smartfilming

Exploring the possibilities of video production with smartphones

#55 After 7 years of brand loyalty to LG: Why I chose Sony to follow in its footsteps — 12. December 2022

#55 After 7 years of brand loyalty to LG: Why I chose Sony to follow in its footsteps

The first smartphone I ever owned was a Samsung S3 Mini. When I purchased it in 2013 I didn’t really think about the phone’s potential for video production. I just wanted to finally step into the world of touch screen phones with mobile internet, without paying a premium price for an iPhone. It was only after spending some time with the lil’ Samsung that I became more and more interested in seeing the device’s potential for more than just taking calls, browsing the web and snapping some pics. My next phone was, interestingly enough, a Nokia 920 running the Windows Phone operating system. I was very much aware of the sparse app situation on Microsoft’s platform but intrigued by Nokia’s camera hardware (Zeiss lens) and the support for 25fps in the native camera app. Since the WindowsPhone app store didn’t really improve much and it became obvious very soon that the platform was not going to stick around much longer, I kept looking for an Android phone brand that would strike a chord with me.

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#50 Anniversary Post: 50 Voices of Phoneography — 15. November 2021

#50 Anniversary Post: 50 Voices of Phoneography

The good thing about numbering your blog posts is that it’s easy to figure out when you have an anniversary coming up… 😉 And now’s the time! To be honest, I wasn’t really sure I would get that far when I started smartfilming.blog in the summer of 2015 with my first articles in German. I had made my initial steps in the blogosphere in 2009 writing about something completely different but discontinued the project two years later when I realized my interest in the topic was fading. Well, I have shown more stamina this time around: 6 years and 50 blog posts! (in case you want to check out an overview of the previous 49 click here) So what to do for this happy occasion?

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#45 The Smartphone Camera Exposure Paradox — 11. May 2021

#45 The Smartphone Camera Exposure Paradox

Ask anyone about the weaknesses of smartphone cameras and you will surely find that people often point towards a phone’s low-light capabilities as the or at least one of its Achilles heel(s). When you are outside during the day it’s relatively easy to shoot some good-looking footage with your mobile device, even with budget phones. Once it’s darker or you’re indoors, things get more difficult. The reason for this is essentially that the image sensors in smartphones are still pretty small compared to those in DSLMs/DLSRs or professional video/cinema cameras. Bigger sensors can collect more photons (light) and produce better low light images. A so-called “Full Frame” sensor in a DSLM like Sony’s Alpha 7-series has a surface area of 864 mm2, a common 1/2.5” smartphone image sensor has only 25 mm2. So why not just put a huge sensor in a smartphone?

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#28 Android 11 might be the most important update for mobile videography since Android 5 — 20. July 2020

#28 Android 11 might be the most important update for mobile videography since Android 5

One of the things more tech-savvy smartphone users often criticize about Google’s mobile operating system Android is the fact that new versions of the OS only roll out relatively slowly and to a somewhat limited number of (recent) devices, particularly when compared to new versions of Apple’s iOS for iPhones. There has been some progress (the current version Android 10 managed the fastest and widest roll-out of any Android version so far), but it’s still a long way to getting anywhere close to the swift and wide-spread roll-out of new iOS versions. 

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#27 No, you don’t need a second video track for storytelling! (… and why it really doesn’t matter that much anymore) — 25. June 2020

#27 No, you don’t need a second video track for storytelling! (… and why it really doesn’t matter that much anymore)

As I pointed out in one of my very first blog posts here (in German), smartphone videography still comes with a whole bunch of limitations (although some of them are slowly but surely going away or have at least been mitigated). Yet one central aspect of the fascinating philosophy behind phoneography (that’s the term I now prefer for referring to content creation with smartphones in general) has always been one of “can do” instead of “can’t do” despite the shortcomings. The spirit of overcoming obvious obstacles, going the extra mile to get something done, trailblazing new forms of storytelling despite not having all the bells and whistles of a whole multi-device or multi-person production environment seems to be a key factor. With this in mind I always found it a bit irritating and slightly “treacherous” to this philosophy when people proclaimed that video editing apps without the ability to have a second video track in the editing timeline are not suitable for storytelling. “YOU HAVE TO HAVE A VIDEO EDITOR WITH AT LEAST TWO VIDEO TRACKS!” Bam! If you are just starting out creating your first videos you might easily be discouraged if you hear such a statement from a seasoned video producer. Now let me just make one thing clear before digging a little deeper: I’m not saying having two (or multiple) video tracks in a video editing app as opposed to just one isn’t useful. It most definitely is. It enables you to do things you can’t or can’t easily do otherwise. However, and I can’t stress this enough, it is by no means a prerequisite for phoneography storytelling – in my very humble opinion, that is.

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#24 Why Telegram is the best messenger app for sending video files — 7. June 2020

#24 Why Telegram is the best messenger app for sending video files

Ever since smartphones and mobile internet became a thing, messenger apps have grown immensely in popularity and significantly curbed other types of (digital) communication like SMS/texts, eMails and heck yes, phone calls, for most of us. There’s also little doubt about which messenger apps can usually be found on everyone’s phone: WhatsApp is by far the most popular app of its kind on a global scale with only Facebook Messenger being somewhat close in terms of users. Sure, if you look at certain regions/countries or age groups you will find other prominent messenger apps like WeChat in China, KakaoTalk in Korea, Viber in the Ukraine or Snapchat among the younger generation(s). We have also seen a noticeable rise in the popularity of security and data conscious alternatives like the Edward Snowden-recommended Signal or Switzerland-based Threema. One might say that right in between mass popularity and special focus groups sits Telegram.

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#23 A powerful new rival for Filmic Pro — 12. May 2020

#23 A powerful new rival for Filmic Pro

Filmic Pro might be called the “Gold Standard” for highly advanced mobile video recording apps on both Android and iOS, it surely is the most popular and widely known one. Even Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh has used it to shoot two of his feature films. The fact that a powerful rival has just recently launched is bigger news for Android users though than for those on iOS. There are a couple of very capable alternatives to Filmic Pro on iOS including Mavis, MoviePro and Moment Pro Camera. While options are available on Android as well they are not as numerous and/or complete and for quite a few development has either ceased completely (Cinema FV-5 and recently Moment Pro Camera) or for the most part been reduced to bug fixes or minor compatibility adjustments (Cinema 4K, Lumio Cam, ProShot). There’s also the solid free Open Camera (plus a whole range of variants based on its open source code) and the pretty good Footej Camera 2 but none of them can really match Filmic Pro when it comes to usability and advanced features. That is until now.

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#21 What’s the best free cross-platform mobile video editing app? — 22. April 2020

#21 What’s the best free cross-platform mobile video editing app?

I’m a big fan of advanced mobile video editing apps like ‘KineMaster’ (Android & iOS) or ‘LumaFusion’ (iOS-only) and I’m very supportive of the idea that one should pay for such powerful media creation tools. However, there might be instances when it’s just not possible for one reason or another to do that. So I have always kept an eye on mobile video editing apps that tick all the following boxes: 1) they should be free to download and use 2) if there are different versions the free version should not include a watermark 3) they should be fairly advanced (for instance include the ability to have a second video track) and user-friendly 4) they should be cross-platform (Android and iOS) and 5) they should handle/export at least 1080p resolution with 25/30fps. I eventually ditched one other prerequisite: that you don’t have to create an account to use the app. To be honest, if you want an app that really ticks all the boxes, there isn’t much around. Actually up until recently I would have only been able to point to a single one: ‘VlogIt’. And even that could have been considered a cheat under strict circumstances because while VlogIt doesn’t have a watermark on the exported video, it has a branded bumper outro. I’m not too much a fan of the app’s UI though and its limited to a 16:9 project aspect ratio. Another theoretical contender was the relatively new ‘Adobe Premiere Rush’ but the availability for Android devices is still extremely limited and you only get three free exports before you have to commit to a paid subscription. So things were looking pretty sobering until last week-end.

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#20 Closing the Window of Opportunity – Farewell to Windows Phone — 8. January 2020

#20 Closing the Window of Opportunity – Farewell to Windows Phone

My personal Windows Phone / Windows 10 Mobile device collection: Microsoft Lumia 550, Nokia Lumia 630, Nokia Lumia 920, Microsoft Lumia 950.

If you are reading this, there’s a chance you might at least have heard about a mobile operating system called Windows Phone even though you never came close to owning a device running it. But there’s also a chance you never knew such a thing existed so let me just very briefly recapitulate.

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#19 Stabilizing shaky video footage on your smartphone (incl. Update 2021) — 5. October 2019

#19 Stabilizing shaky video footage on your smartphone (incl. Update 2021)

The fact that nowadays pretty much everyone owns a smartphone and shoots video with it has brought a gigantic wave of shaky handheld footage along. While some folks are actually allergic to any kind of shakiness in video, I personally think that depending on the amount and context it can work just fine – but definitely not all the time and under any circumstances. So there is a need to stabilize shaky handheld footage. Now the best thing to get smooth n’ stable footage is to avoid shakiness in the first place while shooting. While there are techniques for shooting (more) stable video handheld, the most common thing would be putting the phone on a tripod (using any kind of rig or clamp for mounting it). But maybe you want to move around a bit? More and more smartphones do have internal stabilization, be it on the hardware side with OIS (optical image stabilization) or on the software side with EIS (electronic image stabilzation). Over the last years there has also been a considerable and increasingly affordable influx of (motorized) gimbals that allow smooth camera movements. But let’s be honest: Unless you’re going to a planned shoot, you probably won’t carry around a tripod or gimbal (if you have one) – as compact as they have become over time, they are still too big and clunky to just put in your pocket. So it’s likely that you will find yourself in situations where you shoot video handheld and want to smooth out some distracting jitter afterwards. While most desktop video editing software has a built-in stabilizer function these days, things don’t look quite as bright on mobile but there are still a few (good) options.

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#16 Six months with the LG V30 – a dream come true for smartphone videographers? — 3. January 2019

#16 Six months with the LG V30 – a dream come true for smartphone videographers?

LG V30 with transparent protection case

A little more than six months ago I bid my LG V10 goodbye into retirement. The V10 was the first flagship smartphone I had purchased and I had done so for a very specific reason: LG had redefined what a stock/native camera app on a smartphone can offer in terms of pro video controls. While many other phone makers were including advanced manual controls for photography in their camera apps, video had been shamelessly ignored. With the introduction of the V-series in late 2015, LG offered avid smartphone videographers a feature pack in the native camera app that could otherwise only be found in dedicated 3rd party apps like FilmicPro. While LG’s smartphone sales can’t really compete with the ones from Samsung, Huawei and such, the V-series fortunately didn’t just vanish after the V10 but was succeeded by the V20, V30, V35 and V40 henceforth. As I don’t see the need to upgrade my phone on an annual basis, I went for the V30. It took over the useful dual rear cameras from the V20 and newly introduced features like LOG profile, Point Zoom and CineVideo. After spending six months with the V30, what is there to say about the device as a videography tool?

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