Can the Film Room tell you how high your jumper actually cleared?
The high jump setting reports hip rise and takeoff angle, not centimetres off the bar, and the reason is worth knowing before you expect the other thing.
It is a reasonable first guess: film a high jumper clearing the bar, and surely the app can read how high the bar was. It cannot, and the reason is not a missing feature so much as what a single camera would need to pull that number off reliably.
What the high jump setting actually reports
- Hip rise as a share of the athlete's own height, which answers how much lift the plant produced relative to that specific athlete, not a height in centimetres.
- Takeoff angle off the plant leg.
- Knee fold and extension through the jump.
None of those three numbers is the bar height in centimetres, and none of them needs to be for the comparison that actually matters across a season: whether the same athlete is getting more lift out of the same approach than they used to.
Why reading the bar itself is the hard part
To turn pixels in a video into a real-world height, something in the frame has to be a known distance, the same way the sprint and lift settings need two marks a known distance apart before they will report a speed. A high jump bar moves between almost every attempt, the standards move with it, and nothing in a typical meet clip is reliably placed at a fixed, known height for the camera to calibrate against on every single jump. A number invented from an uncalibrated frame would look precise and be wrong, which is worse than not reporting one.
What to do instead
Write the actual height down from the meet sheet, next to the clip. The meet officials already have that number and they have it correctly. What the Film Room adds on top is whether the technique that cleared 1.55 one week is the same technique clearing 1.60 the next, using hip rise and takeoff angle to see whether the plant actually improved or the bar just happened to go up.
A single 2D camera without a calibrated reference in frame cannot turn a clip into a real-world bar height. The app reports relative lift and angle, read from the body, and leaves the official centimetres to the people holding the tape measure.
Time your next meet with the phones you already have
Timing, the Film Room and the speed gates are free forever, with no account. A Club plan, $71 a month, puts your meets on your own results page, and one plan covers every phone.
Related
What does filming your high jumper from the front show that a side-on clip won't?
Hip rise and takeoff angle come from a side-on clip because they happen forward and back. Drift, a crooked plant and an off-centre landing happen across the body, and a side-on camera cannot see across.
Read →Why does my high jumper always miss the first attempt at a new height but clear the second?
The first jump at a new height almost never looks like the jumps that cleared the height before it, and the gap between the miss and the clear is usually small enough to film.
Read →Should a high jumper's approach run at the same speed on every attempt?
A slower approach on one attempt can be a tactic or a drift, and checking takeoff angle across attempts is how you tell which.
Read →