Baseball FAQ

A hitting clip is split into stance, load, stride, launch, connection, contact zone, extension and finish, and the bat is traced alongside your body.

The named hitting faults — casting, an early shoulder pull and the rest — are checked on that swing. Throwing, pitching and fielding clips are not analyzed; see throwing and fielding.

• Record at 60 fps. Bat speed blurs at 30.
• Keep both feet, hips, hands and the whole bat in frame from stance through finish.
• In a cage, film through an open panel or as close to the net as is safe — netting and bars across the body cost tracking.
• For front toss, frame the hitter, not the tosser. A second body in frame can be tracked by mistake.

Tripod, light and distance basics are the same for every sport; see the recording FAQ.

From those signals it can name these hitting faults, each with a fix and the phase of the swing it belongs to:

• Casting — the arms fire before the hips.
• Early shoulder pull — the upper body spins out.
• Head drift — the head moves off the ball.
• Weak hip-shoulder separation at load.
• Hips not firing through the ball.
• Posture change — standing up or dipping through the swing.

Not claimed from video: measured bat speed, exit velocity, ball flight and precise barrel contact. Every fault is an estimate carrying its own confidence.

That figure scales the path to your shoulder width, so zooming in or out does not inflate it, but it is still one camera and it tends to under-read the peak. Use it to compare your own swings filmed the same way, not against a sensor reading.

The same panel also gives a pull or opposite-field side tendency — never a direction in degrees, because true swing direction needs depth one camera cannot see.

For measured numbers, keep using a bat sensor or hitting tracker such as HitTrax, Blast Motion or Diamond Kinetics. The photo import lists those trackers, but it saves only fields that match golf launch-monitor data: bat speed and exit velocity are shown while you review and are not saved, and nothing from a tracker feeds your video analysis yet. See trackers.

Velocity, arm stress and workload are not measured from video either.

SwingVantage makes no medical or injury-risk claims, does not count pitches and cannot tell you whether an arm is ready to throw — pitch count limits and rest are for you and your coach to manage. Pain, soreness or a change in how the arm feels is a reason to stop and see a qualified professional, not to film another clip; see pain or injury.

The 60 fps note is advisory — the clip is still analyzed. But findings that hinge on timing, such as casting or an early shoulder pull, depend on catching the right frames, and a slower clip gives them less to work with.

Look for a 60 fps or slow-motion option in your phone's camera settings; more on the setting is in what frame rate to use. A slow-motion clip needs one extra step at upload: mark it as Slo-mo, or its timing is read stretched — and unlike a golf swing, a bat swing is not flagged when that happens. See slow motion.

Throw velocity, accuracy and pop time are not measured from video either. For baseball, Motion Lab analyzes the batting swing — see which baseball motions.