Filming your swings is the highest-leverage habit in hitting, and the reason is blunt: the swing is too fast to feel accurately from the inside. Hitters swear their hands stayed back while video shows them lunging; they feel like they're spinning out when the tape shows a clean turn. The bat is moving far faster than your eyes can honestly track, and the camera settles arguments your feel keeps losing.
But a clip is only worth what it's readable at — by you, or by video analysis. Here's how to film swings that tell the truth.
The non-negotiables
Fix the phone. No follow-cam. Tripod, fence hook, bucket, bag against the net — anything stable. A parent walking with the camera adds motion that makes body movement much harder to judge, for eyes and software alike. Fixed camera, moving hitter.
Whole body AND the bat in frame, the whole swing. Phone at chest height, 12 to 15 feet away. If your hands leave the top of the frame at the finish, you've cropped off the part that tells you whether the swing drove through.
One swing per clip. Start before the load, hold the finish. Begin recording a beat before your hands move and hold your finish a beat after contact. A swing that runs off the edge of the clip can't be scored, and the finish is where half the story lives.
60fps or slo-mo if your phone has it. Bats move fast; more frames mean cleaner tracking of a quick move.
The two angles, and what each one sees
This is the part most people get vaguely right and specifically off. Two useful angles, and neither sees everything.
Open side — camera facing your chest (third-base side for a righty). This is the deepest read. In profile it can see your load riding back, your stride, your hip-shoulder separation at landing, your hand path, and your extension through the ball. If you film one angle, film this one.
Behind — camera down the pitch line, behind you. This angle sees the turn coming toward the camera, so it reads how straight your stride lands and how fully your shoulders finish their turn — reads the open side simply can't make. But from behind, the load, the stride length, the hand speed and the extension all run straight along the camera and vanish.
Neither angle is better; they're two halves of one hitter. If a report on your behind clip says nothing about your load, that's the camera's geometry, not a hole in your swing. Alternate angles across sessions and you cover everything.
One honest thing to know before you upload
The tracker sees your body, not your gear. The bat is invisible and so is the ball, which is exactly why a tee swing, a soft-toss swing, and a dry practice cut all score the same way — "contact" is measured as the moment your hands reach peak speed, not the instant the barrel meets the ball. That's a feature: you never need a pitch to get a real read.
Film two or three swings a session, not twenty. Pick your best one and let CoachVision read it — one phone clip becomes measurements of your load, stride, separation and contact, plus the single thing to fix next and a drill to groove it. Thirty seconds of setup, one honest swing. Take that trade every session.