How to film your golf swing
Most swing videos cannot be analysed — by a coach, by an app, or by you. Almost always it is the camera position, not the swing.
Put the phone on the ground-to-target line directly behind you, at stomach height, 4–5 metres away, with your whole body and both hands in frame. Film at 60 fps or higher — 120 fps is meaningfully better. Shoot with the sun behind the camera, not behind you.
Where the phone goes
Stand at address and imagine the line running from the ball to your target. Extend that line backwards, through you, and keep going 4–5 metres. That is where the phone goes. This is the down-the-line view, and it is the angle coaches ask for first.
The word that matters is on. Not near the line, on it. A camera set a metre off to one side changes every angle it reads: shaft plane looks steeper or flatter than it is, your hands look deeper or shallower than they are. The measurement is only as honest as the position it was taken from.
Height and distance
Stomach height. Roughly hand height at address. A phone on the ground looks up at you and exaggerates your posture; a phone at eye height looks down and flattens the swing plane. Lean it against a bag, a bucket, or a bench.
4–5 metres back. Close enough that you fill a useful part of the frame, far enough that the lens is not distorting your body at the edges. Phone wide-angle lenses stretch whatever sits near the frame edge, which is exactly where your club will be at the top.
Everything in frame. Whole body, both hands, and enough headroom that the club stays in shot at the top of the backswing. This is the most common failure: a video that crops the clubhead exactly when the backswing position is being measured.
Frame rate matters more than you would think
Golf's transition and impact happen fast enough that ordinary video struggles to land on the right moment. An event-detection error of 20 milliseconds — under two frames at 60 fps — can change a knee-angle reading by as much as 20°. That is the difference between a checkpoint that is in range and one that is flagged as a fault.
| Setting | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| Frame rate | 60 fps minimum, 120 fps good, 240 fps better |
| Shutter speed | 1/1000s or faster, so the club stays sharp |
| Resolution | 1080p is plenty — prefer frame rate over resolution |
If your phone makes you choose between 4K at 30 fps and 1080p at 120 fps, take the 1080p. More pixels on a blurry clubhead does not help; more frames does.
Worth being honest about the ceiling: identifying the exact instant of ball contact would need something near 2000 fps, because contact lasts under a millisecond. Any video analysis is really working with the nearest visible frame to impact. That is fine — it just means "impact" is an approximation, and anyone claiming millisecond precision from a phone is overselling.
Light and background
Put the sun behind the camera so it lights you, not the lens. Shooting into the sun turns you into a silhouette, and body-tracking needs to see your joints, not your outline.
Wear something that contrasts with what is behind you. A golfer in a light grey shirt against a bright sky is genuinely hard to track. Indoor bays are usually the easy case — even light, dark background, no wind moving your clothes.
The mistakes that ruin a video
- Filming from the side (face-on) when you wanted plane data. Face-on is good for weight shift and lead-arm structure. It cannot read shaft plane or hip depth. Down-the-line is the more useful single angle.
- Handing the phone to someone. Handheld video drifts between swings, so the comparison between today and last week is measuring the camera, not you.
- Standing too close. Under about 3 metres and lens distortion starts affecting the angles.
- Cropping the club at the top. Check the framing with one practice swing before you record.
- Filming ten swings in a row and analysing the last one. Analyse a swing you would actually have hit on the course, not the one after you got tired.
Down the line versus face on
If you only shoot one angle, shoot down the line. It is the view that reads swing plane, takeaway direction, hand depth, hip depth at impact, and head movement — the measurements that explain most mishits.
Face-on is the better second angle. It shows weight shift toward the target, lead arm structure, and shaft lean at impact more clearly than the rear view does. Neither angle sees everything; a single camera behind you sees the most.
A repeatable routine
The point of a fixed setup is not one good video, it is comparable videos. Same distance, same height, same line, every session. Then a change in a number is a change in your swing rather than a change in where you put the phone.
Practical version: find a spot on the range you can return to, note what you leaned the phone against, and use the same one. Two minutes of consistency is worth more than any amount of analysis on inconsistent footage.
Measure it instead of guessing
FormCaddie checks your framing before you swing and tells you if the phone is too close, too low, or off the line. Then it measures 12 checkpoints on the device and returns one drill.
Download FormCaddie free