DIY Indoor Swing Video Lighting for Your Golf Studio

Here's a setup that works well for us in our commercial facility, and the good news is, all the components are readily available and relatively inexpensive:

After trying more than a dozen high-lumen LED bulbs on the market, testing them for flicker and dimmability, we found the Satco 33W PAR38 3000K High Lumen LED from BulbAmerica.com. These have zero flicker when using high-speed cameras at up to 240 fps, dim down smoothly (without flicker all the way), and are very, very bright:

We like these line voltage track lighting fixtures from Direct-Lighting.com. The metal ring is ideal for affixing a DIY snoot (see below), and they're very inexpensive:

If you want the best projected image on your impact screen while you have your swing video lights on, you absolutely need to put snoots on the fixtures to keep side light leakage off the screen. We use 3" plain magnetic strips from DiscountMagnet.com, cut to fit with little notches for the light fixture swivel points, which hold to the light fixture rings, and for extra glare protection line the inside of them (on the side away from the screen, which will glare a bit towards the screen) with adhesive-backed felt from Amazon. For a longer snoot, you can double-up the magnetic strips, overlapping the first one by an inch or so with a second strip.

The fixtures above are for H-Tracks. We use two of these WAC Lighting HT4-BK 4-foot tracks from Amazon, mounted between 5-8 feet away from the ball on either side (running perpendicular to the screen) and centered on ball position. You'll want 3 to 5 lights on each track (the more light you have on the golfer, the better video quality you'll get). You'll also need two WAC Lighting HFC-BK Floating Canopy Connectors from Amazon for the end point of your wiring, and (optionally) 4 of these WAC Lighting H-ENDCAP-BK End Caps from Amazon.

Here's an unedited photo from our demo/testing studio with 10 lights on full-blast. Note the light fall-off on the floor about 5 feet in front of the impact screen - our snoots nearly completely block the light from hitting our screen. If this article helped you, please see the link below to leave us a Google review!