For the past few rounds of golf I have played, I have been trying out a new app called Shot Tracer. It is an app that allows you to track the flight of your golf ball and have a tracer on it when you take a video.
There are some great fun things about this app and the company website has even more features that should be available. However, I use an Android phone and even their website does not properly when trying to get information about the app for Android. You can select any other platform, even Windows, and it will bring you to another page. When you select Android it tries to connect to the Play Store. This is fine if you are on a mobile device but not if you are on a computer as it brings up nothing. With that said my review may be off a bit and they need to fix many Android issues.
The app costs around $5 or $6 to use. This actually is a good price considering what the app is capable of. It is not worth the costs considering the things that do not function like their tutorials say they do. Still, the app has some functionality that makes it fun to use.
So let's look at what is good about the Shot Tracer App. Things are kept simple and there are not a lot of menu options and things to select from. From the home screen, there are four main options of what to trace (ball line, club in your swing, pitch, or putt) then only two options to either take a video through the app or add a video from your gallery to get started. Once you open or take a video the app does its thing provided you kept your camera still and at a proper angle. It will analyze your swing and find the impact frame and then has steps it follows where you can add features like smoke or rockets, add club and distance, or just change colors of the tracer.
Now let's take a look at some of the downsides of the app. The first thing I struggled with was actually what to do once a video was in the app. There is no "start here" option or "click to edit" type function. Once the video is in the app, there are three overlay icons, a gear icon, a play icon, and a trash can. You have to use the gear icon to start the edit tracer process, but there is no way of knowing. There is a tutorial mode in the settings but nothing came up for me that showed what to do. There was also nothing that said you are supposed to shoot at a specific angle but it did recommend a tripod as the camera needs to be very still. When tracing putts it strobe effects the ball and your putter, there is no way to turn off one or the other. I had to go search YouTube for tutorials to learn how to properly use it.
Even after I learned to use it properly there is still a major issue. The app does not always pick up the shot properly. Watch the short video below and you will see how when it goes wrong it goes very wrong. A few shots were picked up and traced from my feet for some odd reason. There were a few times I hit a low draw and it said the flight was high and straight. Although you can go manually change the tracer from where it starts, to the flight and where it ends that really defeats the purpose of the app. If you can manually alter the flight path etc.. then you may as well not have the app trace anything and just let users put whatever ball flight they choose. So remember when you see all those videos of people hitting all these great quality golf shots they are not all real. Oh, and it also does not support 4k video from a GoPro.
I will finish by saying I like the app and it is fun for what it does. I will continue to use it and hope some functions start to work better. Perhaps the other versions of the app work better. If anyone has used this for an iPhone or other device I would love to hear how it works and if you have experienced any similar issues.
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