An Analysts View: How Studio Enhanced My Workflow

We spoke to Andy Findlay, Senior Performance Analyst at The Norwegian Football Federation to gain an insight into how Studio is enhancing a high performance workflow.

It is Findlay’s role to provide both live and post-match analysis across the ​‘A squad’ and a range of youth squads within the Federation, both for men’s and women’s teams. In his own words, he wants to ​“try and build a structure that means that we can make the com­mu­ni­ca­tion processes as smooth and as detailed as possible.”

A big part of developing efficient workflows is finding ways to save time on menial tasks to enable deeper analysis to take place. Studio provides efficiency savings for high performance workflows that make Findlay and his team’s jobs easier — especially in busy environments.

“We play two away games and a home game in the space of a week which is a lot of travel,” said Findlay. ​“The fact that the calibration is automated from the start of the clip means you don’t have to spend a long time getting things ready. It’s almost a case of: import your clips, jump on it, and then you can start to do the output. So, I think it’s really adaptable, really time efficient.”

In Studio, Hudl Sportscode users can now quickly add pro­fes­sion­al, dynamic drawings and graphics to multiple angles in video packages. This new enhanced workflow, which integrates with the Hudl ecosystem of products, has easily been adopted by Findlay’s team.

“With telestra­tion there may be a fear factor with coaches sometimes. You see a lot of timelines, images, effects and different widgets and think ‘this looks complicated, I haven’t got that much time’,” said Findlay. ​“Whereas with Studio, if a coach was doing a one-to-one session with a player and just wanted to add the tracking of one disc on that player or highlight a space, it can take two minutes.

“So for a coach coming back in from a session you might be able to do five-to-ten clips easily with annotation, and then you’re ready to go. So within half an hour you’ve done a fully annotated pre­sen­ta­tion for players.”

Working directly with coaches is a key part of any analyst’s workflow and Studio allows for quick editing of clips. Studio opens right from Hudl Sportscode for hassle-free, two-way sharing of video and graphics packages enabling quick adjustments changes to be made without having to import, export and realign video multiple times.

“Whether I’m in the office, in the stadium, or at home, I can easily go from using Sportscode straight into the animation tool, which naturally is a nice, easy step,” said Findlay. ​“But also the pre­sen­ta­tion tool means that if I am working on two screens while sitting with the coaches I can edit instances on the spot. Because I have the edit screen of Studio on my laptop, but then on a separate monitor they’d be seeing the output and the pre­sen­ta­tion, it makes that stage of the workflow quicker as well.

“The quality of the output at the end, when you export or go back into the organizer – the sharpness of it is almost like a pre­sen­ta­tion or a high quality output itself.”

This improved analy­sis set­up is com­plete­ly new to S-Pulse, as pre­vi­ous solu­tions were lim­it­ed to league fix­tures. Now S-Pulse can use Hudl Replay in train­ing and cup games in addi­tion to league fix­tures. Training and match day analy­sis work­flows are now the same under this new analy­sis sys­tem and the abil­i­ty to code direct­ly to the bench is anoth­er key asset. Now there is an added flex­i­bil­i­ty to work in an increased amount of situations.

“The play­ers and coach­es had nev­er had an expe­ri­ence with analy­sis like this before this sea­son,” explains Moriwaki. It’s now very help­ful to increase our under­stand­ing of when a coach is explain­ing some­thing.​“Even dur­ing train­ing, we can check straight away using Hudl Replay.”

Findlay and his Norway-based team were one of the first testers of Studio, so are more than qualified to describe and compare the new workflow compared to their old one. One of the key features that impressed them most was automated tracking, which means there’s no longer any need to manually track players with graphics. Simply highlight the player and computer vision will do the rest.

The ability to add pro­fes­sion­al, dynamic drawings and sync directly with Wyscout is a further time-saving advancement.

“If you were adding circle drawings around the automated tracking or the manual tracking yourself, the ability to drag and drop the names over is really handy,” said Findlay. ​“For example, if I had our squad from Wyscout, that would auto­mat­i­cal­ly be on a panel on the side and I can drag those names over, straight onto it (the video), so that you can see the tracking automated with the player’s name and squad number together. That’s a time-saver itself because you’re not having to type out and manually add text over the top. It’s all auto­mat­i­cal­ly linked, and you might think it’s 10 or 15 seconds to do it, but if you’re doing 20 – 30 clips and you’re adding four or five names per clip, that’s actually a lot of time over a week or a month that you saved.”