What’s new in CaddieStudio.

Faster first launch and updates

• Opens much sooner the first time on Windows. The app's own code now ships in two files instead of about a hundred, so Windows security has far less to check before it starts.

• A pop-up tells you when a new version is out. Press Update to download and install it (on Windows), What's New to see this page, or close it to keep your current version. On a Mac, or if you installed with the itch.io app, Update opens the download page.

• Signed by the developer. Windows shows "Grant Laughlin" as the publisher instead of "Unknown publisher".

• No more black console window flashing when you import clips.

• Graphics opens faster the first time.

• An Opening project window shows progress while a project opens, and big projects open over twice as fast.

Auto Tracer

• Cancel Auto Tracer with Esc, the toolbar button, or the banner's Cancel. Your points go back to how they were.

• Took a click in the wrong place? Right-click it to take it back, or drag it to move it.

• While it searches, the tracer shows a clean arc through your three clicks instead of a bent line.

• Steadier finish when the ball lands between two video frames.

• Add Target Instead finishes much sooner once the ball reaches the target.

Editing and playback

• Preview from the middle of a clip now restarts the sound along with the video.

• Loop Preview and Half-Speed Preview in Settings → Editing. Shift+Space plays one Preview at half speed.

• Choose how many frames Shift+Left/Right jumps (Settings → Editing).

• New installs zoom in up to 15x and start with lighter smoothing (0.5x).

• Panning with a trackpad now uses H (hold and drag), so Space always plays and pauses.

Click snap

• Clicks snap to the ball's center more often, with fewer snaps to the wrong spot.

Tracer look

• Volt / Orange Sky is the new default look for new clips.

• Fewer fade settings: Trail Length is the whole time the line stays, Faded Launch End fades the start, and Solid Landing Part is under More options.

• Middle Size runs from 0.1x to 1.0x (1.0x is as wide as the start).

• Click a slider's number to type a value past the slider for sizes, lengths and times. Percentages stay between 0% and 100%.

• Settings → Tracer Style now shows this clip's End and Middle Size, the same as the Style panel.

• Hide Points and Hide Tracer now work separately, and you can still zoom with points hidden.

Export

• iPhone HDR clips stay HDR in MP4 exports, Dolby Vision included. Only the tracer is added on top.

• Export waits for Reanalyze Camera to finish, so the export uses the new track.

• Canceling Export All shows a short note instead of an error.

• Exports finish about a quarter sooner. The tracer looks exactly the same.

• Fixed a crash that could happen when starting an export.

• Optional: open the folder when an export finishes (Settings → Export).

Settings

• Shortcuts like Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro in Settings → Hotkeys (CapCut already matches the defaults).

• A Projects folder (Documents\Caddie Studio\Projects to start) where Save and Open Project begin.

• Check for Updates and the version number in Settings → General.

• Reset to Default Settings, which asks first and can be undone.

• The GPU camera tracking option is gone: the regular tracker is as accurate and much faster.

Projects

• File → Collect Project copies every clip a project uses into one folder next to the project and points the project at the copies, so it moves to another computer in one piece. Your original clips aren't touched.

Graphics

• Graphics shows which project it belongs to, and says so when you open it from Home with tracers open, so tracers and graphics stay in one project.

• Six new looks in the brand picker: Broadcast Classic, Clean Minimal, Tour Neon, Retro Scorecard, Bold Sport and Links Heritage.

• New Skins graphic and a Sponsor End Card with an optional logo.

• Long player, team and course names fit better, export folders and files are labeled 16x9 / 9x16 / 1x1, and Graphics says when it reopened your last round.

Home screen

• Tutorial on the Home screen is now a short tour of Home. Tracer and Graphics each keep their own tutorial.

Fixes

• Pressing OK in Settings no longer shows an error, and changing Performance no longer stops an analysis that's running.

• Send Feedback is addressed to hello@caddiestudio.com and hands you the report file to attach.

Auto Tracer

• Click the ball three times and Caddie Studio finds the rest of the flight. Click Auto Tracer on the main bar, then click where the ball is struck, once on the way up when it's clear against the sky, and where it lands. A banner above the video says which click is next.

• If it can't find the ball near one end, it asks for one more click there and searches again from it.

• Line up the next shot while one is searching. Make the next shot's three clicks and it starts on its own when its turn comes.

• Found points are ordinary points: right-click to remove one, or add your own to fix a stretch.

• Add Target Instead: no landing click? Add a target and Auto Tracer follows the ball down onto it.

Camera tracking

• Background tracking is more accurate. A clip-wide pass after the first analysis stops slow drift, so tracers stay on the background through pans and zooms. It runs in the background, so you can start tracing right away.

• The original tracking is kept as a backup: right-click a shot → Use Original Camera Tracking.

Tracer look

• New Perspective setting (Style panel → Advanced Effects → Shape): the tracer can shrink as the ball flies away from the camera.

• New built-in presets using the new perspective look.

• Auto Sky colors the sky parts of a Multi-Color Line, including sky between tree branches.

• Zoomed-In Opacity (Settings → Fading): the tracer fades as the video zooms in, while the landing stays solid.

• Rotate now turns the tracer, camera track and aim marker with the clip.

Graphics

• Graphics is now part of Caddie Studio: score bugs, lower thirds, hole cards and leaderboards as overlay videos. Pick Tracer or Graphics from the Home screen; one project holds both.

Settings and workflow

• Settings is organized into pages in a sidebar, with Hotkeys you can change.

• Settings → Analysis & Speed → Performance: Light, Balanced or Max. Light keeps the app responsive while analysis runs.

• Snap clicks to the ball (Settings → Editing) moves each click onto the ball's center.

• Select several shots in the Shots panel and right-click to act on all of them.

• "Save this as a project?" now comes after your first export.

• MP4 and ProRes exports are named <clip>_tracer.

• New License... item in the gear menu. Caddie Studio is still free with no limits during the beta.

• Updates can install inside the app (Windows, optional): tick Settings → General → Download and install updates inside the app, and the next update downloads, is checked, and installs when you restart.

Saving

• A save button (floppy disk) sits next to File. It and Ctrl+S (Cmd+S on a Mac) save the project straight to its file. Only the first save asks where. File → Save Project As... (Ctrl+Shift+S) saves a copy somewhere new.

• Saving a tracer preset under a name you already used asks whether to overwrite it, instead of making a second preset with the same name.

Style panel

• Click a slider's number to type an exact value. Sizes, lengths, offsets and times can be typed past the end of the slider, e.g. a 20 s Trail Length. Opacity, glow strength and other percentages stay within 0–100%.

• Trail Length now goes up to 10 seconds on the slider, so a Band tracer can stay on screen for a whole long flight.

• Multi-Color Line sections can be as short as you like, down to the last frame or two of a flight (e.g. the ball dropping behind a hill).

Add Apex and Add Target

• Their instructions now show as a banner across the top of the video, like Color mode's. Right-click cancels.

• A target added with fewer than 4 clicks is labeled Needs more points instead of "Not used".

Export All

• Progress shows at the bottom of the window ("Exporting 2 of 5: …"), with a Cancel Export button.

Getting started

• Shorter welcome text. The Quick Overview has new Style Your Tracer and Save & Export pages.

Cleaner layout

• Toolbar: one row. Home is a house icon. New Project, Import Clips, Open/Save Project and Open/Save Tracer are in the File menu. Settings, Tutorial and Developer Mode are in the gear menu. Export is the blue button, and Send Feedback stays on the bar.

• Track Ball and Rotate moved to a shot's right-click menu in the Shots panel.

• Style panel (was "Tracer Preferences"): clip details are behind the ⓘ button next to the clip name. Every slider shows its value. Flight Trail Duration is now Trail Length, and all timings read in seconds. Advanced Effects is split into Shape, Glow & Blur, Shadow and Fading, each opened on its own.

• Shots panel: long names are shortened with "…" instead of scrolling sideways. Apply Preset and Export are two drop-down buttons. Cancel Analysis only shows while analysis is running.

• Timeline: Hide/Show Tracer is an eye button. Add Target diamonds sit on their own row under the scrub bar, so they never overlap your points.

• The "trajectory confidence low" warning only shows in Developer Mode.

• Home screen: Recent Projects are cards with a thumbnail and shot count. Tutorial and Send Feedback are in the sidebar. The Programs card and Import Clips button are gone (drop clips on the window, or click the drop area, to import).

Home screen

• Caddie Studio now opens to a Home screen. Start a New Project, Open a saved one, pick from your Recent Projects, or just drag clips (or a whole folder of them) onto the window to start a new project with them. Dropping a saved project file opens it.

• Choose what happens when the app opens: show the Home screen, go straight to Tracer, or reopen your last project.

• New Home and New Project buttons in the editor's toolbar. Both close the current project (asking you to save first if needed); Home takes you back to the Home screen, New Project (Ctrl+N / Cmd+N) gives you an empty editor right away.

Tracer start and finish shapes

• New Tracer Start and Tracer Finish options in Advanced Effects > Shape choose how each end of the tracer looks. Start: Round (as before), Square, Pointed (grows out of a point), or Flared (starts wide and flat, then quickly narrows into the tracer, as if it's sliding away from the camera). Finish: Round, Square, or Pointed (tapers to a point as the ball lands -- in the air the tracer draws normally).

• Start Size/Length and Finish Size/Length sliders appear under a Pointed or Flared end: Size sets how wide a flared start is, or how blunt a pointed tip is; Length sets how quickly or slowly it tapers.

• Saved with presets and projects. Everything saved before keeps its round ends.

Aim Marker

• New Aim Marker section under the tracer controls: put a shape in the sky where the golfer is aiming. It's up while they line up and disappears 1.5 s after the strike (adjustable), so viewers can see whether the tracer goes through it.

• Tick Show Aim Marker, then click (or drag) on the video to place it. It stays fixed to that spot as the camera pans and zooms.

• 10 shapes (triangle, diamond, circle, ring, square, star, chevron, crosshair, bullseye and more), size, filled or outline, color, outline, opacity, glow, shadow, and a fade, pop or shrink animation.

• The marker's look is saved in your tracer presets. Whether a shot has one, and where, stays with that shot. Undo works for placing it.

• It appears in every export and in the preview.

Zooming out past the frame

• When you zoom out far enough to see the border around the frame (to place a point where the ball went off screen), a note at the bottom of the video says Press ⌘0 to fit to screen (Ctrl+0 on Windows), so it's easy to get back to the full frame. It only shows while you're zoomed out, and it follows the key if you change it in Settings > Hotkeys.

Tracer color sections

• Auto Color by Background is now Multi-Color Line, and it can color as many parts of the flight as you like, not just one sky stretch. Switching it on keeps the tracer one color until you choose: Auto Sky colors open sky automatically (sky on both sides of a branch included), and Edit Colors lets you pick your own stretches, e.g. where the ball passes behind a tree.

• Edit Colors opens Color mode: click the tracer twice, where the new color starts and then where it ends, with on-screen step-by-step prompts. Each section's controls sit just off the tracer, joined to it by a short line: drag a diamond tab to move an edge, click the color dot to pick a color, right-click to remove. Your ball points are dimmed and locked while you're in Color mode, so nothing gets grabbed by mistake.

• The section you just added or dragged always wins: drag an edge over another section and it covers it. The covered section isn't cut, it keeps its own range underneath (shown as a faint dashed ghost in Color mode, its tabs still grabbable), so moving or removing whatever covers it brings it right back.

• Undo / Redo (Ctrl/Cmd+Z, Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z) now include color edits: adding, dragging, recoloring and removing sections, and switching Auto Sky on or off, in the same history as your ball points. One drag is one undo step.

• Every preset comes with four colors ready to use (base, Sky, Accent 1, Accent 2), and choosing a preset keeps your sections.

• A thin color strip under the timeline shows which color the tracer is at each moment.

• The color change no longer looks like it jumps backward on slow shots: it now fades in over a few frames as the ball crosses.

Tripod clips

• Camera analysis now notices a tripod clip on its own. If the background hasn't moved after about a second, it checks the rest of the clip, and if the view holds still it stops analyzing and moves on to the next clip. The Shots panel then says Tripod detected instead of "Analyzed by GPU/CPU". If the camera only moves near the end (someone picks the phone up), it skips the still part and analyzes just the end (Tripod detected, then moved).

• After three tripod clips in a row, it asks whether every clip in the project was filmed on a tripod. Yes skips camera analysis entirely for every other clip in the project (they show Tripod (skipped)), and the project remembers your answer.

• Got one wrong? Right-click the shot and choose Analyze Camera Motion Anyway.

Export

• Two new tracer-only export formats for editors that can't read ProRes transparency, such as CapCut, iMovie and phone editors. If your editor supports ProRes 4444, that's still the best choice.

  • Screen Blend (MP4, Black): the tracer on black. Put it above your clip and set its blend mode to Screen. It matches the preview exactly, fades and glow included. Best for white or light tracers.

  • Green Screen (MP4, Chroma Key): the tracer on green, for any tracer color. Put it above your clip and use Chroma Key. Because a chroma key can't keep a half-faded pixel, fades become a thinning tail and a retract into the landing spot, and glow and shadow are left out.

• Batch exports name these <clip>_screenblend.mp4 and <clip>_greenscreen.mp4, so they never overwrite a regular MP4 export in the same folder.

• MP4 (Tracer + Video) colors now match your original clip. Exports used to come out with slightly shifted colors in editors like CapCut and Premiere.

• HDR clips (the default on recent iPhones and many other cameras) look faded while you edit. That's only the preview. The app now tells you so when you open one. For HDR clips, export the tracer on its own (ProRes 4444, Screen Blend or Green Screen) and layer it over your original clip to keep its real colors. MP4 (Tracer + Video) isn't available for HDR clips yet.

Tracer

• Tracer width, particle spacing and shadow offset now scale with your clip's resolution, so a 4K clip's tracer looks the same as on 1080p instead of half as thick. Projects where you already widened the tracer for a 4K clip will now look thicker; turn Width back down to fix it.

Stability

• The app no longer dies silently on an unexpected bug. Uncaught errors are now logged, saved to a crash report file, and shown as a plain-language dialog instead of just vanishing or printing to a console nobody's watching.

• Camera motion analysis (the automatic pass that runs on every clip you import) now tells you if it fails, instead of leaving the clip stuck on "Analyzing..." forever with no explanation.

• Closing the app while an export is running now asks first, instead of freezing the window until the export finishes on its own.

Feedback

• New Send Feedback button in the toolbar — report a bug, request a feature, or share general notes at any time, whether or not a clip is loaded. It saves a report locally (including recent app activity, if you opt in) and opens an email draft so you can send it along.

Getting started

• A new tutorial walks through the whole workflow the first time you launch the app: importing a clip, what the background analysis pass is actually doing, how to place points on the ball (click it every few frames going up and down, skip ahead to wherever it reappears if it's lost from view), and every playback/zoom/undo shortcut. Reopen it anytime from the Tutorial button in the toolbar.

• The Tutorial button now offers two things. Quick Overview is the same read-through as above. Interactive Walkthrough is new: it opens a real example shot — clip and finished tracer already loaded — and then points at each part of the app in turn, on the actual controls, one click at a time. Nothing you already have open is closed or changed; the example just joins your Shots list, and you can leave at any point with Skip.

• Fixed the Interactive Walkthrough's example tracer not rendering at all — a bad camera-motion value in the bundled sample threw it off-screen on every frame. It also now opens on the moment of contact instead of partway through the flight, starts on a named preset instead of "Custom," and ends by pointing you at Clear Tracer to try placing your own points on the same shot.

• The "Analyzing camera motion..." status now explains itself on hover — what it's doing and why it runs automatically — instead of just sitting there unexplained.

• A new Tutorial Mode toggle (Tutorial → Tutorial Mode in the toolbar) switches every tooltip between full explanations and a shorter, compact style — on by default. Settings still has a finer-grained "Tooltip Detail" option if you want more control, and the two now always agree — picking a Settings option the toolbar toggle can't represent on its own (Shortcut Only or Off) no longer leaves the toggle showing a stale, contradictory checked state.

• A new status-bar message calls out low-confidence stretches of a trajectory by frame range (e.g. "Trajectory confidence low from frames 31-79") — previously the only way to spot one was noticing a fainter point on the canvas.

• A play/pause button now sits next to the frame-step buttons at the bottom, so playback doesn't only work via the Space key.

Undo

• Ctrl+Z (and Ctrl+Y / Ctrl+Shift+Z to redo) now undoes trajectory point edits — placing a point, removing one, dragging one, adding an apex marker, even Clear Tracer. Toolbar Undo/Redo buttons are also available. Previously the only way back from an accidental run of clicks was Clear Tracer, which wiped the whole trajectory, not just the mistake.

Cancel long-running analysis

• Camera motion analysis (the longest common wait in the app, roughly 1.5 minutes per clip) can now be cancelled mid-run from the toolbar. A cancelled clip can simply be re-selected later to try again.

Settings that stick

• Your editing preferences — including a default tracer style and default export format — are now remembered between sessions instead of resetting every time you relaunch the app.

Easier to follow along

• The window title now shows which clip is open and whether you have unsaved changes.

• A status bar confirms when the app autosaves your work.

• The Shots list explains itself when empty instead of just looking blank.

• Tracer style controls, the export dialog, and the timeline's frame-step buttons now have tooltips explaining what they do.

• The video preview itself now has a tooltip — click to add a point, right-click to remove one, scroll to zoom, middle-click and drag to pan — since it previously had no discoverability at all, being a blank canvas rather than a labeled control.

• A handful of common actions gained keyboard shortcuts: Import (Ctrl+I), Export (Ctrl+E), Save Tracer (Ctrl+S), Open Tracer (Ctrl+O), Undo (Ctrl+Z), Redo (Ctrl+Y / Ctrl+Shift+Z).

• Applying a tracer preset to every open shot now asks for confirmation first, matching how removing a shot or clearing a tracer already works.

• Removing your last remaining shot is no longer blocked. It now returns you to the same blank "no clip loaded" screen you see on first launch, ready to import something new.

New presets

• Three new tracer presets: Cinematic Drop (a soft drop shadow and a wider glow), Neon Comet (a bright, high-glow tapering tail), and Soft Focus (a bright line with a gently feathered edge instead of a crisp one). Four presets that were mostly just recolors of the same look (Broadcast Yellow, Tournament Style, Neon Green, Sunset Orange) were retired to make room — every remaining preset now looks meaningfully different from every other one.

Easier to click small, distant balls

• Scroll-zoom on the trajectory canvas can now go further than the old fixed 8x ceiling — raise Max Zoom in Settings if a small or distant ball is still hard to click exactly even fully zoomed in. Zooming in further makes the image more pixelated past a certain point, so this is opt-in rather than a new fixed default.

• New Fit to Screen shortcut (Ctrl+0 by default, rebindable in Settings → Hotkeys) resets zoom and pan back to the whole frame in one press, instead of scrolling all the way back down.

Performance

• Placing and removing tracer points is now noticeably faster, especially on shots where you've tracked a long stretch of flight (or a roll-out after landing) — it no longer redoes more work than it needs to on every single click.

• Importing a clip no longer spends time analyzing the sky for automatic trail-color matching unless a tracer style actually has "match trail color to sky" turned on. That analysis now runs lazily, the moment a style needs it, instead of on every import whether it's used or not.

• The Interactive Walkthrough no longer stutters clicking Next between the Presets, Color, and Advanced Effects steps — it was needlessly redoing a full layout pass each time to "redock" a panel that was already exactly where it needed to be.

• Clips longer than 15 seconds now ask you to select the part where the ball is in the air before the automatic camera-motion analysis pass runs, with a live preview and an estimated wait time as you narrow it down. A clip you import at its normal length never sees this prompt — it's only long, untrimmed clips that pay for the extra step, and only once (you can skip it and come back to it later from the Shots list).

• Importing several clips at once (e.g. a whole round) no longer bogs down the machine. The Shots list now shows "Queued..." for clips waiting their turn instead of every one claiming "Analyzing..." at once, the status bar names which clip out of the batch is currently running, and a brief pause between clips gives your GPU/computer room to breathe during a long import instead of running flat-out back to back. A single imported clip behaves exactly as before.

• Camera motion analysis now adapts automatically if something else on your computer (a game, another GPU-heavy app) is competing for the graphics card while it runs. It keeps working either way — just slower when the GPU is busy — and the status bar will say "GPU busy, running slower than usual" so it's clear what's happening instead of it looking stuck.

• On a slower graphics card, the app now measures your very first clip's camera-tracking speed and, if it looks slow, offers to switch to the CPU-based tracker for a smoother experience — a one-time banner with Switch to CPU, Keep GPU, and Don't Ask Again. It never switches anything on its own, since GPU tracking can still be more accurate on fast pans and zooms; the choice (and a manual "Camera tracking" option in Settings) is entirely yours.

• Initial private beta release.