By Ashley Kennedy |
Going — and staying — slo-mo with the iPhone 6
Over the weekend, my local fire department held an open house where they set lots of stuff on fire. So I did what any video enthusiast would do: I took plenty of slo-mo footage—of the flames, the smoke, the water spewing from firehoses—with my new iPhone 6.
Bringing that footage into editing software, however, isn’t quite as cut and dry as you might think. So I wanted to show you some of the things I learned—in case you ever want your slow-motion video to have a life outside of your iPhone.
Here’s the slo-mo footage I shot of the fire demo:
What is slo-mo, exactly?
First let’s go over some basics about how slo-mo actually works. The iPhone 6 records slo-mo footage at either 240 frames per second (fps) or 120 fps. To toggle back and forth between each mode, just tap on the fps indicator.
When you record at a higher frame rate (say, 240 fps) the camera takes 240 images in a single second. Normal video is shot at 24, 25, or 30 fps. So when you play back slo-mo footage at a “normal” frame rate (i.e., 30 fps*), it appears very smoothly slowed down because there are around 10 times as many frames to display in the same amount of time.
Bottom line: The video itself isn’t actually slow motion—rather, it has everything to do with how fast it’s played back.
When does slo-mo stay slow?
If you play back your slo-mo footage right from the phone, it works flawlessly. You can even perform simple edits by determining which sections of video play back in slo-mo.
To make speed-based adjustments, you just drag the sliders between the “normal” video (represented by the tightly-spaced vertical lines) and the slo-mo video (represented by the loosely-spaced vertical lines).
Then, if you send the footage directly to a cloud app like YouTube or Facebook from your phone—no problem; it maintains the slo-mo quality as well as any existing in-Phone speed-based edits.
When does slo-mo not stay slow?
But let’s say you want to take it to your computer so that you can edit it further. That’s where things start to break down—because your computer doesn’t know to convert your 240 fps video to 30fps.
Instead, when you play the video in the Quicktime player, for example, it plays at its native 240 fps, which results in “normal” looking video.
The same applies if you try to bring it into video editing software: no more slo-mo.
How do you retain the slo-mo footage in its natural state?
One nice “hack” to retain your video’s precise slo-mo information is to either
a) send it to yourself via email, iMessage or AirDrop, or
b) upload the file to a cloud app (like YouTube) from your phone, and then download it from the same cloud app onto your computer. When you do that, your lovely slo-mo video will look exactly as it did on your phone, and you can bring it into the nonlinear editing application (NLE) of your choice to work with further. (Some cloud apps convert the video to a slightly different resolution, so be aware that you may lose some pixels in the process.)
I tried each of the following methods, and all produced successful results (keeping the slo-mo slow, while “baking in” all in-phone edits):
- Email to yourself from phone; download file from email on computer
- iMessage to yourself from phone; download file from iMessage on computer (Mac only)
- AirDrop to yourself from phone; download file from AirDrop on computer (Mac only)
Cloud Upload/Download Solutions
- Upload to YouTube from phone; download from YouTube on computer
- Upload to Vimeo from phone; download from Vimeo on computer
- Upload to Facebook from phone; download from Facebook on computer
For smaller files, these methods are quite fast and easy, and weren’t much more work than connecting the phone to the computer and transferring files the traditional way.
Need more flexibility?
You should know a couple of caveats about these approaches, however. For very large files, some methods may not work due to file-size restrictions.
Also, because the in-phone edits are “baked in,” you often aren’t able to smoothly change the boundaries between your normal video and slo-mo video once you’ve performed one of these transfers.
So, if you’re dealing with larger files, and if you want the flexibility to edit your 240 fps footage however you like, let’s talk about a different way.
When you bring the footage to your computer (via iPhoto**, iTunes, Dropbox, etc.) you’ll need to manually slow down the footage within an NLE. This works wonderfully because all 240 frames are used to convert the footage to slo-mo, so the result will be extremely smooth (much smoother than if you slowed down 30fps footage).
However, if you made any in-phone edits to your video’s speed, those will be lost, and you’ll have to manually add them back in. So, If you know that you’ll be editing the footage manually, don’t bother editing your video speed on your phone first.
Take a look at ways to manually slow down your footage in iMovie, Final Cut Pro X, Premiere Pro or Avid Media Composer.
So, here’s my advice: If you’ve got smaller files with minimal speed editing needed, just send the files to yourself using one of the send/receive or cloud/retrieve methods outlined above.
But if you’re working with many files and need maximum post-production flexibility, just import the video to your computer, and perform all speed work in your NLE of choice.
*In-phone iPhone 6 slo-mo video is actually played back at 60 fps—so that’s twice the speed of real-time video, but still one-quarter the speed of the slo-mo footage.
**If you first import the clip into iPhoto on your computer, it does read the slo-mo correctly, but the moment it leaves iPhoto, the slo-mo quality is lost.
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