1

Can one use Kinovea to measure ball spin? The plan would be to take 2-3 frames of a ball with markers and measure the spin/rotation automatically with a software pfogram. Will Kinovea allow that? Really appreciate this program. Thanks.

2

Facinating if it could and I'm sure one of the clever people will be along to discuss the physics of angular momentum and the potential spin rates users may be dealing with. The ECB use a cricket version of TrackMan by a Danish company who started out with golf ball analysis. The golf version of the system costs somewhere around $20-25000 and I think uses 3D laser doppler rather than a camera. It's taking off in pro baseball too. An international finger spinner may top 2000 rpm, a wrist spinner maybe 2500rpm and I think some of the baseball guys hit 3000rpm ie 50 revs per second. A high street 30fps camera isn't going to cope with that but plenty of high speed ones would - if you could mark the ball up with an identifier in the plane of spin, I suppose enough identifiers so that one of them is in the plane of spin then a dual function to draw a line "This is a right angle to the plane of spin and this is the plane to count markers going past/measure rotation in time x in" "and track the highlit object while counting"
Would be a great function