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Making movies with an iPhone
Smartphones with a great camera and the ability to record high-quality video are no longer difficult to find, in fact they’re in everyone’s pocket. Beginning and even seasoned content creators are finding that using their mobile phones to shoot video has several major advantages:
Mobile phones are ubiquitous and we almost always have our phones with us. Quickly and spontaneously capturing quality video content doesn’t require lugging around large and expensive video cameras when an unexpected opportunity presents itself.
Perhaps most importantly, as phones have become more capable, content creators are finding that getting their foot into the door of vlogging or filmmaking is made much more affordable.
However, while it is a good start to have a smartphone with an awesome camera, using poor video-production techniques will result in a poor final product. Having the right tools is nothing if you don’t know how to use them to the best of their ability.
First of all, your subject should be lit properly. Proper lighting has a huge impact on smartphone cameras especially because they have smaller image sensors and lenses. Try as much as possible to shoot your video in areas where your subject is illuminated evenly and not shadowed or blown out by light sources in the background.
If you don’t want your video footage to come out distorted, blurred, or affected by “rolling shutter” the best thing to do is to keep your phone steady while recording. If you’re serious about shooting steady video, you can use a tripod clamp to keep your phone stable and give it some weight so your movements are smoother. At the very least hold your phone with both hands and try to be as smooth as possible.
Another consideration is your audio quality. An amazing video with poor audio can change the overall experience for your viewer for the worse unless you plan to add a completely new audio track during the editing process. Some would even argue that while you want your video to look good, the quality of your audio is more important than the video.
Don’t zoom unless you absolutely have to. Staying physically closer to your subject ensures better image quality, less digital noise and better focus in your videos since most smartphones use a digital zoom rather than optical zoom. Digital zoom basically enlarges the existing pixels rather than magnifying the light entering the camera lens and will hurt the quality of your video immensely. You can get away with some digital zoom if you’re shooting in 4k, but it’s still best practice to avoid it.
Lens attachments can expand your options in this regard. There are a number of lens accessories available that can give you wide-angle, zoom, and a variety of other specialty lenses with very professional results.
It should go without saying but in the age of Snapchat, DO NOT SHOOT VERTICAL VIDEO! Hold your phone horizontally so that videos played back on non-mobile screens will look as it should.
Be prepared. Before you begin recording, make sure you rehearse as much as possible. If you plan on moving with the camera, walk the path you plan on traversing. Pay attention to other people that aren’t aware of what you’re doing and make sure they won’t be in your way and you won’t be in theirs. Charge your battery, make sure your phone memory has enough space for your recording and put your phone in airplane mode so an errant phone call doesn’t ruin your perfect shot.
A quick search on YouTube can find a number of commercials, and even entire movies shot entirely on an iPhone. These devices can really capture some magic and with a little practice and the right techniques, you can make something that looks professional and perhaps even Oscar-worthy.
A First Look at Mojave
I swore I was going to wait for the third developer beta to upgrade my Mac to Mohave but I could not resist. After carefully making sure I had back-ups, I downloaded Mohave. I have just started to play with it but I do want to caution you that, unlike me, you should NOT be playing with live ammunition. It is buggy and not yet ready for serious production work. It will get there but things like all the buttons in our accounting system have no labels, all my 32bit applications like 2011 MS Office, 4D and several others all bring up warnings that they will soon not work.
I think you will find Mohave to be a big improvement in the Mac OS. There are many features that I am discovering that know I will be using regularly. Here’s just a sampling of the new features.
Dark Mode
After the installation Mohave defaulted to Dark Mode and while it was unique and different, it was not for me and I changed pretty quickly back to Light Mode. Dark Mode puts the focus on your work while toolbars, menus, and controls recede into the background. It’s integrated throughout macOS so it works with built-in apps—and third-party apps can adopt it too. The desktop picture even changes to match the time of day wherever you are. You can toggle between light and dark modes in the General System Preference.
Screenshots
You only have to remember one key command for your screenshots. Taking, annotating, sending, and saving screenshots is easier than ever. Just press Shift-Command-5 to bring up new onscreen controls, including video-recording tools.
Stacks
With Stacks, your Mac automatically arranges all the files scattered on your desktop into neat groups based on file type, date, or tag so you can get organized and easily find what you need. My desktop is usually a LOT messier than this example but I think you get the idea. You can toggle Stacks on or off at Finder->View->Use Stacks.
Finder Enhancements
You can now browse files at a glance with the large previews in Gallery View, view full file metadata, and perform Quick Actions like rotate or markup. This is very cool and I have just scratched the surface but the Finder window is much more powerful now. To markup pics for this article, I am able to do it now in Finder.
Quicklook is part of the new Finder, too. Clicking on the Quicklook eye icon will allow you to mark up and sign PDFs, rotate and crop images, and even trim audio and video files right in Quick Look—without launching an app.
Continuity Camera
This another really handy enhancement in Mohave. With Continuity Camera you can open your iOS device’s camera from your Mac, then immediately transfer the photo you took over to a document that you’re working on. For example, if you are working on a Pages document, and you need a photo of your dog, you can activate Continuity Camera, take the photo with your iPhone, then immediately see that photo pop up in the document on your Mac. Magic, right? Here’s how you do it for a photo, using a scanner is the same:
Open an editable document in an app like Pages or Keynote
Control-click, right-click, or two-finger-click on a space within the document where you want your phone to be located
Click Take Photo under the name of the iOS device you’ll use to take that photo
Take the pup’s photo using your iPhone or iPad
Tap Use Photo. Your photo will now appear in your document where you clicked.
Group FaceTime
With Group FaceTime, you can chat with up to 32 people simultaneously—more than ever before. New participants can be added at any time, and a call can include both audio and video callers. And users can join from any Apple device—iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch. I haven’t given this a try yet but sounds pretty handy.
News, Home, Voice Memos and Stocks
iOS apps on the Mac! Oh no! I use all of these except Voice Memos daily on my iPhone or iPad. I especially like Apple News as it is a great way to catch up on what is important to me. Aside from the normal world and national news my news feed is full of Celtics and Cubs news.
We use our iPhones and iPads to turn on and off our lights, adjust our thermostat and lock the doors. It has always been a bit weird that you couldn’t do that from the Mac – well, now you can and it works great!
This is just the start of iOS apps that may find their way onto the Mac and I think that is a good thing.
We will cover more of the new features in Mac OS 10.14 Mohave as we discover them! The public beta is out now but as I said it is not for the squeamish – some things may not work the way you want them to, some things will not work at all and even though you might like being a pioneer you might also regret heading down that path before all the bugs are squashed.