Bath Rugby Club Adopts Custom Video Recording Workflow For Team Development

Established in 1865, Bath Rugby Club is one of the oldest and most prestigious rugby clubs in the world. The Recreation Ground, better known as Rec, is one of the most idyllic rugby grounds in the United Kingdom, nestled next to the River Avon in the shadow of both Bath Abbey and Great Pulteney Street, a Georgian masterpiece.

Bath Rugby takes great pride in its heritage, but it's also a highly successful sports organization with an eye to the future – and the club relies heavily on advanced technologies for ongoing team development. One example is the club's video recording capabilities, including the ability to record live matches and training sessions for performance analysis and strategy.

When Bath Rugby Club recently sought a solution for upgrading our video handling capabilities, it had several key requirements. First, the club needed the ability to record not only from live streams provided by broadcasters, but also from handheld cameras. Besides the ability to transfer videos quickly to professional analytical software, Bath Rugby wanted to make the content available to team members on their laptops and mobile devices in a user-friendly format to account for variations in technical knowledge and broadcast experience. In addition, the resulting videos needed to be in a quickly recognizable format with enough detail and quality to be analyzed frame by frame, without taking up large amounts of data storage. Video clips also needed to be in a transportable format open to multiple professional and end-user grade platforms.

To meet these requirements, Bath Rugby Club has built a custom video handling workflow based on VITEC's FS-H70 portable proxy recorder. The FS-H70 addresses the club's need for HD video recording in the standard MOV format, recording files onto a removable card. The card can then be distributed to club members and coaches for easy access and viewing of the videos. The MOVE files can also be easily ingested into the Sportstech Sportscode analytical software for internal club use. Video from the SDHC card or Sportscode can also be shared via the cloud to coaches, managers, and players alike, depending on the desired viewing platform.

Bath Rugby chose the FS-H70 because of its ability to ingest an SDI feed and provide a loop-through recording from the pitch side. The system is light, battery- or DC-powered, and portable, so it met all of the club's criteria for an easy-to-use pitch-side piece of equipment. With the new workflow, Bath Rugby Club can leverage multiple cards for training and live matches that can be swapped and read immediately via laptops on the pitch side. Another powerful advantage is the FS-H70's ability to be read quickly by the Sportscode software in a format that requires no re-encoding or translation.

The VITEC FS-H70 has provided Bath Rugby Club with a simple, yet powerful video handling solution that encompasses the club’s distinct workflow and requirements.

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