A breakdown lives or dies on one thing: can the viewer see what you are talking about before they scroll. Your read of the possession might be right, your voiceover might be good, and it will not matter if the thing you are describing is a blur of five jerseys in the corner of a phone screen.
That is what the diagram is for. The clip proves it happened. The diagram shows what it was.
The three formats worth making
Vertical, 1080 by 1920. The default for a feed. The layout that has settled in basketball content is the game clip across the top half and an animated diagram across the bottom half, with a title banner sitting on the seam between them. The viewer’s eye goes to the moving footage, then drops to the diagram when they want to know why.
The diagram half of that frame is 1080 by 960. That is the number to export at, not 1080 by 1920, because the top half is your footage.
Square, 1080 by 1080. Older, still fine, and better when the diagram is the whole point and there is no footage — a set you drew, a coverage you are explaining, a play you want people to steal.
Landscape, 1920 by 1080. For anything longer than a minute and anything going on YouTube. A landscape breakdown can hold a full-court diagram and a half-court one side by side; a vertical one cannot, and squeezing it is how you get a diagram nobody can read.
Pick the format before you draw. A full-court press break is unreadable in a vertical half-frame. Draw it landscape or do not draw it.
Pacing
One idea per clip. Not one possession, one idea. If a possession has a ball screen, a slip and a weak-side flare, that is three clips, and each one gets watched.
Show the action twice. First at real speed, so the viewer sees what a defender actually has to deal with. Then slower, with the diagram, so they can follow the timing. The second pass is where the teaching happens, and it is the reason people save the post.
That is a hammer: a baseline drive one way, timed with a weak-side flare screen that sends a shooter to the opposite corner. It is a perfect breakdown subject because the point of it is invisible in the live clip. The interesting player is the one nobody is watching, on the other side of the floor, and a diagram is the only way to show him.
The first two seconds carry the whole clip. Do not spend them on a logo, a countdown, or “in today’s video”. Spend them on the thing itself: the screen being set, the defender getting pinned, the number on the screen. Say the noun first.
Length: fifteen to thirty seconds for one action. Sixty to ninety for a full possession with two or three reads. Past two minutes you are making a YouTube video, which is a different job and wants landscape.
Captions
Assume the sound is off, because it usually is.
- Burn the key words in. Not a transcript. Three or four words at the moment they matter: “back screen on the roller”, “low man has to help”, “nobody is home”.
- Put them where the eye already is. On a stacked reel, that is the seam, not the bottom edge, where the app’s own buttons sit.
- Leave the safe margins alone. Most vertical apps overlay controls on the right edge and the bottom. Anything in those strips will be covered on somebody’s phone.
- One caption per beat. If two captions are on screen at once, neither gets read.
The title banner across the seam does double duty: it names the play for someone who already knows the concept, and it survives being reposted without your voiceover.
Lining the animation up with the footage
This is the part that takes the longest and the part most people get wrong.
A real possession does not run at the speed of a clean diagram. The screen in the clip arrives late, the pass is a beat behind, the roll is slower than the drawing. If you drop a diagram in at its natural speed it will be a second ahead of the footage by the end, and every viewer will feel it even if they cannot say why.
Two ways to fix it. Either set the diagram to a fixed total length — four seconds, six seconds, whatever the clip is — and let it stretch to fit. Or hold a frame at the start, let the footage catch up, and release.
Spain pick-and-roll is the clearest example of why the timing matters. The whole action depends on the back screen landing while the big is still dropping. Half a second early in the animation and it looks like two unrelated screens.
What the export actually does
Here is what you get and what you do not, plainly, so you can plan the edit.
What it exports. The animation as a video file, rendered frame by frame from the play rather than recorded off the screen, so it never drops frames. Any camera view you have on screen, including a free orbit or any of the presets. Format presets for the reel lower half at 1080 by 960, the full vertical frame at 1080 by 1920, square at 1080 by 1080 and landscape at 1920 by 1080. Thirty or sixty frames per second. MP4 where the browser supports it, with WebM as the fallback.
What you can turn on and off. An optional title banner, which defaults to the play’s name and is editable, in a bold pill across the top edge of the diagram so it lands on the seam. Action lines on or off. Player names and numbers on or off. Phase coaching notes as optional captions. A safe-margin option that keeps players and lines clear of the right and bottom edges. A small optional watermark. Speed from a quarter to double, or a fit-to-seconds duration, plus a hold at the start and the end.
What it does not do. It does not import your game clip, it does not stack the two halves for you, and it does not edit video. You export the diagram and you cut the reel in whatever editor you already use. Stacking the footage and the diagram in one export is on the roadmap; it is not in the product today.
What it costs. Free exports are 720p with a small watermark, which is fine for a team chat and visible enough in a feed to be worth removing. The 1080p export with no watermark and the reel formats are on the paid Coach tier.
When you have no footage
Plenty of good breakdown accounts never show a game clip. They show the diagram and talk over it, and the reason it works is that a diagram can do one thing film cannot: run the same possession twice with something changed.
That is the format worth stealing. Show the action working. Then show the same action against the coverage that kills it, and stop the clip at the moment it dies. Two versions of one set is a better post than two different sets, because the viewer learns a read instead of collecting a diagram.
If you go that way, keep the court plain and the numbers large. A stylized court with a heavy scheme looks good in a still and turns into noise at fifteen frames of motion on a phone.
A checklist before you post
- Does the first frame show the action, not a title card
- Is the diagram readable at phone size with the screen at half brightness
- Are the captions out of the bottom and right strips
- Does the diagram finish on the same beat as the clip
- Would someone who does not know the term still understand what happened
- Did you show it twice
The last one is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the post gets saved or scrolled.
Questions
What size should a basketball breakdown reel be?
1080 by 1920 for a vertical feed. The common layout puts the game clip in the top half and the diagram in the bottom half, which means the diagram itself is rendered at 1080 by 960.
How long should a breakdown clip be?
One action, shown twice, is usually between fifteen and thirty seconds. If it needs more than one idea, it is two clips.
Can the app put the animation under my game clip for me?
No. It exports the animation as a video file at the size you choose. Stacking it under your footage happens in your own video editor. Importing the clip and exporting the stacked reel is on the roadmap, not in the product.
Do I need a paid plan to export video?
Free exports are 720p with a small watermark. The 1080p export with no watermark and the reel formats are on the paid Coach tier.