Video Boundaries
As I watch the five old games I have accumulated of the 1983 Daingerfield Tigers, you get a true sense of the speed of the team, and the attack mindedness of it’s defense, but you are watching almost 40 year old degraded VHS tape transferred over digitally, and unless you are a complete football nerd like me, you really can’t get the flavor of it.
It is definitely hard to distingush numbers, and I have had to identify players only by knowing what position they are and roughly what they look like.
Bill Bellicheck has this learning activity he gives his young coaches called “padding”. Padding is where you essentially break down each play on video, by player and watch exactly what each player is doing. By doing this you can understand the game within the game, and it is highly effective in learning tendencies, strengths and weaknesses.
It is also very boring, tedious, and lengthy for most human beings.
I started padding in middle school, when I got a copy each weekend of my cousin’s full football games. It progressed to high school, where I would pad our team’s film. Because of the nature of the film jerkiness, and the swamp technique of the defense, the games films I have are impossible to pad.
Then I heard a name.
Denis Shiryaev.
He has gotten some international attention lately by taking really, really old films, using an algorithm and sharpening, colorizing, and more importantly, transferring them to 60FPS, and 4K.
So, I did what I always do, I reached out to see the cost. I found out. It hurt. But, it was too tantalizing and opportunity to pass by. Each of the five games I have are basically the old coaches 16mm press box video. They last about 24 minutes each.
It is going to take almost a week for each one to be initially reviewed with the algorithm, but I am very excited to see the results, and I hope a new generation will actually be able to see what we are talking about.