Measuring club speed from video alone

Clubhead speed is normally measured with a radar or Doppler-based launch monitor sitting near the ball. Golf estimates it from video instead, by tracking the club's position across consecutive frames and calculating how far it traveled in the time between them.

The key requirement is a high enough frame rate to capture the fastest part of the swing — the last few feet before impact, where the club is moving quickest — without motion blur smearing the club's position beyond recognition. Most modern phone cameras, recording at 120 frames per second or higher in slow-motion mode, are sufficient.

Accuracy depends heavily on camera angle and distance, which is why Golf's setup guide recommends a specific framing: far enough back that the whole swing arc stays in frame, close enough that the club remains a large, trackable object rather than a few pixels wide.

In testing against radar-based measurements under the recommended setup, video-based estimates typically land within a few miles per hour of the radar figure — close enough to track meaningful progress over weeks, even if it isn't quite launch-monitor precision on any single swing.

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