When I was in high school (and even before that) I loved to make movies with friends and my brother and sister. Back then, in the late 1990s, we had what was basically a shoulder-mounted VCR. For the time, it was pretty amazing technology. It had a loading tray for a full sized video tape cassette. It had a giant battery that allowed you to film maybe an hour or so. This was before small digital cameras were everywhere and memory was so cheap and abundant that you could just dump video data to it without a second thought. I used that camcorder to make lots of silly movies with my brother and sister. I remember one where I took a piece of red cellophane and taped it over the lens and ran around the backyard filming. I called it “The Fly” and I made buzzing noises while running around. I made another movie called “Who Wants to Fight a Million Bears?” where my brother would go into a room, make all sorts of noises and come out for an interview about how the fight went.
When I was in high school, technology had improved and I was working after school at the local community access TV station. They had lots of cameras there friends and I could use as well as a Mac Pro G5 and an iMac with Final Cut Pro. Friends and I made a few “movies” of ourselves just doing stupid things. The cameras were better too. We primarily used a Canon GL-1 and a small JVC or Panasonic. They all used MiniDV which was far better quality than VHS. We still wrote out most of our projects to VHS when we were done, but the last movie we did right before we finished high school we burned to a DVD.
Nowadays, though, digital cameras are so plentiful and high quality that anyone can take great quality video. Many people even choose to use the iPhone as a camera to shoot professional-looking videos or short films. I’ve seen some of these and they really do look amazing. It’s almost impossible to tell it was filmed with a phone.
I don’t have an iPhone though, and am not likely to get one any time soon (I still like my recently acquired Palm Pre 2, thank you very much!). I do have an iPad Air, though. Recently I looked into what could be done to use the camera on it to record decent quality video. Fortunately, there are options! The first thing you’ll want to consider is how to mount the iPad onto a tripod or at least some more stable way to hold it so your video isn’t jumping all around. I ended up trying out a case by iOgrapher. I like it because of two main things. First, you can add lenses to it easily. Second, it has two accessory shoes so you can mount a flash, or a microphone, or whatever you want. It also mounts into any tripod. It also has two handles that let you have a firmer grip on the iPad so stability while moving around is greatly improved. I’ve found it works really well and have enjoyed filming things once again.
Of course, you can use the built-in camera app to do all of this, but I found it’s lacking substantially in ability to really unlock the capability of the camera, especially on the iPad. After lots of research, I eventually settled on an app called MoviePro. It’s only $4.99 in the app store and it’s absolutely worth it! It lets you set almost anything you want including things I really like such as frame rate, focus, a whole pile of resolutions, white balance, ISO and much more! It even makes zooming pretty easy. I’ve been absolutely thrilled with how nice the videos I’ve shot with it have come out.
Everything I’ve mentioned here was specific to me using my iPad Air, but pretty much any iPad or iPhone will work just as well (all the way back to the iPhone 4S actually). Combine all this with the ability to compile together nice looking effects and titles in iMovie on either the iPad or your Mac, and you’ll be making loads of cool videos in no time!