Remote Camera — What's on the Remote vs the Director

When you use MotionEdge with two devices — an iPhone on a tripod doing the recording and an iPad in your hand running the session — the two devices don't show the same things. This trips people up: you set up the skeleton overlay on your iPad, walk out to the bay, look at the iPhone on the tripod, and... no skeleton. Or your iPhone is silently detecting swings while the iPad is the one chirping. These are intentional design choices, not a bug. Here's the map.

The two roles, in plain terms

• The Remote — the device on the tripod doing the primary capture. It's running its own pose detection, its own swing detection, and writing the actual video file. It's the one looking at you swing.
• The Director — the device you're holding (typically your iPad, sometimes a second phone). It coordinates the session, lets you see the live feed, kick off captures, and review what just got recorded.

These names come from the on-screen labels: the iPad shows a Director view, and the iPhone shows a Remote view. Most people use iPad as Director + iPhone as Remote, but any combination works — what matters is which device is on the tripod recording you.

The mental model

The split comes down to one principle: things that matter to the device watching you happen on the Remote. Things that matter to the human happen on the Director.

• Pose tracking and swing detection run where the camera is. There's no point sending pose landmarks across the network when the video feed is already there and the Director can see exactly what the Remote sees.
• Audio cues (tempo beeps, swing-detected chimes) belong with the person who needs to hear them. The Remote is on a tripod five feet away, often pointing away from you and behind your shoulder — it has no business making noise. The Director is in your hand.
• One signal cuts across everything: the state border (red / yellow / green / blue around the screen) showing whether the system is scanning, ready, or saving. That has to be visible everywhere — it's the at-a-glance "is the system ready for me to swing?" indicator, and you need it whether you're glancing at the tripod or your iPad.

Quick reference

Why doesn't the skeleton show on my iPad?

Because the skeleton is being drawn by whichever device is running pose detection — and that's the Remote, not the Director. The Remote is the one with the camera trained on you; it sees the joints and draws the lines.

We don't send the pose data over the wire to the Director for two reasons:

1. Latency. Pose landmarks are a stream — 30 or 60 sets per second. Pushing that to the Director over Wi-Fi would add a noticeable delay between your motion and the overlay, which defeats the point of having a live skeleton in the first place.
2. It's not buying you anything. The Director already shows the live video feed from the Remote. The skeleton would just be a duplicate of what's on the Remote's screen, lagged by a beat.

If you want to verify the skeleton is rendering correctly during setup, turn it on the Remote and look at the Remote. You can toggle it from that device's Capture Settings under skeleton overlay. After setup, most users leave it off on the Remote during normal capture — the Director's video feed is what they're watching.

Why did my iPhone on the tripod not beep when it detected a swing?

This is intentional. Audio cues on the Remote are suppressed even if alerts are toggled on, because the Remote is almost never the device the human is looking at or listening to. It's clamped to a tripod across the bay. A beep coming from over there doesn't help you — and on a quiet range or in a simulator, it would actually be irritating to anyone nearby.

The Director, on the other hand, is in your hand. It honors whatever you've set in its Capture Settings: tempo beeps, swing-detected chimes, voice alerts — those all play on the Director. See the Auto-Detect Sensitivity FAQ for the full list of alert options and how to tune them.

Where do my detection traces go?

To whichever device produced them. Each device that's running detection writes its own trace files locally — the Remote writes its trace based on what its own detector saw, and the Director writes its trace only if it's doing its own detection on its own camera (which is rare in a typical Remote + Director setup).

In a normal two-device session, the trace you care about is on the Remote — because that's the device that saw the swing and made the call. When you ask support to look at a missed-swing or false-fire trace, you want the trace from the Remote, not the Director.

To grab it: on the Remote, go to Settings → Support → Attach Log Files. The diagnostic bundle pulls in all the recent detection traces and attaches them to a support email automatically.

What about the state border? Why does that show on both?

Because it's the one signal you need everywhere. The state border is the colored frame around the screen — red while scanning for a golfer, yellow while detecting, green when armed and ready, blue while saving a clip. It tells you the system's state at a glance.

You might be glancing at the tripod to confirm the Remote is armed before you swing. You might be looking at the Director to confirm the clip saved. Either way, the colored border is what you're checking. So it has to be visible on both.

The Director shows the state border of the Remote that's currently being treated as the primary tile (since that's the device that decides when a swing is being captured). So when you see green on the Director, that means the Remote is armed and waiting. Same color, same meaning, two screens.

What if I want something on the device that doesn't have it?

For the most common asks:

• You want a beep when a swing is detected. Make sure alerts are on in the Director's Capture Settings. Your iPad will chime when the Remote completes a save.
• You want to see the skeleton during a session. Turn it on the Remote, before you walk away to the tripod. You can also walk over and glance at the Remote during setup to confirm the skeleton looks reasonable.
• You want to send the detection trace to support. Pull it from the Remote, not the Director. Settings → Support → Attach Log Files on the device that was doing the recording.
• You want the Director to do its own detection too (e.g., for a side angle from a second device). That's a different topology — both devices become Remotes from each other's perspective. Each runs its own detection independently, each writes its own video, and each shows its own state border. Best for advanced multi-camera setups; not the typical workflow.

When in doubt: the device with the camera on you is the source of truth

Anything related to what the system is actually seeing — pose, swing detection, recording — lives on the Remote. Anything related to what you, the human, are doing with the session — kicking off captures, monitoring, reviewing, getting feedback — lives on the Director.

Once the split clicks, the rest of the multi-device setup gets a lot easier to think about.

See also: Auto-Detect Sensitivity for tuning detection on the Remote. Apple Watch Modes for using the Watch as a remote trigger or a third device. Remote Camera Troubleshooting when the two devices aren't finding each other.