TFB Review: Shotisize - The AI That Helps Improve Your Shooting

I’m no fan of the vast majority of hype surrounding LLMs/AI clients. For the most part, I feel like a majority of them aren’t really helping anyone do anything useful. But every once in a while, a tool comes along that makes me reconsider the broad brush with which I usually paint AI clients. To that point, the Shooters Global Shotisize AI feature in their Drills app is one of those rare cases. This specially designed “AI” can analyze new or existing range footage, detect your start signal and shots, and then overlay clean, professional shot times and splits right over the video for you to review or share with your fellow shooters. While I typically like to put a ton of rounds down range for each review I do, in this case, I decided to just use a bunch of older competition footage I have of myself, to see what the experience is like, and see what potential value an AI client like this might have for various shooters.

TFB Review: Shotisize - The AI That Helps Improve Your Shooting

• Product Website: https://timer.shooters.global/drills/
• iPhone:https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/drills-shooting-training-app/id1202856977?l=en-US
• AndroidOS:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=udtech.drills&hl=en_US&pli=1

Features

• Drill Training and Course Building.

The Drills app lets you create structured courses, run them with your timer, and track performance. It’s well organized with a library of standard drills. I use it occasionally for focused practice sessions, but it plays a supporting role to Shotisize for me right now.

• Live Timer Integration

Pair it with a Shooters Global timer via Bluetooth, and everything records with automatic overlays. Shotisize extends this capability to any setup, which is the bigger win for most users.

• Stats and Progress Tracking

Processed videos feed data into your long-term stats. You can watch trends over time and spot weaknesses. It’s basic but effective for serious improvement tracking.

• Export and Sharing Options

Export locally or share directly to social platforms. Quality holds up for training and content use, even if 4K originals get some compression.

First Impressions

As I mentioned in the intro, Shotisize is built into the free Drills app from Shooters Global. The app has been a solid training companion for years, but this AI upgrade turns any decent shooting video into something far more useful or, at the very least, more fun to share with your shooting buddies. The program is available for both iPhone and Android devices, and there might be minor differences between the two, so all of you iPhone users will have to cut me a bit of slack if a few details in these images look out of place.

While the AI features do come at a price and yet another pesky subscription model ( $4.99 a month or $39.99 for an annual subscription), the real hook is flexibility. You don’t need their timer or a special camera or a sophisticated crew coordinating everything. Any video from a phone, GoPro, or even a higher-end setup works as long as it has a clear audible start beep and live fire. That alone makes it a convenient shortcut who already film sessions to evaluate their performance for various shooting disciplines and want that time and information displayed side by side. You can essentially review the entirety of your archive of shooting footage with this one program much faster than you would be able to do this with only manual review and video editing software.

Shotisize Works with Old Footage

I figured I’d take most of the time here to explore just the Shotisize portion of the program. We’ll explore the rest of the drills app at a later date. I spent a lot of time trying to track down some specific videos I wanted to add shot timer footage to. The requirements for the videos are that they must be between 3 & 180 seconds in duration, contain shooting only (it won’t detect dry fire), and there should also be a loud audible “beep” sound that either is a shot timer or sounds like a shot timer (phone, air horn, friend who is very good at sound effects).

I fed the “app” several older videos from some range days last year, where we did some timed training using my Kestrel KTS-1000 shot timer, which surprisingly does not have any connectivity features with any apps despite its astronomical price. The process for uploading clips to Shotisize is simple: hit the Shotisize button, select the clip in the gallery, and let the AI go to work. It listens for the start signal and individual shots, then builds the timeline. This is about as easy as uploading a photo to Facebook.

Processing takes a minute or two. I uploaded some particularly large files harvested from one of my DSLRs that was shooting footage at 4K and 60P (this is a recipe for a large file size). It helps reduce processing times if you use lower resolution footage and reduce the length of your clips to only what is necessary. Most cellphone footage these days is almost imperceptible in quality for the average person viewing it on their phone, so you can completely get away with using even old 720p cellphone footage, provided it has clean audio. Once complete, you enter an editor that lets you review every detection - at least according to the AI. 

In practice, the AI handles most of the heavy lifting on clean footage, but as is typical for AI models, the real world quickly shows just how much more powerful a trained human brain is than an AI. Loud gravel footsteps, echoes, or any noise that drowns out the actual shots can confuse it. I ran into this with several older clips where the camera mic picked up heavy foot movement, reloads, and other mechanical noise that wasn’t shooting, and the AI kept registering those as extra shots.

A visual audio waveform helps tremendously with this, as it does in regular editing software for shooters. You can slide frame-by-frame, or shot by shot, to adjust sensitivity, tweak the echo filter, add missed shots, remove false positives, or nudge times by 0.01 seconds. Thankfully, the editor makes corrections straightforward. Each detected shot shows up as a small bullet icon on the timeline. You simply tap to accept it or mark it as noise, and the splits and totals update automatically. It’s not perfect, but the process is intuitive and far faster than building a timeline from scratch all on your own.

Overall, I’d say the AI is anywhere between 33% and 100% accurate, depending on the specific circumstances of the video. But, much like everything else that has to do with AI or LLMs, you’ll have to take any results it spits out at you with a mine’s worth of salt, and verify the work it has done for you, and it helps if you start by giving it good information. At the end of it all, after all the shots and beeps are properly accounted for, you can then use the editor to change the position and size of the shot timer as well as its contents. The Shotisize logo is there to stay and takes up a healthy portion of the bottom right corner of your video, where you can also display your username from the Drills app.

Once all the human work is done, the final video looks nice, consistent, and professional, and if you’ve done your part right, the shot information is displayed in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with the overall viewing of the video for critique on your performance. The skeek overlay shows splits, total time, and other data and updates as you’re watching the video. It exports to an MP4 format smoothly as long as you follow the on-screen prompts and don’t try to do anything else on your phone while it's working. The finished videos can also sync back into your Drills profile for tracking and sharing if you want to take advantage of those features. For anyone building content (like me), reviewing stages, or coaching, this saves hours of manual editing for you and your clients. I’ve posted a few examples of what the app spits throughout this article that were made entirely in the Shotisize application.

Final Thoughts

Shotisize is one of the first effective uses of “AI” I’ve seen in the firearms space at the civilian level. I think what I like is that it respects the user by keeping manual controls front and center while doing the repetitive work efficiently(at least with ideal footage), which is exactly what we keep computers and other devices of convenience around for. I’m looking forward to range testing with new footage soon to push it harder, but even with existing clips, it has already proven useful and rather intuitive to pick up. Hopefully, we can squeeze a bit more out of the system when it’s paired with a Shooters Global shot timer.

I would really like to see a few changes to the app, particularly that you can’t use the internal editing software in landscape mode (you can obviously view the finished videos in landscape mode on your phone). Editing a video on a vertical screen in any application is just plain not fun, and while I know vertical mode only simplifies things, I’d at least like the option there for those of us with wide preferences. I’d also like to see the model improved to better detect suppressed and maybe even dry fire shots. I’d also like to see some refinement in the accuracy that the model is capable of when detecting shots in this type of footage. Not everyone is going to be shooting in a controlled environment and may have to contend with noise on another bay or range, and the biggest advertised feature of Shotisize is that it's supposed to auto-detect your shots for you. Luckily, I shoot mostly in remote areas, so this isn’t an issue for me, but your mileage may vary depending on your environment and the skill of your camerawork.

That being said, the Drills portion of the program is still free to download and use and has a ton of features that should be helpful, even to new shooters. Shotisize is likely best suited for competitors, instructors, or anyone who films training and wants to be able to pair that with videos of their runs. To me, this simply makes something that would normally take a lot of video editing time and human effort into a very trivial task that requires only that you have the footage and the Shotisize subscription.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this one. AI, LLMs, and the like are a very touchy subject. Has AI gone too far this time? Will our shooting footage submitted to this app eventually be used by Skynet to train T-800s to shoot guns, or secretly be sent to the government so they can further infringe on our rights? Or is this something that you might find useful for helping improve and refine your firearm skills? Stay tuned for some more future coverage, next time on one of the Shooters Global shot timers, which we can then tie into the Drills app to see what that has to offer. Thanks, as always, for reading.