From the course: Video Gear

Choosing a camera app

From the course: Video Gear

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Choosing a camera app

- You know, Rich, if you take a look at the Apple App Store, or Google Play or Microsoft's equivalent, you'll soon discover that there are literally thousands of camera apps, I mean thousands of them. It seems like nobody's ever happy with a build in camera. - Yeah and while the manufacturers have pretty good apps, truth of the matter is is there's just features that sometimes get left out for one reason or another and what we want to focus on is taking a look at a couple of popular apps but not just the apps but talk about the features. So as you're shopping, you could find some apps and you know what to look for. Now to start things off, one of my favorites is called Camera+ and one of the things that's cool about it is it actually has a built in level so as we're shooting, we can tell when the shot is level. Why is that important? - Well, I think one of the things that distinguishes amateur photography and video from professional is that professionals tend to get the framing right, including things like horizon lines so unless you're going for that Dutch angle for creative purposes, you usually want to have things lined. up. The other thing I like about Camera+ too, is the ability to, just with the drag of your finger, adjust exposure of the camera. - Even while the shot's rolling if you needed to. - Yeah, a lot of the built in cameras are automatically going to meter the scene and sometimes dynamically change that exposure based on what's going on. With Camera+ you can just dial in that exposure how you see fit and that's a really nice feature to have as well on a camera. - Another thing that's great about it is it does have a companion ability so you could partner this device with another device for remote triggering. Now for example, oh yeah, what time is it? - Oh yeah, I actually have a Camera+ app directly on my phone so if you wanted to put the camera oh I don't know, somewhere over there and not be in the scene yourself, you can simply place the camera on a tripod or something else of that nature and then fire off shots. - Or maybe you are in the scene yourself but you're doing a recording and you've put the camera up and you're talking to it so you don't have to keep running back and forth. Every time you want to start and stop, you could trigger it right from your device which is pretty important and it gives you that flexibility. - And that's perfect if you're doing things like demo videos singer-songwriter for Youtube or something like that. - Another one is called FiLMiC Pro and this is an app that's out for a while. One of the things that I like about this is it adds a couple of extra features, mainly in the realm of overlays. Now one of the things here that's really cool Rob, from the settings menu here, it offers a couple of other options which are nice. One, what do we got there? - Well, this is the ability to adjust the bit rate of the actual video file that you're recording and you'll see this expressed in megabits per second. You have it going everywhere from Economy up to FiLMiC Extreme. You know what, 50 megabits per second on that Extreme level, now sure that's going to create really large files but it's going to give you exceptional quality compared to 24 which is about half of what Apple gives you with the iPhone. - The Apple standard at 24 this can bump up to 50. Now if you're going to go up to 50 or 32 close all the other apps on your machine and ideally restart your device but many of these phone apps will actually have settings to change. Now this makes it a pro app and so expect to pay for these cameras. But the ability to change bit rate? Huge. Now besides this here and a couple of other options, we can change the overlays. Do we have spot metering? Is it fixed, is it movable? Can we even adjust it? - And these are options that you typically see on a DSLR or another high end camera. How is the camera going to meter, is it going to take the center of the frame or part of the frame or the entire frame? And that's a really nice freature to have as well. - And some of the other pro apps will also feature things like filming guides. Here we've got all sorts of standard overlays Everything from one to one of a square video and four by three to cinema overlays. - Yeah, and that's great. You see in Vimeo and Youtube and other places people like that sort of very wide cinema scope type thing. You know, two three five to one, two four to one, and what this allows you to do is put up some overlays on the screens so you can protect, have people in the frame and not accidentally cutting people's heads off or have to re-position later on in post production. - And the other thing that I really liked about this one is that you can change the speed of the zoom on the lens from very fast to slow and creeping. Normally with the zoom lenses it's really like the pinch gesture which just doesn't work. This allows you for slow, creeping zooms which are pretty cool. One other app that I like and Rob, let's just be honest here the Android phones have had 4K recording for a while, 4K video chews up the battery, chews up the hard drive, but it is possible. - It definitely is possible and a lot of app developers have kind of, for lack of a better term, hacked the underlying technology but yeah, some of the cameras out there are capable of recording true 4K video. - Yeah, ProCam 2 is one of those, it makes it as an add on option. Again, close all the other apps, make sure you restart the device but 4K video recording is awesome. This one also offers a bunch of different handy overlays so we can see things like the golden ratio or the grid or other dividing patterns. - Rule of thirds, that kind of thing. - Helps you out with the overall thing. The ability to change frame rates and even assign some of your own all built right in as well as great white balance controls. The name of the game now is you start to go out and look for apps, don't be surprised to see pretty much every feature that exists on a DSLR or professional video camera has now got a software equivalent. You just got to know what to look for and hopefully this week's episode gave you some ideas on what's possible. For Video Gear Weekly, my names Rich Harrington. - And I'm Robbie Carman. Thanks for watching.

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