Method
There is no clever part. There is a careful part, and it is the third stage, where most of the work goes into deciding what not to tell you. What survives it is a record an owner can keep and a vet can read beside their own examination.
Side on, on a phone, in the time it takes to walk your horse out and back. No rig, no markers, no special surface, and nowhere you have to take the horse to.
Landmarks are found in every frame. Where a joint is not clearly there it is recorded absent rather than guessed, and the paths those landmarks sweep become the movement figures.
Every figure is checked against what is biomechanically possible for the gait you filmed. What fails the check is withheld, and the read names which check failed and why. What comes back is a record you can keep, and one your vet can read beside their own examination.
Every frame is searched for the points that describe how a horse is put together: poll, withers, croup, hip, and the limb chain down to the hoof. Where a joint is not clearly visible in a frame, that frame records it as absent. It is never filled in with a guess, because a guessed joint becomes a real-looking number three steps later and nobody can tell which one it was.
A landmark path through a stride is the raw material. How far the horse travels in a cycle, how often the cycle repeats, how much it varies, how far the poll rises and falls, how far the fetlock sinks. All of it comes off the paths, and all of it is expressed against the horse's own frame so two horses of different sizes can be set beside each other.
Before anything is reported, the figures are tested against what is physically possible for the gait that was filmed. A walk has no moment where all four feet are off the ground, so a limb that appears airborne more than half the time is a tracking failure, not a horse. A hind print cannot land closer to the next fore print than the limbs are mounted apart. Where a figure fails a test like that, it is withheld and the read names the test it failed.
A movement record answers one half of a question about a horse. The other half is structural, and that half is EquiRay: our radiograph workbench for veterinarians, where a study is assembled, each view is checked for quality, the views that are missing are named, and the vet’s own written report is kept with the horse rather than filed away from it.
Be clear about what that is and is not. EquiRay does not read films for pathology, and every finding it carries was made by a veterinarian. Neither product looks at a horse and tells you what is wrong with it. What the pair does is give you movement and structure on the same animal, recorded the same way each time, so a year from now there is something to compare against besides memory.
No date, and we are not going to invent one. Leave an address and we will write when there is something worth your time.