Record at 720p for Smaller Files and Faster Analysis

Swing videos add up fast. A single range session can be 30, 40, 50 clips, and each one is a chunk of storage on your phone. If you film as much as we do, you've probably watched your free space quietly disappear over a season.

Here's the good news: for swing analysis, you almost certainly don't need 1080p. Recording at 720p stores roughly half the data per clip and analyzes noticeably faster — and you won't lose any detection or pose accuracy doing it. It's the setting we now recommend for most golfers.

What resolution should I record golf swings at?

720p. It's the sweet spot for swing analysis.

The reason comes down to how the analysis works. The pose estimation engine that finds your body and tracks your joints scales every frame down to a small fixed size internally before it looks at you — so feeding it a bigger, sharper frame doesn't make the skeleton any more accurate. The extra pixels in a 1080p frame mostly get thrown away before any analysis happens. You pay for them in storage and processing time, and get nothing back for the swing work itself.

720p keeps everything the analysis actually uses and drops the overhead that it doesn't.

How much storage does 720p save?

Roughly half. A 720p frame holds about half the data of a 1080p frame, and that carries straight through to file size.

Rough storage math at 60 fps:

• 1080p / 60 fps: ~80–100 MB per minute of recording
• 720p / 60 fps: ~45–55 MB per minute of recording

For a 30-swing range session, that's the difference between burning around 1 GB and around half that. Over a full season of regular filming, switching to 720p can mean hundreds of swings' worth of extra room before you ever run tight on space.

If you do run low, MotionEdge also moves older videos to iCloud and reclaims local space automatically — see Optimize Local Storage. 720p and storage optimization work together: smaller clips mean less to upload and faster re-downloads when you scrub back through an old session.

Will I lose any analysis quality at 720p?

No — not for the analysis that matters. Swing detection, the pose skeleton, joint angles, tempo, the filmstrip positions, and the metrics are all computed from a downscaled frame regardless of what you record at, so they behave identically at 720p and 1080p.

There's also a nice secondary benefit: 720p clips analyze noticeably faster. Every stage of the pipeline — decoding the video, handing frames to the pose engine, rendering the filmstrip, preparing frames for the AI Coach — has fewer pixels to chew through. You'll feel it most on the longer jobs: a big imported session or an AI Coach analysis comes back sooner.

How do I change the recording resolution?

On the camera screen:

1. Tap the aperture icon (the camera/aperture button in the top bar of the capture screen).
2. Under Resolution, choose the 720p option.

That's it. The setting is remembered between sessions per device, so you only set it once. Frame rate is a separate choice — leave it at 60 fps, which is the right answer for swing analysis (and specifically required for indoor simulator bays — see Indoor Simulator FPS). Recording at 720p doesn't change anything about your lighting, lens, or detection settings.

When should I still use 1080p?

There are two situations where the extra resolution earns its storage:

• You're filming to share or display, not just to analyze. If you want a clip that looks crisp full-screen on a TV or sent to a friend in a non-analysis context, 1080p holds up better on a big screen. For coaching annotations, filmstrips, and AI feedback, 720p is indistinguishable.
• You're doing close, precise ball-flight work. The ball is a small object in the frame, and at 1080p it's captured with a few more pixels. Ball tracking still works reliably at 720p across our test library, but if you're specifically chasing the most precise possible ball-departure detection — for example a careful launch-monitor correlation session — 1080p gives the ball tracker a little more to work with.

For everyday range filming and self-coaching, neither of these applies, and 720p is the better all-around choice.

See also: The Camera Screen — Every Control Before Pressing Record for a full tour of the capture controls. Optimize Local Storage for how MotionEdge frees up space automatically. Indoor Simulator FPS for why 60 fps matters in projector bays.