Automatic Sports Editing - 26th February 2017

Intro: The following blog post discusses a custom solution I've come up with which takes 4 hours of sports editing time and brings it down to 10 minutes. This is what you get when a computer guy is also a filmmaker, hehe.

For the past five years (with some interruptions) as some of you may know, I've been in charge of the production of local handball games broadcast on the Maltese channel, Melita Stars with highlights and 'Goal of the Week' segments being uploaded online and distributed to news networks.

Games are not broadcast live, and therefore editing is done after filming. The editing involves adding all game graphics and scoreboard (which for Handball is a very tedious task with some 60 goals scored per game.

Perhaps the most tedious task is the scoreboard which requires me to re-watch the entire game adding the goals one by one, even watching it on fast forward this usually takes a bit less than an hour per game. Following the scoreboard and game graphics, highlights and 'Goal of the Week' segments are also edited, this process generally takes another hour and a half.

Having produced nearly 200 games, having spent countless hours on Sunday afternoons editing, it was time to find a better solution. Being a programmer/filmmaker it was time to put my skills to the test and automate this process once and for all.

After nearly a week of on and off programming I was able to come up with a two-step solution. I created an iOS App using Swift 3, which logs all the goals and any saves. I keep the app running during filming and just tap the relevant buttons (goals, saves etc) during filming, the app is linked to the camera via timecode. Once the game is complete the app generates a text file with log data which at the touch of a button is sent by email to my personal account.

Next, at home, I run the custom created scripts which I coded using Adobe Extend Script language which is designed to open the footage and log file simultaneously and edit the games from beginning to end (including the scoreboard, game graphics and relevant fade-in and fade-outs).

Once the game file is complete, another script is run which uses a few heuristics to create the game highlights and following this another script creates the 'Goal of the Week' video.

Essentially this experiment (with practical use) allowed me to utilize iOS and ExtendScript, two languages I had never used before. It takes a weekly editing job of nearly four hours and brings it down to 10 minutes! Of course, video export time and upload time are still the same, but there is nothing I can really do about that... (but at least it's a job the computer does on its own)

Any questions or editors out there need a similar solution? Get in touch my email is in the footer.