The Camera Screen — Every Control You Have Before Pressing Record

This is MotionEdge's mission control for capturing a swing. Almost everything that affects the quality of your recording lives here. The defaults are tuned to work well at a typical driving range in daylight, but most golfers benefit from at least a few tweaks once they understand what each control actually does.

This article tours the configurable controls. For what the live screen shows you while you're capturing — border colors, skeleton overlays, diagnostic traces — see Reading the Capture Screen.

Lighting — shutter speed and ISO

The single biggest lever for video quality. Good news: MotionEdge tunes this for you by default now (#917). Fast-Shutter Mode caps the shutter at 1/250s in automatic exposure, biases ISO up to keep the image bright, and falls back gracefully (1/250 → 1/125 → 1/60 → uncapped) if the bay is too dim to sustain 1/250. You don't need to touch the manual sliders for typical outdoor or normal-indoor lighting.

The two places you'd still touch the controls:

1. Indoor LED projector / simulator bay — fast shutter catches LED flicker. Open the exposure card (sun icon ☀️) and turn Fast-Shutter Mode OFF.
2. Bright outdoor range where you want an even sharper impact frame (1/500 or 1/1000) — drag the manual shutter slider.

Under the hood:

• Shutter speed controls how long each frame is exposed. A fast shutter (e.g. 1/2000s) freezes the club at impact; a slow shutter (e.g. 1/60s) lets motion blur smear across the frame. The trade is that a fast shutter needs more light.
• ISO controls how much the camera amplifies the available light. Higher ISO compensates for a fast shutter but introduces graininess in low light.

Manual control of both, plus the Fast-Shutter toggle, lives in the exposure card. The right starting point depends heavily on whether you're outdoors, indoors with natural light, or in a simulator bay with LED-projected video — and indoor LED simulators in particular have a non-obvious gotcha.

Full guidance with recommended values per environment: Reducing Motion Blur — Shutter Speed and ISO.

Lens choice — front / back / wide

You can choose which camera lens MotionEdge uses for capture:

• Back main camera — default. Best optical quality, no distortion. Use this whenever possible.
• Back ultra-wide — captures more of the scene. Useful for tight spaces or when you can't move the tripod far enough back. Beware geometric distortion — the edges of the frame curve outward, which makes pose detection less accurate near the corners. Center the golfer.
• Front (selfie) camera — convenient for self-coaching when you're holding the phone, or for setups where you stand behind the device. Optical quality is meaningfully lower than the back camera on most iPhones, and the field of view is narrower.

For serious swing analysis, always prefer the back main camera if you can frame the swing with it. Pose detection accuracy and impact-frame clarity both depend on undistorted, high-resolution imagery.

Resolution and frame rate (FPS)

Two settings that determine the size of every video file you record.

• Resolution — 1080p is the standard sweet spot for swing analysis. 4K is available but doubles the file size while adding little for pose detection (which downsamples internally). Drop to 720p only if you're recording long practice sessions and tight on storage.
• FPS (frames per second) — 60 fps is the default and the right answer for most swings. 120 fps gives you finer slow-motion in playback (very useful for impact-frame work) but doubles the file size again. 30 fps is not recommended for swing analysis — impact happens in 1–2 frames at 30 fps and detection accuracy suffers. For indoor simulator capture, see Indoor Simulator FPS — 60 fps is specifically required because of how projector screens refresh.

Storage math, roughly:

• 1080p / 60 fps: ~80–100 MB per minute of recording
• 1080p / 120 fps: ~160–200 MB per minute
• 4K / 60 fps: ~300+ MB per minute

If you're filming a 30-swing range session at 1080p / 60 fps you'll burn about 1 GB. iCloud Sync moves these to the cloud automatically and reclaims local space when you're running tight — see Optimize Local Storage for how that works.

Detection method — how a swing gets captured

Three ways to capture a swing:

• Auto-Detect — point the phone at the golfer, hit balls, and MotionEdge automatically detects each swing and saves a clip. The recommended default for range sessions. Sensitivity is tunable per environment (busy range vs. quiet bay). See Auto-Detect Sensitivity.
• Manual — you tap a record button on screen to start and stop. Useful when you want full control or when auto-detect's confidence is low (e.g., golfer mostly out of frame, unusual lighting).
• Apple Watch trigger — if you're wearing a paired Apple Watch, you can trigger captures from your wrist without touching the phone. The phone stays on the tripod, you stand at address, swing, and the Watch tells the phone to save.
• TrackMan-driven — when paired with a TrackMan unit, capture can be triggered by ball flight events. See Live TrackMan Connection.

The mode picker is in the camera top bar.

Remote Camera — broadcasting and directing

This is MotionEdge's multi-device capture system. Two roles:

• Remote — your iPhone on a tripod, sending its video and detected swings to another device.
• Director — your iPad or Mac receiving from one or more Remotes, with the full sidebar, sessions list, and review tools.

The most common setup: an iPhone on a tripod as the camera (Remote), and an iPad in your bag or on a stand as the Director where you actually do the analysis between shots. Multi-camera setups extend this — two iPhones at face-on + down-the-line angles, both sending to one Director iPad.

The pairing and setup flow is its own topic: Remote Camera — Setup & Pairing. Once you're paired, What's on the Remote vs the Director explains which device shows what. If pairing has problems (especially over a hotspot at a range with no Wi-Fi), see Remote Camera Troubleshooting.

A reasonable first-time setup

If you're not sure where to start, this combination works for the vast majority of outdoor range sessions:

• Lens: back main camera
• Resolution: 1080p
• FPS: 60 fps
• Detection method: Auto-Detect, default sensitivity
• Shutter / ISO: leave on automatic — the default Fast-Shutter Mode caps shutter at 1/250s for sharp impact frames. Exception: if you're in an LED-projector simulator bay, turn Fast-Shutter Mode OFF (see the exposure article)
• Remote Camera: skip for the first session — single-device capture is simpler to learn on. Add a second device once you're comfortable.

Once you've recorded a few swings you can review what worked and adjust from there. The camera settings are remembered between sessions per device, so a one-time tune-up sticks.

See also: Reading the Capture Screen for what the live indicators on screen mean during capture. Reducing Motion Blur for the deep shutter / ISO story. Auto-Detect Sensitivity for tuning the swing trigger.