We’ve recently reported on the Mac-football connection — see our Jan. 25 and Feb. 6 stories — but we’ve found yet another one.
At Pittsburgh State University (which boasts a 108-18-2 winning record), coach Bill Kroenke has a “special team” of a PowerBook and Canon digital camcorder that he and his staff use to create Desktop Movies.
The team places the DV cameras at strategic locations in the stadium where they film the action of the day’s game, according to a ” Macs in Action ” story. After each game, the cameras are connected to the PowerBook. After the footage has been downloaded, Kroenke uses Final Cut Pro, Apple’s high-end video editing application to make short digital films that players and coaches use to prepare for the next game.
The PowerBooks are used to produce cut-ups of offensive, defensive, and special teams’ plays, all using QuikScout’s Video Scout 2000, a digital video database software system for cataloging and editing video footage.
Expressly designed for football coaches, Video Scout 2000 helps to instantly create QuickTime cut-ups of specific combinations of plays, formations, and play results from a single game or multiple games. According to Kroenke, Video Scout makes short work of archiving and retrieving any desired plays.
“This system really is powerful,” he told Apple. “A colleague from another school said, ‘you’ll never be able to do video editing on the road … no laptop can handle that.’ Then he saw the footage, and said, how do you get your tapes to look so good?.’ I personally think PowerBook kicks the butt of anything IBM has on the market.”