Drawing Tools — Annotate Your Swing
Sometimes the fastest way to show what's happening in a swing is to draw it — a line down the shaft, a circle around the trailing elbow, an angle on the spine. MotionEdge's drawing tools turn any frame into a coaching whiteboard, and the marks stay on the swing and sync to everyone in a collection you've shared. It's the same thing a coach does on a screen in a lesson bay, except it travels with the swing.
Turning drawing on
In the Video Player panel header, tap the pencil icon. A slim tool strip slides in on the right edge of the panel. Tap any tool to start drawing; tap a tool again (or the pencil) to open the full panel with color and width options. Tap the pencil once more to put the tools away.
While drawing is on, the zoom/pan gestures step aside so your marks land where you intend.
The tools
| Tool | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Line | The workhorse — shaft line, swing plane, a vertical down from the head, a horizontal at the hips. |
| Arrow | Point at something, or show a direction — where the hands should go, the path you want. |
| Angle | Measure a body angle — spine tilt, knee flex, the angle of the trail forearm. |
| H-Angle (ruler) | An angle referenced to horizontal — handy for shaft lean and attack-style lines. |
| Circle | Ring a focus area — the trail elbow, the hands at the top, the clubhead at impact. |
| Draw | Draw whatever you want, exactly as you'd sketch it. |
| Select / Move | Grab a mark you've made to reposition or adjust it. |
| Clear (trash) / Undo | Remove a mark. |
You also get Undo and Clear in the strip — undo peels back the last stroke; clear wipes the frame.
Color and width
Open the full panel (tap an active tool) to pick a color and a line width. One color applies across your tools, and the active tool shows a small dot of the current color so you always know what you'll draw with. Pick a width that reads well against the video — thicker for a phone screen, finer for precise lines on iPad or Mac.
Marks stick — and they sync
Two things make drawings genuinely useful, not just doodles:
- They persist on the swing. Close the swing, come back tomorrow — your lines are exactly where you left them.
- They sync to shared collections. Draw a swing-plane line for your student and, when that swing is in a collection you share with them, it shows up on their device. This is the heart of the coach-to-student workflow: mark it up once, and the person you're helping sees precisely what you saw. See Collections — How Sharing Works, or Sharing Sessions with .mef Files for the file-based alternative.
Guide lines carry over from capture
If you set up guide lines while recording a session (alignment references on the camera screen), those lines come along when you open a swing from that session — already on the frame as a starting point. From there you can keep them, adjust them, or add your own.
Platform notes
- iPhone / iPad — draw with your finger or an Apple Pencil. The tool strip lives on the right edge; the expanded panel gives you the grid of tools, colors, and widths.
- Mac — draw with the trackpad or mouse; hover shows each tool's name. Combine with multiple windows for marking up several swings at once — see Multiple Windows on Mac.
Drawings look and behave the same on every platform — only the input changes.
Drawings on a shared still
When you Share this frame (MotionEdge 1.1 and later), any drawings that are on the video burn into the JPEG — the person you send it to sees the lines even if they do not have MotionEdge. The optional caption on that share is not a drawing: it lives only on that JPEG and is not saved on the swing.
Back to the full screen tour: Video Review — Reading Your Swing.