WatchGameFilm Support Center

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  3. Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Subscriptions

Q. Can I pay by check or activate using a purchase order?
Yes. While the majority of teams purchase online using a credit card, teams may pay by check. We also accept purchase orders in order to activate a team. Please contact help@watchgamefilm.com to explain your situation or need.  We are happy to help.

Q. Do I have to log into PayPal to make a payment?
No. While we use PayPal as our payment processing engine, you do not need to be a member of PayPal to make your payment online.  Within the WGF Subscription page, click on the Purchase button.  The PayPal login window will then appear.  Under the login dialog you will see a button called Pay with Debit or Credit Card.

Film Viewing

Q. Why does none of my film show up in the player?

1) The most common reason of why people don't see any of their film is they haven't expanded their film tree by pressing theicon found to the left of the Film name. The number to the right of the Event name counts how many film(s) are housed under an individual Event. So, if you truly have no film, then awill appear to the right of the Event name with no blue plus icon to the left of the Event name. 

2) The second most common reason is that the wrong time period is selected for viewing film. Make sure you have the correct time period selected by choosing from thedropdown. Every Event has a date assigned to it when it got created. That assigned date determines which time period(s) that Event (and all films housed under it) appears in your film tree. By default, the time period is set to "This Week" when you first load the player.

The following is a screenshot of a team WITH film under the selected time period:


The following is a screenshot of a team WITHOUT film under the selected time period:



3) The third possibility is that the video may not have fully uploaded. This is caused by the upload window being closed out before the video is completely done uploading, often occuring when people close the upload window when they see the bar reach 100%. Even though it says 100%, it isn't fully done yet.

You can tell if the video is completely finished uploading when you are brought back to this screen:



4) You'll also want to check if you have created the Event prior to uploading your film. On WatchGameFilm you MUST create your event prior to uploading your film. Click here to see how to create an Event.

Q. How can I remove the large Play | Pause button in the middle of the video player?
This issue is primarily related to Chrome and Opera browsers.  WatchGameFilm.com uses the native video player of the current browser that you are using.  Unfortunately, the Chrome browser implements its own video player that contains a large Play-Pause button that obstructs viewing parts of the video.  Opera uses the base code of Chrome and thus has the same problem.  We are currently working on this issue.  However; an immediate work around to this issue is to switch to Microsoft Edge or Firefox when viewing film in order to avoid the large Play-Pause button.

Q. Why does the video player show a black screen with audio when watching film?
This issue most likely is around the hardware acceleration of your web browser.  You can usually Disable Hardware Acceleration under Advanced Settings in your browser.  For Chrome users:

  1. Enter chrome://settings in the address bar
  2. Scroll to the bottom of Chrome's settings page and click Advanced
  3. Scroll to the bottom of Chrome's advanced settings page
  4. In the System section, slide the Use hardware acceleration when available toggle to off
  5. Click RELAUNCH to restart Chrome

Film Upload and Encoding

Q. I uploaded my film so why can't I view immediately view it?
WatchGameFilm.com needs to encode your film to a device compatible MP4 video format so that your film can successfully stream across all of the various user devices. We format your upload into a standard H.264 video format and optimize the bitrate and video size to a level that will stream well across mobile phones, tablets, tvs and other smart devices as well as your standard computer. This encoding process usually takes up to 20 minutes to complete so be patient. Please contact help@watchgamefilm.com if you are still having problems.

Q. I uploaded my film over an hour ago so now why can't I view it?
Does the video you uploaded have sound? If not, when you created the film did you say Remove Audio when you filled out the film record? We are unable to encode a video for sound when there is no sound in the video, so our encoders set the film aside and move on to the next in queue. You can contact help@watchgamefilm.com so that we can look into it and confirm that this is the situation, or you can create another New Film record (this time setting it to Remove Audio) and try uploading again.

This issue appears resolved and you can leave audio ON when creating a film and uploading clips with no sound.  We are currently testing it Live.

Q. Why does is it say my film is too large to upload?
We allow up to 2GB per clip for file upload. Remember, this is per clip, not per film. 99.9% of all videos uploaded will never incur this problem. However, if your video clip file is over 2 GB you will be unable to upload it through our standard process. If this was a full length game recorded as a single video file, we recommend in the future that you a.) do your film recording as periods or halves and upload just a couple of smaller files instead of one giant file or b.) check your camera settings and lower the video quality of your recording. WatchGameFilm.com streams everywhere, so we need to optimize the original video to make that happen. If WatchGameFilm.com is the only place your video will be viewed, lowering the video quality during recording time will lower your file size to get under 2 GB as well as shorten your upload time when sending the film to us. For your immediate problem, contact help@watchgamefilm.com so that we can get your larger than 2 GB film online.  We can open up a share in our cloud so that you can send us this oversized file and they we can manually encode and process it for you so that it gets online and can be watched by your team.

Q. Why does my upload timeout or report the error "The web server returned unexpected response"?
This is most likely happening because your computer is going into "sleep" mode during your upload.  Uploads can take up to a few hours depending on your upload bandwidth and the amount of data you are transferring.  Change the sleep timer on your computer to be longer than the upload to avoid this problem.  We also recommend to record your games using a lower video quality setting such as SD instead of HD in order to lower the file size of your videos which will in turn shorten the length of upload time.

Q. I recorded video using my iPhone and created a new film record with No Sound.  Why didn't the video encode?
Your iPhone is most likely using a compressed Apple-based video format (High Efficiency HEIF/HEVC) that works with Mac related tools and WGF.com is also able to correctly encode the video if sound is allowed.  Currently we are unable to encode iPhone HEVC video if you set the New Film record to No Sound for audio.  For now, to be able to use an iPhone to record film (WITH NO SOUND) for WatchGameFilm.com; on your iPhone do the following:

  1. Go to iPhone Settings
  2. Select Camera
  3. Select Formats
  4. Select Most Compatible option instead of High Efficiency
  5. When you create a WGF.com new film record, remember to select No Sound for audio

Now record your video using your iPhone and upload to WGF.com (note: you can use your iPhone to log into WGF.com and upload your clips.  The encoding will now be successful and you will be able to watch film recorded from an iPhone.

This issue is only for iPhone videos that need the sound removed during WGF.com encoding.  iPhone video uploaded to WGF.com with audio on encode correctly.

Users

Q. Why can't I change the name or email address of a user on my team?
WGF.com users own their profile when you add them to your team. Their email address is their unique identifier in our system. Users may be added to multiple teams, so if a coach on one team could change the user's profile data, that would then change across all teams. Thus, we leave the ability to change the name to the user instead of a coach on a team. Regarding the email address, if it needs to be changed because the old one is no longer valid, we recommend that you add them as a new user with the new email address and then once they log in successfully, remove their user account that has the old email address. If you simply made a typo in the user name when setting up their account, please contact help@watchgamefilm.com to help you make the change.  You can also tell the user they can correct their own name under My Profile.



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