September 22, 2021

Episode 289: The End of Coach’s Eye

In this episode (25:48)

Instructors at Bad Dog Agility have been using the Coach’s Eye app to analyze maps and videos of runs for years, but no longer! Coach’s Eye is being retired and users have one year of support from the company. Not to worry, Sarah has already found a replacement app, OnForm.

You Will Learn

  • What is happening with Coach’s Eye.
  • Sarah’s recommended app to replace Coach’s Eye.
  • What Jennifer and Esteban think of the new app.
  • Upgrades and differences between Coach’s Eye and the new app.

Mentioned

- You're listening to "Bad Dog Agility" bringing you training tips, interviews, and news about the great sport of dog agility. (cheerful music) - I'm Jennifer. - I'm Esteban. - And I'm Sarah, and this is episode 289. Today's podcast is brought to you by hititboard.com and the Teeter Teach It!, an easy to use tool that controls the amount of tip on your teeter so you can introduce motion to

your dog in a gradual way. Go to hititboard.com for the new Teeter Teach It! and other training tools and toys. Use discount code BDA10 to get 10% off your order. That's hititboard.com. Today, we're gonna talk about a tool that we three use quite a bit, and we have mentioned on the podcast many times before, Coach's Eye. And the big shocking news that we got just in the last

week, that Coach's Eye is going away as an app. So for anybody listening to this that is, has listened to us tell you over and over and over again how important video analysis is and how important self analysis is, or if you've watched any of our videos on "Bad Dog Agility" or in the Bad Dog Agility Academy, where we draw arrows on the screen, and explained the handling

with voiceover, the tool that we were using to do that is now done. (chuckles) - I was- - So this is a shock- - I was so sad, so sad to hear this news. I panicked, there was a moment of panic. Luckily Sarah, you came in and saved the day for us. - (chuckles) That's right, I had a moment of panic too because we love this tool, we

love using it to explain agility. We think it just makes things really clear to be able to you know, talk about agility while it's on the screen and being able to highlight things and draw arrows, and things like that. And so this was quite a shock, and so immediately, they gave us a year. They said, so anybody who's using it, first of all, don't panic because you have

a year to figure something else out. And second of all, we've done a lot of the figuring out for you, and that's what we're gonna talk about on this podcast. So, for anybody who is using the Coach's Eye, you do have a year to use it, you just can't, they're not selling it anymore. - So through about September, 2022. - Correct, so if you're already using it, if

it's already on your iPad, you know, you have an entire year to get used to a new tool. So, we started looking around at some alternatives and we have, as a team for Bad Dog Agility, landed on one, and we wanted to share our thoughts on it with all of our listeners because I think that it, just like Coach's Eye, this can be a really valuable tool for

you to self-analyze your own agility performance, to be able to slow it down, to be able to compare handling options using side by side features and timers and things like that. And so this new tool still does all of that, that Coach's Eye did. - Well more specifically, you found the tool. - Yes. - And Jennifer and I are just starting to use it, so you're a couple

days ahead of us. - Yes. - At least, and you're the one who did all the research, you talked with the developer, the owner. - That's right. - And so, tell us a little bit about that. - Yeah, so this tool is called OnForm. And if you go to- - Like O-N, space, F-O-R-M, OnForm? Or like, one word? - Yeah, like, capital O-N, capital F-O-R-M. - What's their

website? - Their website is getonform.com. - Okay. - Right. And actually, I don't, if anybody is familiar with HUDL, H-U-D-L, that was a tool that I had looked at previously that was also very similar to Coach's Eye, and OnForm acquired them. So it's actually under the covers HUDL, for anybody who's familiar with that. And from an analysis perspective, it gives you all the same things that Coach's Eye

did. You can you know, scroll through in slow motion, you can compare side by side, you can draw arrows, you can do voiceovers. You can do all of those things. - It's all in the same places too, so the record button is still at the top center. - Right. - The wheel is at the bottom center. - Right. - On the right side, you have all your square,

your circle, and line, and squiggly line and you can change them all different colors, your timer, so it's going to feel very familiar to you if you use Coach's Eye a lot. - That's right. And you still have basically the same idea that you can import video in, you can do analysis, and then you can save the analysis. So there's kind of two, I think there's two groups

of people that may have been using Coach's Eye, or may think about using a tool like this. And that is people who are just doing it for themselves, and so for the most part, if you're doing analysis for yourself, you actually aren't producing anything. You don't need to produce a video and save it. You're literally just using the tool to be able to conveniently slow down your own

video and maybe to do some side by side comparisons and use the timer. But you don't need to like, explain anything to anybody, you are your own audience, right? So you don't really need to be recording, and you don't really need to draw arrows or squares around obstacles, because you know what it is that you're looking at, right? And then there's a much smaller group of people that

may have kind of followed in our footsteps and actually used Coach's Eye to help others, right? In which case, you are recording your voice talking through a sequence, or talking through somebody's video, and explaining to them what is going on, right? So, let's talk about price because it's wildly different between Coach's Eye, and OnForm, and I think that a lot of people, when they first looked at OnForm,

they might not even try it because of the price. But I kinda have some insider information to give everybody, to kind of lay out how you can use this affordably. So Coach's Eye was a $5 app and then we always said, just pay $5 and get the timer, you need the timer, right? So $10 and you're good. For iOS and I think it was $15 on Android. So

you know, relatively low price point for a fantastic tool for your agility, right? This tool, OnForm, is a lot more. You are getting a lot more than just the analysis. It is meant to be more than just analysis. It's meant to be like, an entire you know, coach athlete management tool with messaging, and email, and all of this stuff. And so it has a much higher price point.

But for the majority of agility competitors, you don't need all of that, you don't want all of that, and so you can use the free version of this tool, and you can get all of the analysis features that you had with Coach's Eye. - Okay. - So nobody needs to feel like- - So you're saying it's free? - I'm saying that for you know, unless you are a

you know, a instructor where you want to do lots and lots of analysis for your students, in which case you might think of this as a business investment. But if you're doing it for yourself, you can use this tool completely free. - Okay, I'm still a little unclear. So why wouldn't I just use it for free? As an instructor, yeah. - As an instructor? - All right, so

let's get into the details of the levels, and what you can do with the free level. Right? - Okay. - So- - How about, instead of you pitching to me. - Yeah. - How about I tell you what people are going to use the video for, right? - You got it. - So they're gonna have a video that they've taped. - Yup. - Of themselves doing something with

their dog, right? - Yes. - And they're gonna voiceover it, they're gonna mark it, and they're gonna submit it to their instructor, hey I have a question here. Or, if they're an instructor, they analyze somebody's run, right? Or they create some kind of instructional video that they're gonna put on YouTube, share with their students, et cetera, et cetera. - Yes. - Now you just said that I get

full Coach's Eye functionality for free. - Right. - What more do I need? - All right, so here is the, I guess, the tiny gotcha of the free account. And that is, you can only have 10 videos in your account. - What? - So. - What do you mean account? - You can only have like- - Like Coach's Eye, I have like, 100 videos. - Right, you can

only have 10. So if you wanted to be- - In the app, can I not just delete an old one? - In the app. Yes, you can, that is exactly right. So, if you want it to be free, you can just load in, you know, one video, do an analysis, that's a second video. You can delete them both, right? As long as you keep your account under 10.

- Now once I make my- - You can just keep doing it. - Once I make my analysis video, can I move it off somewhere else? Can I save it to the iPad itself in the photos? - Yes you can. - And then I can also upload it to YouTube. - Yes you can. - Okay, but you're just saying like, where sometimes I would have like, 50 videos

in my Coach's Eye, going back a month or two, really old stuff, you're saying, and every once in a while you would yell at me that I'm using up too much space on my iPad and I need to go and delete them, you're saying this basically is gonna force you to do that by capping it at 10 videos. - Correct. - And not, but they can be any

length of stuff? Or it's based on the number of videos and not time? - It's based on the number of videos. - Okay, I mean, that doesn't- - So this is the way to make it free, yeah. - That doesn't seem so bad. So, I'm guessing that we are paying something for the next level in order to be able to have more flexibility, more videos, is that right?

- Yes, yes. So one thing that this tool does a lot better than Coach's Eye, is that it automatically syncs all of your videos to cloud storage so that you don't run into the situation you kept running into, where you filled up your entire iPad with Coach's Eye videos, and I had to come and tell you to clean it up, that never happens because behind the scenes, it's

always going to their cloud, we don't have to pay extra for cloud storage, so it's not taking up a lot of space on your iPad. So that's one advantage that it has, right? And so that's why it can be nice to have the bigger account with unlimited you know, cloud storage for you know- - Unlimited, okay, so how much, how much does that cost? And is it per

month, per year? - So the account with like, unlimited is $300 a year. So yeah. - Okay. - Significantly more than the $15 of Coach's Eye. - So I guess it's- - I feel like this is like, the Esteban clause, like if maybe you just cleaned out your iPad more frequently- - Right. - And kept it under 10 videos we would be okay, but we thought mmm, Esteban

keeps them on there, we better get the unlimited package. - Jennifer, she's gonna use our free software, but I know how to get that dude. We just got to cap them at 10 videos and he's- - He's like- - He's just gonna shell out $300 so he doesn't have to delete stuff. - Right, he's like, I'll pay $300 to not have to manage my iPad space. - I

see, okay. Okay, but it has full functionality, it's not like they're withholding the clock or the timer or anything? - It's full functionality. Yeah. - Okay. - It's full functionality, you automatically get the timer, you automatically get the side by side. - The day they do that, I'm gonna have words with somebody. - (chuckles) That's right. And just because- - I'm excited about having the timer, because I

never had that timer in my old version of Coach's Eye. - Yeah, I didn't know that until you told us when we went to this one. I was like, Jen! - My timer disappeared. My timer disappeared- - I never had a timer. - A couple weeks ago. - So when I started using OnForm, and the timer was there, I was like oh, so fancy. - Right, right. -

It's got a timer now. - Right. - Yeah, yeah. Well okay, so is there a third level or basically those are the two levels for people to use? - So there is a level in between, and so I want to explain, I don't think it's very useful but I want to explain it because people might be like, well, why don't I do this one in the middle, right?

So there is a personal account which gives you, let me just double check up here. I believe it gives you 500 videos so that- - What's the price? - It's $50 a year, it gives you 500 videos but it caps the number of voiceovers that you can do to five per month. - Oh okay. That's not usable. - So if you only do it every once in a

while, right, so if you only do it every once in a while that might be usable, but I'm kind of like, well if you, why would you have 500 videos- - Right, for us it's not usable. - Oh yeah, no. - For somebody else, it may be. - It may be. - You may be able to pay 50 bucks. - Right, but I'd rather- - And not do

it that often. - Just keep it to 10 and pay nothing. - Right. - Than to pay $50 and then suddenly get locked out of doing voiceovers. - Me, Jennifer, Dr. Hyde, everyone who uses it, who works with us, they're all going to- - Right, if you use this on a daily basis, it might be worth it to have the cloud search. - Let me ask you that,

so let's say, somebody's listening now, they're an instructor, and they have several instructors like us. - Yeah. - Mostly instructor group. Are each of us paying 300 bucks? Do we each need an individual account? - Right. - Or are we all sharing one? - So right, so here's where as a business owner, I wanted to be on the up and up, right? - Oh right. - You know,

I wanted to do the right thing, right? And so I laid out the, how many of our instructors use this, how often we use it, so you know, you, me, and Jennifer, it's daily right? But Sarah Baker does some videos with us and it's just like, once a month. So I was, you know, I laid out exactly what we do and just said, you know, what should I

sign up for and they were very accommodating, and he said for what we do, and we have like, a single, we have a single Bad Dog Agility email address that we use, he said, just sign up with the email address that you all use and just all use that email address for one account. So like, you, me, and Jennifer, we're all logging in with the same Bad Dog

Agility email address which is the one that we have, people email us at team@baddogagility.com when people you know, have questions about the podcast or want to tell us they, you know, like this podcast, or that podcast, they can use that email. We use that email to login, and we pay for one coach account and that is their suggestion. So totally above board there. - Gotcha. - All right,

one thing I did want to cover is how to get the free account because it is not obvious. So when you download OnForm, and create your account, it's really only going to give you the paid options. But it does give you a seven day free trial. So you go ahead and you pick on of the paid options, you have your seven day free trial and then the way

to keep it free is to go to your settings, click on your name, should be the very top thing under settings, it will say your name and the Apple ID, iCloud, Media and Purchases. You click on that, and then you click on Subscriptions and you're gonna see all of the options for all of your subscriptions. You click on OnForm Video Analysis. And then you're gonna see the options,

none of them say free. So then what you do is, you cancel subscription. When you cancel the subscription at the end of your seven day free trial, you are then reverted to a free account and you can continue to use that with that 10 video limit. - All right, well so, we've all used it now. And I want to start with Jen. Jen, what do you, is there

anything that you particularly like about it that's different? Well, I guess you mentioned the timer. But is there anything that you don't like about it so far? - Well you touched on the fact that the layout is almost identical, and I think to me, that was huge. So your toolbar is on the right side, your scroll is across the bottom, you have the record, you still have the

pause feature, right? So if you're in the middle of a video and you know, you need to pause and go, I was gonna say, well, I was gonna say yell at the dogs for barking. - That too. - You can pause and come back so I really like that feature. The other thing that I like is in the slow mo, you get to pick how slow you want

it to go. So in Coach's Eye, you kinda hit slow mo and it was like, that's what it was. You have like, half speed, quarter speed, eighth speed, and still a scroll bar. - I see. - So you have a lot more variability there. The other thing that I like is that, and this is more for like, doing the voiceovers and the feedback, so maybe some of you

haven't actually even used this feature, is when you're done with the video, so you've done the talking or the voiceover or whatever, it doesn't take any time to build the analysis. So once you've recorded and you're talking and you're done, Coach's Eye takes a moment to like, build it, and the longer the video the longer it takes it to build. This is like, instant. As soon as you're

done it's like, okay would you like to save it? And then you have the ability to kind of export it however, you can save it. What I often do is I'm saving to my iPad, right into the camera roll. And then uploading to YouTube. So a lot of the features, and the way that I use it are identical, it's just getting used to a little bit different, the

lines and the arrows aren't as thick. I know that seems so minor, but for as much as we use it every single day, multiple times a day, that I'm just getting used to have thinner lines instead of the thicker lines. But I think, I mean, so far it's been a pretty seamless transition. - Yeah, what do you think about the wheel speed? That's my only complaint so far.

I haven't done any comparison yet, side by side, you can still compare two videos. - Right. - In fact, I think Sarah was saying something about an overlay, tell us about that in just a second. - Yup. - But I find the wheel does not move as fast as the other wheel. And I'm like, come on, get on with it. - Yeah. - Yes. - I'm like, increase

the- - I would agree with that. - Wheel speed. - The wheel's also a little shorter, or smaller. - Yeah. - So like, before it was the whole length of the iPad and now it's like, short, so my finger rubs across the screen more repetitively. - Well maybe that's it. That's what's happening. - No, it's also slower. - It used to be the entire length. It is slower.

- I think that Coach's Eye one like, the more you, the faster you scroll, the faster it went, it wasn't like, one speed. - Yeah. - It would get faster or slower, and this one, I think is just always the same speed when we scroll it. - Right. - But I guess the trade off, as you were saying, that you can grab the bar and move your finger-

- And that's what I was gonna say, there is a little yellow dot you can actually grab the bar. So like, on the- - Yeah. - You know, if you need to go forward or slower through something, so I think that's just kind of an adjustment, I don't know that I would say I like it better or worse at this point. But I did notice the multiple slow

down speeds which, for our sport, I think going to an eighth speed is a bit slow. (chuckles) A bit unnecessary, but I guess maybe for some sports, they want it that slow, but it's nice to have the option I guess. - Right. - Yup. - Right, okay. Yeah I mean, I'd give it a chance. Today is literally the first day that I've used it. - Yeah. - 'Cause

even though we had it a couple days ago, I just kept using the Coach's Eye just out of habit. - Right. - So tell us a little bit about the overlay as opposed to side, well what's the difference between side by side and overlay when I'm comparing two videos or I you know, take a jump, I turn left one time, I turn right the other time and I

want to know which way is faster? - Right, so Coach's Eye, you know, one of the features that we used a lot was side by side. So you would basically take two views of something and line them up. So it might be like, the same dog and handler doing a front cross versus a rear cross and you want to see you know, the path of the dog and

how different it is. So you would line the dog up over the first jump on both of your videos, and then tell it, you wanna, you know, compare the two, which would basically give you one wheel bar that controlled both videos. And you can scroll through. And we have, you know, I'll put in the show notes, we have examples of side by sides that we've published where we

do side by side analysis. So that's very helpful, but they also have the ability, and I did want to mention this because I wouldn't have even known to try it until the sales guy showed it to me, to do an overlay, which is you are now seeing both of those dogs literally on top of each other, at like, where they're kinda ghosty, right? Like 50% opacity. Usually, that's

only gonna work well when you have a static point of view. - Right. - Right? - Right. - So that basically, if you're you know, if you have like, just imagine that you have a static point of view at a sequence, well if you have- - That means your camera doesn't move. - It means your camera doesn't move and it means that- - The camera angle is the

same. - If you take two different videos, right? And the jumps and the grass and the tree, everything, and the dog is all 50% opacity. Meaning they look a little bit like a ghost, they're 50% there and 50% not there. Well when you take those two exact same point of views and put them on top of each other, you get 50% of the jumps from one video, 50%

of the jump from the other video, now the jump looks 100%. So the jump looks nice and solid, the grass looks nice and solid, and it's only the dog and the handler that look like ghosts, and you can kind of see in real space how they compare to each other, as opposed your brain having to kind of go back, look you know, left, right, left, right, left, right

at these two sides. - Yeah. - In the video. - And this would work really well for a lot of the people who do our exercises like VIP members, or taking some of the online classes, and who set up tripods. - Yes. - Right? So if you just put your camera on a tripod and you go out and you work exercise one, exercise two, exercise three, presumably you're

probably not moving in between, and it would be very easy to do an overlay. Versus if you have your friend film and they're panning. You know, sometimes that's more helpful 'cause you can zoom in and get a better view, but then you can't do the overlay aspect of it. So could be super helpful for a lot of people who have their camera on a tripod. - Yeah, I

think it works really well for jump analysis too, because you can take that side view and you can literally see the dog's take off point change. - Oh. - You know? You see them get closer to the jump or you know, further from the jump. - I'm gonna have to- - You can see exactly where the foot is. - Play with it, I'll play with it. - Yeah.

So those are you know, some of the ways that we've always used Coach's Eye in the past and that we'll continue to use this tool. But you know, I think that's kinda all the points that I wanted to make. (chuckles) I had, 'cause we really have talked about Coach's Eye a lot. And so this, so the funny thing about their announcement, the Coach's Eye thing was a little

weird because it was literally September 14th, and the announce, you login to the app and there's this big bar across the top that says, "Notice: Coach's Eye will no longer be available to be purchased in the store starting September 14th, 2021." And I'm like, that's today. (chuckles) - And we use it every day so it's not like we missed, we would've missed the announcement. - Right, I'm like,

that's literally zero warning. Like if you don't already have it on your iPad, you're done, you can't, you know, I don't know what happened there. I thought it was pretty bizarre. And then they had the whole thing about like, you have a year- - I'm sure there's a story. - To get it up, yeah. You have a year to you know, that you can continue to use it

but you can't download it from the app store or anything like that. So anyway, you know, we've talked about Coach's Eye a lot and so on that day, when that thing suddenly pops up, I got like, four different messages from four different people with a screenshot, going, "What do we do?" "What should I do? What should we use?" What am I gonna, you know? So that's why we

wanted to do this podcast and just give you an alternative. So my advice for an alternative, especially if you've used the Coach's Eye because it is such an easy, you will have a very easy transition is to use OnForm. And honestly, I think from, because of the some of the improvements in OnForm, I think from day one, you may find that you actually save time from day one,

even though there's some things that you have to kinda like, learn where they are and some things are a little bit different, there's so many improvements that you still come out net benefit. Which is why I was like, okay we have a, at first I was like, we have a year, we're gonna use Coach's Eye for a year. Once I found this tool, I was like, okay. This

is gonna save us so much time. Jennifer, you have to learn this today and start using it today so you can get all of this time saving. And I did the same thing for Esteban, same thing for Dr. Hyde. So that's the tool that we're gonna use. If you've been using the Coach's Eye, I would say, go give it a shot. And if you have never used the

Coach's Eye, than this podcast all probably is very, very (chuckles) you know, high level and technical. But if you haven't used the Coach's Eye and you've made it this far in the podcast, I would say now is the time for you to start your own video analysis journey and you can use the hot new tool that everybody's gonna be using, and that is OnForm. And that's it for

this week's podcast. We'd like to thank our sponsor, hititboard.com. Happy training. (cheerful music)

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