This weekend I finally got some time to spend with the camera on iPhone 4. I’m really impressed with what you can do on a smartphone. So how good is it? Well – depends on what your expectations are, but I can say I am very impressed and it is a ton of fun. The footage in the above film was shot, edited and exported entirely on the iPhone 4 using the built in camera app and the $5 iMovie available thru the app store.
The footage you see here was shot in San Antonio, TX over 2 days this past weekend. The cemetery is at Fort Sam Houston Military Base. I downloaded the music track off iTunes during a rain delay at the airport and edited the entire piece in the air. I uploaded after returning home.
The Good
There is a lot of good. The iPhone shoots 720p video and outputs at 30fps. This could be an issue with mixing with 24fps in other sources, but being a 5D user, I got used to this. You can conform the footage down to 24fps for a slow motion type effect for use as b-roll without a hitch. The colors render quite nicely. No color saturation or grading was applied to the little movie I shot (more on that in a minute). Focus and exposure work similar to shooting stills. Just simply touch the screen on what you want to focus on and the focus and exposure are automatically adjusted. Very simple. The lowlight performance is quite good. Not mind blowing, but its certainly usable in low light.
The Not-So-Good
The lens flares quite easily. I constantly had to reframe shots because of this. This is expected with a dinky plastic lens.
The biggest problem though is the nature of the camera being in the shape of a phone. Due to the physics here its hard to stabilize the picture as the natural use is to hand hold for your footage. Its shaky. Not as bad as some cameras, but its difficult. One plus here is that iPhone 4 has done away with the rounded edges in the new design. Its possible to set it on a flat surface and film. There are a few scenes my clip where I was able to do this.
iMovie is extremely impressive, but I have 2 small wishes. The first is easy – Apple, can you please add fades to the transitions and the ability to put them on the ends of the timeline? You can cross fade between clips, but you can’t fade up from black at the beginning and end of the start and end clips. I was able to do it above by taking a black still of the palm of my hand and fading into the “first” clip. Secondly it would be nice to do some small color adjustments, but I know that’s pushing the power of the device.
Lastly, when you do panning shots, you see the horizontal line distortion common to shooting video on non-video cameras. This is most noticeable when playing the footage back on an HD TV set. The good news is that the “jello” effect you also see on non-video cameras doesn’t seem too problematic.
The Verdict
There’s a lot to review about the iPhone and I’m just showing the video side of things. I’ve got to say that this is an incredibly useful and fun feature. Will I replace my other video cameras? No. But I always loved doing stills on my iPhone 3G because I always had the camera with me. This combined with the ease of uploading and sharing is a significant contribution to photography – up there with the Polaroid back in the day. Its really nice to see this beginning to extend to video as well.