Everything You Need to Know about the Hudl Pro Suite Updates

From new Hudl Sportscode features to key updates to the Hudl library, league exchanges and Wyscout, let’s get you up-to-date with the details.

Our goal is to provide acces to our large global database of video and data, both from Wyscout and Hudl, within the interface in Hudl Sportscode.

Get Hudl Sportscode XMLs from Wyscout

This is our first step toward integrating Wyscout, Sportscode and Hudl. You’ll now be able to download an advanced Sportscode XML directly from Wyscout, with the ability to configure how it appears in your timeline.

Within Wyscout, you can click “Download XML” for a specific game. The new window allows you to choose whether you want to download player-based data or team-based data.

One of the highlights of Hudl Presents: Performance Analysis 2021 was Lead Product Manager for Match Analysis Paul Arnott revealing the latest exciting updates to the Hudl Pro Suite. These updates are designed to further enhance your elite match analysis workflows, while also presenting our future plans for the connected platform.

HUDL PRO SUITE

How to Download Video and Data from League Exchange in Hudl Sportscode

Download Video Packages

Users familiar with Hudl Pro Suite will be aware that you can access video and data from your Hudl team library directly from Hudl Sportscode.

Now, this option is also available for league exchanges, streamlining your analysis workflow and improving speed to access access your all-important league video and data. For leagues with multiple angles of video available, you’ll be able to see all angles right away in Hudl Sportscode.

Start Analysis While Video Is Downloading

When opening a video package in Hudl Sportscode, you now have the ability to start coding, labeling clips and creating playlists while the video is still downloading, making your analysis workflow considerably faster. And, as the timeline data for the whole game is downloaded first, output reports will immediately show data from the whole game.

Access Multiple Leagues

Finally, for those who have access to more than one league—whether it’s women’s and men’s leagues, domestic and international leagues, or two different youth leagues— you can now access all of them from within Hudl Sportscode.

We’re also working on a future enhancement that’s going to allow you to automate this process. You’ll be able to set a trigger that causes games to automatically download to your desktop as soon as they become available. Stay tuned for more information.

For leagues with multiple angles of video available, in future, you’ll be able to select which angles you want to utilise right away in Hudl Sportscode. In the following screen, you get to choose how you want that data to be formatted. For example, whether you want to include both teams or the color of the team rows. You can configure the prefix for the rows in the timeline, and choose whether or not to show the shirt number, the team name or the player ID.

You can also control the lead and lag time for all the instances in the timeline. By choosing the smart link option, you’ll get defaults for each of these rows. If you choose the custom length option, you get to configure both of those values. You also have the option of deciding which subset of data appears as labels on the instances in the timeline. And finally, you get to choose whether to download the whole game or possibly just one half.

It downloads from Wyscout as a single XML file in a Sportscode XML format that you can import directly into Sportscode.

If the video you’re using in Sportscode comes from Wyscout itself, then the data in the timeline will automatically be aligned with the video that you’ve downloaded. If you get video from a different source, or from multiple sources or multiple angles, you can use the workflow within Sportscode to align the data with the video.

Use Mentions to Communicate

Hudl users can now tag an athlete, any team member or any group of team members when they’re adding a comment.

By using the “@” character, you’ll get a filtered list of who you can tag. When you submit the comment, it automatically notifies everyone who’s tagged by sending them an email. And it adds the clip to that person’s (or that group’s) library as well.

ANALYSIS

Experience Options with the Data Source Selector

The find window it’s a really powerful component in Hudl Sportscode that allows you to search for instances across data sources. Up until recently, this feature was restricted to just the topmost timeline.

But now you’ll have more options. Using the data source selector, you can search for all timelines in a folder, recursively searching through all the timelines inside video packages within a selected folder. Provided that the video packages and timelines you want to search are organized in a single folder in your file structure, this function can be extremely helpful.

But if that’s not how you organize your files, you can also use the new custom selection feature within the data source selector. This allows you to apply your search criteria to any selected set of timelines and video packages, either in one or multiple folders in your file system.

What’s more, you’ll be able to do exactly the same thing with an output window. When you switch to report mode, you now get the data source selector in the toolbar. And from there, you can select multiple video packages and timelines within those video packages, exactly the same way as for the find window.

It will also work for the chart visualization feature previously mentioned, allowing you to generate a chart and visualize data in that chart across multiple games.

This feature significantly improves the quality of your analysis, allowing you to spend less time building databases and combining timelines, and more time searching and reporting across multiple games.

Analyze Multiple Games Faster in Hudl Sportscode

Hudl Sportscode now includes the ability to run a code window in report mode across all timelines in a folder or a custom selection of timelines.

When Hudl Sportscode was launched, it introduced significant performance improvements in databasing, with a specific package structure that was optimized for fast analysis across a whole season, rather than just being a simple video package.

Databasing has always been the cornerstone of multi-game analysis. It’s been a great mechanism for collating moments of interest from multiple games, either for further analysis, presentations or sharing to other members of your team.

Thanks to our latest enhancements to Hudl Sportscode, you can now analyze and find key moments across multiple games without needing to first use time-consuming workflows such as databasing or combining timelines.

This update includes the much requested ability to execute a code window in ‘report mode’ on all timelines in a folder, or even on a custom selection of games. This also supports the ability to generate video from the code window reports, giving you the possibility to add flags back to the original source or send to playlists whilst adding notes. This enhancement now allows you to access your custom data, along with your custom reports, across your custom selection of games.

This ability has also been added to the find window, allowing you to quickly return specific instances matching your search criteria.

COMING SOON: VISUALIZATIONS

See Your Data in Charts

We’ll be simplifying data visualization in Hudl Sportscode by adding a new button type to the code window: charts. A chart can be configured by a dropdown in the inspector to be either a bar chart, a column chart, a stacked version of the bar or column chart, or a pie chart. Expect more chart types to come in the future.

With this feature, you can embed a chart in your output window in exactly the same way that you’d embed code buttons, labeled buttons or action buttons in a code window. Each type of chart has a different set of parameters that you can configure in the dedicated inspector.

Just like action buttons in an output window, these elements of charts are linked to video. You can set them up so that if you click one section of the chart, it launches a video player with the corresponding instance you’ve configured. The chart updates live during the game, just like output reports do.

These basic charts are just the tip of the iceberg for some of the visualizations we’re working on. We think these visualizations are going to change the way you analyze data during a game, and the way you use Sportscode. Keep an eye out for future updates.

Improve Data Exports from a Matrix

Finally on analysis, let’s focus on how users can export data out of the matrix into other applications.

Generally this is in Excel or other databasing tools that you might use if you’re making use of Sportscode data and combining it with other data for other purposes. We’ve improved the functionality of how you export data from a matrix in Sportscode in CSV format. There are a couple of powerful features to enhance this. The first is the ability to design your own matrix. For example, adding columns based on functions involving labels in the matrix.

The other enhancement is the ability to point your own matrix to both the video package that matrix was generated from but also to different timelines for different games. Both of those features have now been added to Hudl Sportscode and will be available to use imminently.

LIVE

Import Live Data

Moving to live workflows, ones which involve Hudl Sportscode or Hudl Replay, you’ll now be able to import live sets of data provided by a third-party provider directly in your Hudl Sportscode timeline.

Before the start of the game, and from within the Sportscode import menu, you’ll see a list of live matches you can choose from. By selecting a game and clicking “Import match data”, the data will automatically get imported into your capturing timeline. This feature works over the internet, so it only requires access to the data source and the live video.

Automatically Sync New Instances

This was a much-requested feature that’s now available. Using the “Tag” button on the right-hand toolbar of the iPad screen, coaches using Hudl Replay can create new instances that automatically synchronize with Hudl Sportscode (if in use) and are represented by a new line in the timeline.

This feature allows coaches to quickly present clips that are meaningful to the team. If multiple coaches are using Hudl Replay, a new line will be created on the Hudl Sportscode timeline for each of them.

Enjoy Better Playlists

We use “playlist” as a generic term in Hudl Sportscode to identify an organizer or a sorter. It’s a curated ordered list of clips that you might use to prepare for a presentation or for sharing with your players via Hudl.com.

Over the last 12 months, we worked hard to improve playlists—they now include many features that users loved in v.11 of Sportscode, along with some brand new ones.

Send Clips to Database

All you have to do is select the clips in your sorter or organizer, click the database button that’s in the top toolbar of the playlist, and select which database you want to send it to.

View Proportional Instance Text

When using high-resolution monitors, the text now appears in an appropriate size for dimensions of the monitor or TV that you’re using.

Split Clips

You can now split single clips into two separate clips.

See Original Name & Number in Sorters

The original timeline, row name and instance number of the clip are now displayed in the sorter. You’ll have context of where the clip originated and what part of the game it came from in the timeline.

Edit Slide Names

You can now edit the name of a slide in a sorter to provide context about what’s actually appearing on a slide.

UPCOMING ENHANCEMENTS: PLAYLIST

Hide Columns

You’ll be able to show and hide all columns and overlay text in sorters with one click. When you choose to hide individual columns, they’ll stay hidden.

Write Better Instance Notes

If you’re a big user of instance notes in the sorter, then we have a couple of enhancements. The first one is that you’ll soon be able to commit an instance note and quickly move to the next clip in one hotkey.

If your Instance notes are too long to fit in the column width that you’ve chosen, you’ll soon have the ability to view the entire instance note as well.

Edit the Clip Row

The name that you see for those clips comes from the row name and timeline, but you’ll also have the ability to modify it. Some users use that in presentations and overlay texts, or even for grouping different clips and presentations.