How to film your golf swing for analysis (without making these 3 common mistakes)
Updated: Aug 13
How to film your golf swing for analysis
Recording your swing looks simple. You lean the phone against your bag, hit a few shots, and play it back. Then the clubhead is a blur, or the angle makes your swing look like somebody else's.
Camera position decides what you can measure. Get it wrong and nobody can fix it afterwards, not an app and not a coach. Get it right and swing plane becomes something you check instead of guess at.
The angle that shows your swing plane
There is only one, and it is called down the line. The camera sits behind you, looking toward the target.
Five things have to be right:
Distance. Three to three and a half metres, roughly ten to twelve feet.
Direction. Straight through your hands, pointing at the target.
Height. Level with your hands at address. Not on the ground.
Line. Parallel with your target line.
Steady. The phone must not move. A clip mount on your bag, a tripod, a bench, anything rigid. A leaning phone drifts, and a drifting camera makes frame by frame comparison useless.
From that exact spot your shoulders stack into a single point. Only then does the club have a visible path to travel along.
Too close to your body and you look flat. Too far behind the ball and you look over the top when you are not. Both are camera errors, and both get diagnosed as swing errors.
Why the ground is the worst place for the phone
It is the most common setup and the most misleading one. Filming from the grass looks up at you. The shaft appears to travel on a flatter plane than it does, and your hands look higher at the top than they are.
Hand height costs nothing to arrange. The quickest version is a clip mount on your golf bag. It clamps on like a clothes peg and holds the phone on top. Seconds to set up, and no tripod to carry.
One thing to watch with a bag mount. The bag now has to stand where the camera needs to be. Three metres behind your hands, parallel to your target line. Most golfers drop the bag wherever it lands and film from there. That puts the camera in the wrong place and undoes the whole point.
Face on is the second angle, not the first
Camera perpendicular to your target line, at chest height. It shows body rotation and what your legs are doing.
It does not show swing plane. Film it when you want the fuller picture. Film down the line first.
Frame rate and light
Use slow motion if your phone has it. 120 frames per second is ideal and 60 is the floor.
The reason is arithmetic. Your downswing lasts about a third of a second. At 30fps that is nine frames for the fastest part of the swing, and missing impact by one frame throws the whole reading off.
Keep the sun behind the camera. A silhouette hides your wrists at the top, which is where you wanted to look.
Film the whole swing, from setup to finish. Trim it afterwards.
You do not have to press record
The awkward part of filming alone is the walking. Press record, walk to the ball, swing, walk back, stop recording. Repeat forty times.
SmartCapture in SwingGrade takes that out. You set the phone down, start the session once, and the AI watches for your address position. Each swing is recorded on its own.
It needs two things from your setup:
Your whole body in frame, head to feet. It tracks your shoulders, hips and ankles, so a tight crop on your upper body stops it working.
Portrait orientation. SmartCapture runs in portrait only.
The down the line setup already covers both. At three metres a phone at hand height has your whole body in frame with room left over.
Then pick a mode. Save stores every swing automatically. Repeat loops the clip where you stand, so you watch it and keep the ones worth keeping.
No ball is needed either. It works in a garden or a living room, which is where most people end up using it on a weeknight.
Film it the same way every time
The setup only pays off if you can repeat it. Two videos shot from different spots cannot be compared, however good each one looks on its own.
So mark the spot. A tee pushed into the turf, a scuff on the mat, a paving stone in the garden. Next session the bag goes back there.
That is what makes a before and after mean something. Without it you are looking at two camera positions and calling the difference progress.
How to line two swings up properly: Side by side golf swing comparison
What to do with the footage
A clean video is the start, not the finish. Four positions are worth checking in every swing, and tempo is worth measuring before you change anything.
The four positions and how to check them: How to analyze your golf swing
Measuring your ratio: Golf swing tempo and how to measure it
Thirty seconds of setup decides whether the next hundred swings are worth reviewing.
Frequently asked questions
How far should the camera be from me?
Three to three and a half metres, or ten to twelve feet. Closer and your swing looks flatter than it is. Further and you lose detail in the clubhead.
Can I film with the phone lying on the ground?
You can, but the video will mislead you. Looking up at a golfer flattens the apparent swing plane. Get the lens level with your hands at address instead.
Is 60fps really enough?
It is the floor rather than the target. The downswing lasts roughly a third of a second, so 60fps gives you about twenty frames of it. 120fps doubles that and makes impact much easier to land on exactly.
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