Golf ball tracer experiment

Published: March 13, 2023

I recently went to the Cologuard golf tournament here in town and got some footage of golfers chipping into a green and teeing off in the next hole. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to gather footage for an experiment.

This was an test to see if I could create a golf ball tracer effect. I started this experiment using AVID Media Composer 7 because I had a license for it from film school 10ish years ago and I couldn’t get it to work quickly. I could have figured it out, but I would have had to spend hours and hours relearning AVID enough to figure it all out again.

I searched online and the AVID forums to see if anyone had any recommendations and I couldn’t find any. I could find truck loads of video tutorials on YouTube for golf ball tracing in Adobe Premiere using After Effects, but I didn’t want to shell out that kind of money for a fun experiment.

I did come across this tutorial for Kdenlive from Arkengheist 2.0 that was exactly what I was looking for and Kdenlive is the perfect price for my experiment: free.

The motion tracking in Kdenlive isn’t quite good fast enough to track a golf ball so I had to correct it manually for every frame. That wasn’t an issue for this short clip, but too much longer than this and it’d be a pain.

At some point I’ll do a video on how I did this, but until then, this is the completed video.