a large number of tags are sometimes needed in a short space of time. You can slow the video replay speed down to “half speed” by clicking on the “.5x” button in the video display area.

NOTE:

• If you “right click” the mouse on the video display area the video will jump back 5 seconds which is often enough time to correct or add additional tags.

• Use the keyboard “hot keys” to move the video backwards and forwards. “z” and “x” move the video back and forward 3 seconds at a time. “a” and “s” move the video back and forward 30 seconds at a time.

• You can also use the “-10s” and “-5s” buttons to move the video back 10 or 5 seconds respectively. If you are at a lull in activity (e.g. getting ready for a free kick or a corner) you can move the video forward using the “+10s” and “+5s” buttons.

Yes.

StatsManager can be used to tag any video of any occasion. Define your own “Sport” and “Team Actions” as required for your individual sport. Some sample sport templates are included in the installation package but there is no limit to either the sports supported or the actions (i.e. Tags) for those sports.

All tags have a “Player Name”, “Action” and “Event Time” associated with the tag. In the “Timeline View” all of these values can be edited by clicking on the tag.

To change the name, click on the “Player Name” field in the tag and a dropdown will appear showing all the available names of players in the team selected for the game.

To change the “Event Type”, click on the “Event Type” field which will display a dropdown showing all the available “Actions” that are defined for the game.

To change the “Event Time”, click on the “Event Time” field which will display a dropdown allowing the time of the event to be adjusted either up or down.

Yes, StatsManager stores all its data in a database. You can either share the whole database or export specific Teams, Sports or sets of Tags for specific games. StatsManager was designed to be used by multiple coaches and players who will often be geographically remote.

Yes, StatsManager has built in e-mail support to email video clips directly from within the application to your players or any other chosen email destination.

If the player email addresses are added when a Team is configured the list of emails for a specific team are conveniently presented from the email screens to make this process as simple as possible.

Yes, StatsManager can be configured to use a folder within Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive as its export folder. This means that all clips when exported are automatically synced to the cloud as fast as your internet connection or network will allow. See the separate “How To” guide on how to achieve this.

This can be done from the “Timeline View” by pressing the “Export ALL (by Player)”. A separate “clips” file is created for each player in the game with all of their tags converted to video clips and saved into a single file.

If the “Export ALL (by Event)” button is pressed, a clips file is generated for each event type in the game with all of the tags for that specific event saved into a single file.

The “Export” wizard will guide you through the exporting process on a step-by-step basis.

This can be done from the “Timeline View” by selecting the clips that you want to export as a video and then pressing the “Export Selected Clips” button. The quality (i.e. size) of the video can also be chosen.

NOTE:

• Choose “Tablet” for the Quality setting for a quick export.

Sometimes when showing the video it is useful to draw lines, boxes, etc. on the current video frame to illustrate a point. This can be done from the “Timeline View” at any point by selecting the “Draw on Video” button. This takes a snapshot of the current video image and opens a new window with that frame already loaded where you can draw arrows, lines, boxes and circles directly onto the image. You can also add text comments too.

The snapshot images can be saved to be used again later by clicking on the “Save Drawing…” button that is shown when editing in the “Draw” window.

If a game video file is missing (i.e. moved or deleted) StatsManager will display that video file name in red. This indicates to the user that the game information needs to be edited to redefine the location of the video file for this game.

Game video files are usually quite large (greater than 1GB in size). To export clips in the same quality as the original recording can take a very long time and use up a lot of disk space. In addition, large clips are often rejected by email servers as being “too large”. To get around this, select only a “good enough” quality for the device you are going to be viewing the clips on. “Tablet” is the default and recommended.

In order of “quality” and size from the lowest to the highest, they are “Smallest”, “Mobile“, “Tablet (recommended), “Computer”, “TV” and “High”.

NOTE:

• “TV” and “High” quality can take a very long time per clip to generate.

Sometimes you might want to remove the sound from your captured video. This can often be because it was windy when the video was recorded and the camera microphone picks this up. On other occasions when sharing videos you might not want to pass on any coaches comments made while the video was being recorded.

To make a fresh copy of your video without the sound track, select the “Video Tools” tab and then the “Remove Sound” button. This will allow you to select the video that you want to remove the sound for.

The best place to keep your game video files is in the StatsManager Video folder. By default this is a sub-folder in “My Documents”. Keeping video files in this location means that when they are moved to a different machine, the game definitions still point to the correct place even if the computer user changes between machines.

You can always change the default folder settings using the “Change Settings” option. The folder settings are on the “Folders” tab.

In the “Timeline View” or when using “Play Video” button the video can be shown full screen by double clicking on the video. To return to normal size double click on the full screen video or press the “Escape” key.

Most modern video cameras record directly to a memory card. This makes it really easy to get your video off the camera and onto the computer. Live capturing / tagging is a lot more involved and requires more than just your camera to be present when recording.

NOTE:
If your video camera records to tapes there are many applications that are freely available that will capture from your video camera to a file on your hard disk (e.g. search for “WinDV” or “HDVSplit” on Google).

StatsManager was designed to support any video that your system plays. It does not “favour” any particular format. Some smartphones will only play a small range of video files so StatsManager will default to .MP4 format to accommodate this.

StatsManager runs on Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 10. It “probably” runs on others but hasn’t been tested on them.

No, and it’s not likely that there will be a version for any OS other than Windows given the dependency on some core Windows technologies.

In most cases, modern cameras will compress to MP4 while recording and this is usually fine for video tagging. Each hour of game time in MP4 mode requires about 1GB of space.

If you use the “high-res” format you need about 13GB of space per hour. “High-res” is better quality but the computer disk is filled up very quickly at 13GB / per hour (or more) and everything is also slower because the files are so huge.

A season of matches (say 30 football games of 90 minutes/game) is only 45-60GB in MP4. The same season in “high-res” format is over 600GB

If StatsManager cannot open a video file it is because you do not have a “decoder” that supports your video format. Windows tends to be good with AVI files and not a lot else.

To avoid all of these problems simply install a “decoder pack” such as the “LAV Filters” (recommended) or the “K-Lite Codec Pack” (use those words to search on Google).

Both the “LAV Filters” and the “K-Lite Codec Pack” are free and available for multiple versions of Windows.

All feedback is welcome. Send an email to info@statsmanager.co.uk with details of the new feature, feedback or to report a bug. Normal response time is within a day.