How did they do that?

[Paul Taylor]

[Tim Wescott]

Probably computer vision to track the image of the plane, and some hand-editing to tell the tracker what to track and when.

Just like when they do it with race cars on the sports programs.

[john e. holliday]

Similar videos have been on with discussions about how it would change judging.

[Peter Nevai]

Motion Capture software. These days there are a number of software apps that do that. No longer exclusively the domain for 3D character animation. It can even be done after the video is taken, using software applications like Adobe Aftereffects where you can define any point in the frame and the computer software will follow the defined point around the frame. So long as the object is always within the frame it is really easy to set up.

[PJ Rowland]

I spoke to the guy who did it.
Its stop frame motion editor software and each manouver is drawn in dots by hand.  Took several hours to do each one!

Im fairly certain we could do the same with trakman or similar radar tracking.

[Peter Nevai]

I spoke to the guy who did it.
Its stop frame motion editor software and each manouver is drawn in dots by hand.  Took several hours to do each one!

Im fairly certain we could do the same with trakman or similar radar tracking.

Don't really need any special equipment. Just a video camera and software. So long as the object stands out from the background (in this case an open sky) software can track the object in the frame without issue. The software tracks the moving pixels and then you can have it plot out the path. Path plotting is used primarily as a tool to fine tune the motion capture and to be able to clone the motion and export it out for marrying to a 3D wireframe in an external application. But unless you have $800 to $2K to spend on the software, it is a bit extreme for analyzing model airlanes. If you want to play with motion capture the following is a good free source. https://www.kinovea.org/