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? While cameras in smartphones have undeniably become a very important factor, the phone is still very much a multi-purpose device and not a single-purpose one like a dedicated camera – for better or worse. That means there are many things to consider when building a phone. I doubt anyone would want a phone with a form factor that doesn’t allow you to put the phone in your pocket. And the flat form factor makes it difficult to build proper optics with larger sensors. Larger sensors also consume more power and produce more heat, not exactly something desirable. If we are talking about smartphone photography from a tripod, some of the missing sensor size can be compensated for with long exposure times. The advancements in computational imaging and AI have also led to dedicated and often quite impressive photography “Night Modes” on smartphones. But very long shutter speeds aren’t really an option for video as any movement appears extremely blurred – and while today’s chipsets can already handle supportive AI processing for photography, more resource-intensive videography is yet a bridge too far. So despite the fact that latest developments signal that we’re about to experience a considerable bump in smartphone image sensor sizes (Sony and Samsung are about to release a 1-inch/almost 1-inch image sensor for phones), one could say that most/all smartphone cameras (still) have a problem with low-light conditions. But you know what? They also have a problem with the exact opposite – very bright conditions!
If you know a little bit about how cameras work and how to set the exposure manually, you have probably come across something called the “exposure triangle”. The exposure triangle contains the three basic parameters that let you set and adjust the exposure of a photo or video on a regular camera: Shutter speed, aperture and ISO. In more general terms you could also say: Time, size and sensitivity. Shutter speed signifies the amount of time that the still image or a single frame of video is exposed to light, for instance 1/50 of a second. The longer the shutter speed, the more light hits the sensor and the brighter the image will be. Aperture refers to the size of the iris’ opening through which the light passes before it hits the sensor (or wayback when the film strip), it’s commonly measured in f-stops, for instance f/2.0. The bigger the aperture (= SMALLER the f-stop number), the more light reaches the sensor and the brighter the image will be. ISO (or “Gain” in some dedicated video cameras) finally refers to the sensitivity of the image sensor, for instance ISO 400. The higher the ISO, the brighter the image will be. Most of the time you want to keep the ISO as low as possible because higher sensitivity introduces more image noise.
So what exactly is the problem with smartphone cameras in this respect? Well, unlike dedicated cameras, smartphones don’t have a variable aperture, it’s fixed and can’t be adjusted. Ok, there actually have been a few phones with variable aperture, most notably Samsung had one on the S4 Zoom (2013) and K Zoom (2014) and they introduced a dual aperture approach with the S9/Note9 (2018), held on to it for the S10/Note 10 (2019) but dropped it again for the S20/Note20 (2020). But as you can see from the very limited selection, this has been more of an experiment. The fixed aperture means that the exposure triangle for smartphone cameras only has two adjustable parameters: Shutter speed and ISO. Why is this problematic? When there’s movement in a video (either because something moves within the frame or the camera itself moves), we as an audience have become accustomed to a certain degree of motion blur which is related to the used shutter speed. The rule of thumb applied here says: Double the frame rate. So if you are shooting at 24fps, use a shutter speed of 1/48s, if you are shooting at 25fps, use a shutter speed of 1/50s, 1/60s for 30fps etc. This suggestion is not set in stone and in my humble opinion you can deviate from it to a certain degree without it becoming too obvious for casual, non-pixel-peeping viewers – but if the shutter speed is very slow, everything begins to look like a drug-induced stream of consciousness experience and if it’s very fast, things appear jerky and shutter speed becomes stutter speed. So with the aperture being fixed and the shutter speed set at a “recommended” value, you’re left with ISO as an adjustable exposure parameter. Reducing the sensitivity of the sensor is usually only technically possible down to an ISO between 50 and 100 which will still give you a (heavily) overexposed image on a sunny day outside. So here’s our “paradox”: Too much available light can be just as much of an issue as too little when shooting with a smartphone.
What can we do about the two problems? Until significantly bigger smartphone image sensors or computational image enhancement for video arrives, the best thing to tackle the low-light challenge is to provide your own additional lighting or look for more available light, be it natural or artificial. Depending on your situation, this might be relatively easy or downright impossible. If you are trying to capture an unlit building at night, you will most likely not have a sufficient amount of ultra-bright floodlights at your hand. If you are interviewing someone in a dimly lit room, a small LED might just provide enough light to keep the ISO at a level without too much image noise.
Clip-on variable ND filter
As for the too-much-light problem (which ironically gets even worse with bigger sensors setting out to remedy the low-light problems): Try to pick a less sun-drenched spot, shoot with a faster shutter-speed if there is no or little action in the shot or – and this might be the most flexible solution – get yourself an ND (neutral density) filter that reduces the amount of light that passes through the lens. While some regular cameras have inbuilt ND filters, this feature has yet to appear in any smartphone, although OnePlus showcased a prototype phone last year that had something close to a proper ND filter, using a technology called “electrochromic glass” to hide the lens while still letting (less) light pass through (check out this XDA Developers article). So until this actually makes it to the market and proves to be effective, the filter has to be an external one that is either clipped on or screwed on if you use a dedicated case with a corresponding filter thread. You also have the choice between a variable and a non-variable (fixed density) ND filter. A variable ND filter will let you adjust the strength of its filtering effect which is great for flexibility but also have some disadvantages like the possibility of cross-polarization. If you want to learn more about ND filters, I highly recommend checking out this superb in-depth article by Richard Lackey.
So what’s the bigger issue for you personally? Low-light or high-light?
As always, if you have questions or comments, drop them here or hit me up on the Twitter @smartfilming. If you like this article, also consider subscribing to my free Telegram channel (t.me/smartfilming) to get notified about new blog posts and receive the monthly Ten Telegram Takeaways newsletter featuring a personal selection of interesting things that happened in the world of mobile video in the last four weeks.
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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.
While in general I would definitely prefer to have faster and more wide-reaching availability of new Android versions, I also think that the topic is often way too dramatized, particularly since Google separated regular security patches from the OS version with Android 8 Oreo in 2017. If we look at this particularly from a smartphone videography perspective, there have been hardly any major feature updates to the Android system over the last years that would make having “the latest and greatest” an absolute must. In my opinion, the last crucial milestone was Android 5 Lollipop back in 2014 when Google added the ability for screen recording via third party apps and – most importantly – introduced the Camera2 API which gave developers access to more advanced camera controls like shutter speed and ISO. The following versions surely continued to further polish a now pretty mature mobile operating system and occasionally included generally useful new tweaks and features for the common user but nothing really groundbreaking in terms of mobile videography. The upcoming Android 11 (scheduled for late summer / early fall 2020) could actually be a new milestone however. After checking out the official Android 11 developer information site from Google and various articles (many by the excellent XDA Developers news outlet!) plus getting a (used) Pixel 3 to hop on the beta version of Android 11 myself, I have found a bunch of quite interesting things, some will be immediately accessible in Android 11, others will offer new possibilities for app developers to dig into.
Native Screen Recording
As mentioned before, Android 5 had already introduced the general ability for screen recording back in 2014 but only for 3rd party apps, not as a native OS functionality. While some Android phone makers actually added native screen recording to their phones it wasn’t available right out of the box for most devices. It did finally pop up as a system immanent feature in the beta version for Android 10 but was unfortunately dropped for the final release. Now it’s back on the Android 11 beta and I’m pretty sure it will make it to the finish line this time around! You can simply access this feature via the quick settings when pulling down the notification shade from the top. It’s not there by default but you can easily add it to the quick settings by tapping on the pen icon in the bottom left corner of the notification shade and then dragging the screen record tile to the quick settings. On my Pixel 3, the resolution of the recorded video is 2160×1080 or 1080×2160 depending on the orientation with a somewhat curious frame rate hovering around 40 to 45 fps.
Capturing System Audio
Directly related to the native screen recording is the ability to capture system/internal audio from the device. It’s something that Google wouldn’t allow up until now so all the screen recording apps that came out in the wake of Android 5 were only able to capture sound through the phone’s mic / an external mic or no sound at all, not the ‘clean’ audio of an incoming call or a video that you are playing back. When you launch the native screen recorder on Android 11, it asks you to pick between three options in terms of audio capture: “Microphone”, “Device audio” or “Device audio and microphone”. Why is this important? If you want to record a (video) call for instance, you should now be able to capture both ends directly into a mix or just get your interviewee’s audio without having your own side mixed in. The pop-up when launching the screen recorder also gives you the option to show touches while capturing which is great if you are doing a tutorial on how to use an app as viewers can see what buttons you touch during the process.
Airplane Mode doesn’t turn off Bluetooth
When recording video on a smartphone it’s generally a good thing to turn on Airplane Mode to prevent any kind of interference with your recording. Sure, most of the time you might get away with not paying attention to this… until an important shot gets ruined by an incoming call etc. So far, going into Airplane Mode killed Bluetooth (it’s possible to manually turn it on again) which probably isn’t that big of a deal for shooting video – yet. Most external Bluetooth mics are still lacking in terms of more professional audio quality but this might change soon and it’s already a viable option to use Bluetooth headphones for audio monitoring. It’s a welcome tweak then that when having a Bluetooth device paired to the phone, going into Airplane Mode won’t turn off Bluetooth automatically.
Automatically block notifications when using the camera
Filmic Pro actually already has an option to block notifications while using the app in its settings but Google apparently introduced a new API that will allow developers of camera apps to automatically block disruptive notifications and sounds when people are using the app. The next step could be a feature that would allow the user to automatically activate the airplane mode when launching a camera app.
Support for concurrent use of more than one camera
This one could be a biggie! Here’s a quote from Google’s official Android 11 “Features and API Overview” knowledge base: “Support for concurrent use of more than one camera. Android 11 adds APIs to query support for using more than one camera at a time, including both a front-facing and rear-facing camera.” To me, this very much sounds like the groundwork for giving camera apps the power to capture content from multiple cameras simultaneously. This is not completely new on Android phones. Various phone makers including the likes of Samsung, HTC, LG and Nokia have featured camera modes on some of their devices that let you capture a video with both the front and the rear camera at the same time, creating a split-screen video in the process. I actually wrote a whole article about it and its particular usefulness for covering live events with some sort of presenter. Whether people didn’t like the feature or didn’t even know it existed in the first place will probably remain in the dark (I assume it was the latter) but the fact remains that this very intriguing feature never grew any kind of significant popularity or wide-spread availability. The universal rise of multi-camera arrays on smartphones in the last years however really does call for a revival of this feature! Pretty much every phone nowadays has two or even more rear cameras and one could indeed think of quite a few use cases where a combination of rear and front cameras or both rear cameras (regular and wide-angle/tele) recording simultaneously might come in handy. Apple introduced a dedicated API with iOS 13 just last year and 3rd party developers jumped at the opportunity with Filmic Inc.’s CTO Christopher Cohen even being invited on stage at the Apple Event to show off “DoubleTake”. Unlike with the dual camera feature on certain Android devices before, you can also record the video streams into separate files instead of having a pre-mixed split-screen. It’s easy to see that this resource-intensive functionality would most likely only be available on powerful Android devices in the beginning (it even seems to be relatively fragmented on iOS at this time) but I really hope I’m not misinterpreting this info and some camera app developer can make it happen soon!
Control external devices
I’m not sure how much can actually come out of this but a new feature called “Quick Access Device Controls” specifically includes “cameras” in its explanatory text: “The Quick Access Device Controls feature, available starting in Android 11, allows the user to quickly view and control external devices such as lights, thermostats and cameras from the Android power menu”. From this, one might deduct that by “cameras” they probably refer to surveillance cameras (or some other internet-connected IoT smart device) but I suppose this could potentially be utilized for controlling other external devices in a media production environment as well so I’ll keep an eye on it and maybe a clever developer finds an ingenious application for this.
Removal of 4GB file size limit
Up until now, Android was only able to write maximum files sizes of around 4GB, a left-over from the very early days that remained unaddressed for too long. As a matter of fact, certain phone makers (Sony for instance) found a way to disable the file size limit in their version of the OS but it remained present on many devices. While this limitation was of little relevance to many (including certain mobile videographers!), it was a major nuisance for others (including me) who wanted to record longer interviews, workshops, events etc. Some camera apps would seemingly record continuously while splitting clips in the background when reaching the file size limit, some would automatically restart the recording, others just stop, forcing a manual restart by the user. With UHD/4K video slowly creeping into the mainstream, this matter got even more pressing in the last years and it’s really about time Android rids itself of this anachronistic relic. Well, it looks like this time is now!
Share Nearby / Nearby Sharing
The last feature I want to mention isn’t actually exclusive to the upcoming new Android version but I still decided to include it here. AirDrop has been a really useful feature on iOS for some time, it allows you to wirelessly transfer (big) files between iOS, iPadOS and MacOS devices without an internet connection. While Google launched its quite useful “Files” app some time ago which lets you among other things quickly send (big) files between Android devices without an active internet connection by using an ad-hoc wifi network and the WiFi direct protocol, it’s still a separate app and not baked into the OS itself. It also doesn’t span the bridge to the desktop if you want to send one or more video files from your phone to your computer for editing. A new feature called “Share Nearby” or “Nearby Sharing” which will be integrated into Android’s share sheet apparently aims to provide Android users with an AirDrop-like experience. And while I first thought that it will not reach beyond the Android OS, thereby seriously curtailing its usefulness, there is some information indicating it could actually link to desktop computers via the Google Chrome browser which would be really awesome! Share Nearby is supposed to roll out in August for all Android devices running Android 6 Marshmallow or newer.
As you can see, this time around there’s actually quite a list of (potentially) useful new features debuting with the new version of Android so it’s fair to say I’m really excited about the launch! What do you think? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on the Twitter @smartfilming. Also, feel free to sign up for my Telegram newsletter t.me/smartfilming to get notified about new blog posts and receive the monthly Ten Takeaways Telegram including a personal selection of 10 interesting things that happend in the world of mobile video during the last four weeks.
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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.
I can see why someone would support the idea of having two video tracks as being a must for creating certain types of videography work. For instance it could be based on the traditional concept of a news report or documentary featuring one or more persons talking (most often as part of an interview) and you don’t want to have the person talking occupying the frame all the time but still keep the statement going. This can help in many ways: On a very basic level, it can work as a means for visual variety to reduce the amount of “talking heads” air time. It might also help to cover up some unwanted visual distraction like when another person stops to look at the interviewee or the camera. But it can also exemplify something that the person is talking about, creating a meaningful connection. If you are interviewing the director of a theater piece who talks about the upcoming premiere you could insert a short clip showing the theater building from the outside, a clip of a poster announcing the premiere or a clip of actors playing a scene during the rehearsal while the director is still talking. The way you do it is by adding the so-called “b-roll” clip as a layer to the primary clip in the timeline of the editing app (usually muting the audio of the b-roll or at least reducing the volume). Without a second video track it can be difficult or even impossible to pull off this mix of video from one clip with the audio from another. But let’s stop here for a moment: Is this really the ONLY legitimate way to tell a story? Sure, as I just pointed out, it does have merit and can be a helpful tool – but I strongly believe that it’s also possible to tell a good story without this “trick” – and therefore without the need for a second video track. Here are some ideas:
WYSIWYH Style
Most of us have probably come across the strange acronym WYSIWYG: “What you see is what you get” – it’s a concept from computational UI design where it means that the preview you are getting in a (text/website/CMS) editor will very much resemble the way things actually look after creating/publishing. If you want a word to appear bold in your text and it’s bold after marking it in the editor, this is WYSIWYG. If you have to punch in code like <b>bold</b> into your text editing interface to make the published end result bold, that’s not WYSIWYG. So I dare to steal this bizarre acronym in a slightly altered version and context: WYSIWYH – “What you see is what you hear” – meaning that your video clips always have the original sound. So in the case of an interview like described before, using a video editing app with only one video track, you would either present the interview in one piece (if it’s not very long) or cut it into smaller chunks with “b-roll” footage in between rather than overlaid (if you don’t want the questions included). Sure, it will look or feel a bit different, not “traditional”, but is that bad? Can’t it still be a good video story? One fairly technical problem we might encounter here is getting smooth audio transitions between clips when the audio levels of the two clips are very different. Video editing apps usually don’t have audio-only cross-fades (WHY is that, I ask!) and a cross-fade involving both audio AND video might not be the preferred transition of choice as most of the time you want to use a plain cut. There are ways to work around this however or just accept it as a stylistic choice for this way of storytelling.
One-Shot Method
Another very interesting way that results in a much easier edit without the need for a second video track (if any at all) but includes more pre-planning in advance for a shoot is the one-shot approach. In contrast to what many one-man-band video journalists do (using a tripod with a static camera), this means you need to be an active camera operator at the same time to catch different visual aspects of the scene. This probably also calls for some sort of stabilization solution like phone-internal OIS/EIS, a rig, a gimbal or at least a steady hand and some practice. Journalist Kai Rüsberg has been an advocate of this style and collected some good tips here (blog post is in German but Google Translate should help you getting the gist). As a matter of fact, there’s even a small selection of noticeable feature films created in such a (risky) manner, among them “Russian Ark” (2002) and “Viktoria” (2015). One other thing we need to take into consideration is that if there’s any kind of asking questions involved, the interviewer’s voice will be “on air” so the audio should be good enough for this as well. I personally think that this style can be (if done right!) quite fascinating and more visually immersive than an edited package with static separate shots but it poses some challenges and might not be suited for everybody and every job/situation. Still, doing something like that might just expand your storytelling capabilities by trying something different. A one-track video editing app will suffice to add some text, titles, narration, fade in/out etc.
Shediting
A unique almagam of a traditional multi-clip approach and the one-shot method is a technique I called “shediting” in an earlier blog post. This involves a certain feature that is present in many native and some 3rd party camera apps: By pausing the recording instead of stopping it in between shots, you can cram a whole bunch of different shots into a single clip. Just like with one-shot, this can save you lots of time in the edit (sometimes things need to go really fast!) but requires more elaborate planning and comes with a certain risk. It also usually means that everything needs to be filmed within a very compact time frame and one location/area because in most cases you can’t close the app or have the phone go to sleep without actually stopping the recording. Nonetheless, I find this to be an extremely underrated and widely unknown “hack” to piece together a package on the go! Do yourself a favor and try to tell a short video story that way!
Voice-Over
A way to tackle rough audio transitions (or bad/challenging sound in general) while also creating a sense of continuity between clips is to use a voice-over narration in post production, most mobile editors offer this option directly within the app and even if you happen to come across one that doesn’t (or like Videoshop, hides it behind a paywall) you can easily record a voice-over in a separate audio recording app and import the audio to your video editor although it’s a bit more of a hassle if you need to redo it when the timing isn’t quite right. One example could be splicing your interview into several clips in the timeline and add “b-roll” footage with a voice-over in between. Of course you should see to it that the voice-over is somewhat meaningful and not just redundant information or is giving away the gist / key argument of an upcoming statement of the interviewee. You could however build/rephrase an actual question into the voice-over. Instead of having the original question “What challenges did you experience during the rehearsal process?” in the footage, you record a voice-over saying “During the rehearsal process director XY faced several challenges both on and off the stage…” for the insert clip followed by the director’s answer to the question. It might also help in such a situation to let the voice-over already begin at the end of the previous clip and flow into the subsequent one to cover up an obvious change in the ambient sound of the different clips. Of course, depending on the footage, the story and situation, this might not always work perfectly.
Text/Titles
Finally, with more and more media content being consumed muted on smartphones “on the go” in public, one can also think about having text and titles as an important narrative tool, particularly if there’s no interview involved (of course a subtitled interview would also be just fine!). This only works however if your editing app has an adequate title tool, nothing too fancy but at least covering the basics like control over fonts, size, position, color etc. (looking at you, iMovie for iOS!). Unlike adding a second video track, titles don’t tax the processor very much so even ultra-budget phones will be able to handle it.
Now, do you still remember the second part of this article’s title, the one in parentheses? I have just gone into lengths to explain why I think it’s not always necessary to use a video editing app with at least two video tracks to create a video story with your phone, so why would I now be saying that after all it doesn’t really matter that much anymore? Well, if you look back a whole bunch of years (say around 2013/2014) when the phoneography movement really started to gather momentum, the idea of having two video tracks in a video editing app was not only a theoretical question for app developers, thinking about how advanced they WANTED their app to be. It was also very much a plain technical consideration, particularly for Android where the processing power of devices ranged from quite weak to quite powerful. Processing multiple video streams in HD resolution simultaneously was no small feat at the time for a mobile processor, to a small degree this might even still be true today. This meant that not only was there a (very) limited selection of video editing apps with the ability to handle more than just one video track at the same time, but even when an app like KineMaster or PowerDirector generally supported the use of multiple video tracks, this feature was only available for certain devices, excluding phones and tablets with very basic processors that weren’t up to the task. Now this has very much changed over the last years with SoCs (System-on-a-chip) becoming more and more powerful, at least when it comes to handling video footage in FHD 1080p resolution as opposed to UHD/4K! Sure, I bet there’s still a handful of (old) budget Android devices out there that can’t handle two tracks of HD video in an editing app but mostly, having the ability to use at least two video tracks is not really tied to technical restraints anymore – if the app developers want their app to have multi-track editing then they should be able to integrate that. And you can definitely see that an increasing number of video editing apps have (added) this feature – one that’s really good, cross-platform and free without watermark is VN which I wrote about in an earlier article.
So, despite having argued that two video tracks in an editing app is not an absolute prerequisite for producing a good video story on your phone, the fact that nowadays many apps and basically all devices support this feature very much reduces the potential conflict that could arise from such an opinion. I do hope however that the mindset of the phoneography movement continues to be one of “can do” instead of “can’t do”, exploring new ways of storytelling, not just producing traditional formats with new “non-traditional” devices.
As usual, feel free to drop a comment or get in touch on the Twitter @smartfilming. If you like this blog, consider signing up for my Telegram channel t.me/smartfilming to get notified about new blog posts and receive the monthly Ten Takeaways Telegram newsletter including a personal selection of 10 interesting things that happened in the world of mobile video during the last four weeks.
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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.
Telegram started out in 2013, founded by Russian brothers Nikolai and Pawel Durow who had already created “Russia’s Facebook”, VK. While it was able to avoid being seen as “the Kremlin messenger”, its claims of providing an experience that is very strong in terms of security and data protection have received some flak from experts. It also came into questionable spotlight as the preferred modus communicandi of the so-called “Islamic State” and other extremist groups that want to avoid scrutiny from intelligence agencies. But this is just some general context and everyone can decide for herself/himself what to make of it.
The reason for this article has nothing to do with the aforementioned “historical” context but looks only at the app’s potentially useful functionality when it comes to media production, particularly video production. People are sending enormous amounts of video these days via their messenger apps. For reasons benefitting the sender/receiver as well as the app service provider itself, those videos are usually compressed, both in terms of resolution and bitrate. The compression results in smaller file sizes which lets you send/receive them faster, use up less storage space and avoid burning through too much mobile data. This works pretty well when all you do is watch the video in your messenger app, it’s far from ideal however if you want to work with the video somebody sent you.
While there is a way to prevent the app from automatically compressing your video by sending/attaching it not as a video (which is the usual way of doing it) but as a file (as you would normally add a doc or pdf), the file size limit of most messenger apps is so small that it’s not really suitable for sending video files that are longer than one minute. WhatsApp has a current file size limit of 100MB and so does Signal. Threema tops out at 50MB for sending files uncompressed while Facebook Messenger gives you a measly 25MB! Just for measure: a moderate bitrate of 16Mbit/s for a FHD 1920×1080 video will reach the 100MB limit at only 50 seconds. In this regard, Telegram is basically lightyears ahead of the competition as it lets you send uncompressed files up to 2 GB (around 2000 MB), yes you heard that right!
Choose “File” and then “Gallery” (or another option if that’s where your media is located) to send a video in full quality without compression.
To send an uncompressed video file within Telegram, tap on the paper clip icon in a chat, select “File” (NOT “Gallery”) and then “Gallery. To send images without compression” (or choose one of the other options if your video file is located somewhere else on the device). It’s that easy! There’s also a cool way to use Telegram as your personal unlimited cloud storage: If you open the app’s menu (tapping on the three lines in the top left corner) you will find an option that says “Saved Messages”. This is basically your own personal space within the app where you can collect all kinds of material like notes, links or files. As long as the file doesn’t exceed 2 GB, you can upload it into this “self chat” like you would in a regular cloud storage service like Dropbox, GoogleDrive or OneDrive. And believe it or not, you currently get UNLIMITED storage for free! I think there’s a chance that Telegram might cap this at some point in the future if people start using it too excessively but up until then, this is a pretty amazing feature most users don’t know about (even I didn’t until a few days ago!).
Telegram gives you unlimited cloud storage, each file you upload can be up to 2 GB in size.
This benefit gets even more powerful when you consider that you can use Telegram across several devices (it’s not only available for Android, iOS and Windows 10 Mobile but also has desktop apps for Windows and MacOS!) with the same account, something you can’t do with other messengers like WhatsApp which ties you to a single mobile device for active use of one account. A side note though: If you have someone send you a big uncompressed video file over mobile data, you might want to tell the other person that it will cut into their mobile data significantly. So if possible, they should send it when logged into a WiFi network.
In-app video editor of Telegram.
And even if your goal is actually to compress a video when sending it, Telegram gives you the best choices to do so. When selecting a video via the Gallery button (instead of the File button) you can adjust the resolution of the clip by using the app’s recently updated in-app video editor. After marking your clip of choice by tapping on the empty circle in the top right corner of the video’s thumbnail, tap on the thumbnail itself to open the video editor. You will be able to trim the clip or add a drawing/text/sticker (brush icon). You can even do some basic color correction (sliders icon), I kid you not! And you can adjust the video resolution by tapping on the gear icon in the bottom left corner of the tool box. By moving the slider you can choose between FHD 1920×1080, HD 1280×720, SD 854×480 and what I will call “LD” (low definition) 480×270.
If your primary focus when using messenger apps is most comprehensive security / data protection or mass compatibility and you don’t need to use the app as a tool for direct (video) file transfer, then you might still prefer Signal, Threema or WhatsApp respectively. Otherwise Telegram is a powerful tool with best-in-class features for a professional video production workflow.
So despite the fact that Telegram is still far from being as ubiquitous as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, it has significantly increased its user base in the last months and years (currently over half a billion installs from the Google Play Store!) and chances are getting better that the person sending video to you is using it or has at least installed it on her/his phone.
Questions and comments are welcome, either below in the comment section or on Twitter @smartfilming. I also just created my own Telegram channel which you can join here: https://t.me/smartfilming. You will be notified about new blog posts and receive the monthly Ten Takeaways Telegram newsletter including a personal selection of 10 interesting things that happened in the world of mobile video during the last four weeks.
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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.
Only two weeks ago, an app called Protake – Mobile Cinema Camera popped up in the Google Play Store (and also the Apple App Store). The screenshots looked quite promising and after downloading it and taking it for a quick spin I can confirm that there’s now another immensely powerful mobile video recording app available for both Android and iOS. Protake gives you full manual control over exposure (shutter speed/angle and ISO), focus and white balance, you get support for external mics and a visual audio level meter plus the ability to adjust input gain, a whole set of exposure and focus assistants (zebra, false color, focus peaking, waveform monitor, RGB parade, histogram), different aspect ratios (including different widescreen formats and square but apparently skipping 9:16 vertical), frame rates (incl. 25fps, but not 50/60 on any of my devices – but that might be different for other phones), resolutions, bitrates (they don’t go as high as Filmic Pro’s though), codecs (H.264/H.265), color profiles/looks etc.. You even have an interesting option called “Frame Drop Notice” which I have never seen anywhere else before and some useful one-tap quick buttons for hiding the UI or switching between maximum screen brightness and current brightness. There’s also support for external accessories like Zhiyun gimbals, anamorphic lenses or a DOF adapter. All in all, it’s a feature range almost as complete as FilmicPro’s and the UI is slick and intuitive.
There is however one catch: While you can download the app for free and also use the auto mode to record, you can only activate recording for the pro mode (including manual controls and most advanced features) by buying a subscription. The subscription model has become a common practice for many apps in the last years (particularly for video editing apps) but so far I hadn’t really encountered it in a camera app. The subscription price is 10.99 Euros (9.99 US-Dollars) per year which is somewhat moderate compared to other apps (if you break it down it’s less than 1 Euro per month) but as I said, it’s new for this kind of app (at least to me!) so it might need a bit getting used to. It should be noted that the current price is a 50% off offer so the regular price would actually be double, venturing into financial territory not too many of us might be willing to follow. There’s another thing to keep in mind which probably isn’t of any relevance to most users but definitely to someone like me with a whole zoo of different phones: The subscription will only let you use the pro mode on three different devices at the same time. So if you want to use it on more than three I suppose you will need to buy a second subscription. This should however be a very rare use case.
One last thing: If you are on Android, please note that most features of the pro mode (like setting specific values for shutter speed and ISO) are only available if your Android device fully supports Camera2 API, which lets apps of 3rd party developers access the more advanced functionality of the phone’s camera. If Camera2 API support hasn’t been implemented properly by the maker of the phone, 3rd party apps can’t access certain features no matter how capable their developers are. As a rule of thumb, relatively current flagship phones and midrangers usually have sufficient Camera2 API support, entry level phones only sometimes. If you want to learn more about the topic, check out this older blog post by me.
Let me know what you think of Protake! Either here in the comments or on Twitter @smartfilming. If you like this blog, please consider subscribing to my Telegram channel (t.me/smartfilming) to get notified about new blog posts and receive the monthly Ten Takeaways Telegram newsletter including a personal selection of 10 interesting things that happened in the world of mobile video during the last four weeks.
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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.
While routinely browsing the Google Play Store for new video editing apps, I came across an app named ‘VN’. The provided screen grabs looked somewhat promising and I downloaded the app. After launching it, I was greeted with a splash screen that prompted me to log in or create an account. I seriously considered deleting the app again. I’m at a point where I really don’t want to sign up for the 3478th service, particularly not before even being able to try out the app. Curiosity however got the better of me and in hindsight, I’m glad it did.
First things first: VN isn’t really new. It apparently has been around for about two years according to the release date in the PlayStore but the relatively low number of downloads compared to other popular free video editing apps indicates that not too many people seem to have noticed it. VN is integrated into a video sharing community (where you can post videos to their platform and follow other users) which can seem a bit annoying if you only want to use the app to save the finished project to the device and share it to your platform of choice. You don’t have to share the video to VN’s community though, it’s possible to only export it to the Gallery (Android) or Camera Roll (iOS) and save it locally on the device.
With that out of the way, I have to say I was very impressed with VN’s feature set after taking it out for a spin. While it’s not quite as advanced as LumaFusion or KineMaster, it comes surprisingly close for a free app, covering a wide range of dedicated functions for serious video editing while at the same time sporting a visually pleasing and generally user-friendly UI.
Main timeline UI of ‘VN’
VN has a classic video editor timeline layout and is able to handle multiple tracks of video (important for b-roll editing for instance), audio and other visual elements like titles, photos and graphics. In terms of graphics it’s also important to note that it supports png files with alpha channel (for instance to include brand logos). You can also record voice-over into the timeline as an audio track and for this external microphones are supported as well. Another big win for VN is the variety of project aspect ratios available: 21:9, 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 3:4, 9:16 and even ‘Round’ which is basically a masked square format.
One area where VN really needs to be improved (at least on Android) is handling audio transitions between video clips. There a multiple ways to achieve this but none is included at the moment: 1) it’s not possible to detach the audio of a video clip to make J&L cuts 2) while visual elements can be keyframed, audio can’t – so no audio ducking / automation is possible 3) while quick fade in/out buttons are conveniently available for audio-only clips (music, voice-overs etc), this is not available for the integrated audio of video clips in the Android version (it is on iOS) 4) no audio-only cross-fade is included in the transitions. With all these critical points in combination it’s very hard to avoid rough audio transitions between video clips in the Android version at the moment, the iOS version is slightly better. I suppose the fade in/out buttons for video audio will be added to the Android version eventually.
Talking about audio, at least in the Android version voice-overs recorded within the app itself don’t sound very good (I tested on two devices so far), like they are recorded at a low audio bitrate or sample rate but I’m sure this can be fixed with an update. Also, you can’t boost the audio in the Android version while on iOS you can. A slightly annoying thing in both versions is the fact that just like many other video editors featuring video overlays, the added b-roll footage doesn’t fill the whole frame but is added in a slightly scaled down version so if you want to have it cover up the frame of the video clip on the primary track seamlessly, you have to manually scale it which is not only an extra step but also includes the risk of accidentally moving the image away from the center. I get that this default setting is useful if you want to use the overlay video as a picture-in-picture but it’s not the best for editing b-roll style. It would also be nice to have a visual audio level meter when playing back the timeline.
Other than that, VN continues to provide you with lots of useful editing options like speed-ramping, nice title templates, filters, basic grading and various visual effects. One very clever UI function is that when long-pressing a video clip in the timeline to rearrange the order of the clips, it automatically squeezes the clip into a compact square storyboard thumbnail and only transitions back to the original timeline view after releasing the clip into its new place. This makes it much easier to rearrange clips quickly. VN also gives you a variety of professional options on export, not only resolution but frame rate (24/25/30/50/60) and bitrate. And it’s watermark-free! And available for both Android and iOS! On iOS it even seems that you can use it without having to create an account first. I have only tested it for about a week now and it’s quite possible that I will come across (more) bugs or shortcomings but so far I can conclude that this is a fantastic app, both easy to use and powerful. So is it the best free-without-watermark cross-platform mobile video editing app?
A couple of days after discovering VN, I took a second look at another app, one that I tested about a year ago when it was still in beta but somehow lost track of it over the months. It’s called ‘Feelmatic’ and is available for both Android and iOS and similar to VN (at least when looking at the Android version), you have to create an account for their video sharing platform/community.
Main timeline UI of ‘Feelmatic’.
Feelmatic also covers a lot of important features for advanced mobile video editing. It’s a bit more basic than VN, lacking some of its “bells & whistles”, but depending on the job you need to get done, it might not be that much of a deal. One might even see it positively as a more focused approach with a toolbar that lets you see all elements at a glance without having to swipe and scroll around, going down the option rabbit hole. It might be easier to grasp for users who are completely new to video editing. When I first tested the app last year it didn’t have the ability to add a video overlay but it does now. Better yet and unlike VN, the video overlay fully covers up the clip in the primary track by default. Feelmatic lets you record voice-over within the app and supports the use of external mics for that. Just like with VN however creating a smooth audio mix can be a problem, as there’s no audio keyframing, audio-only transitions or fade in/out buttons etc. I consider this to be one of two crucial points to improve in Feelmatic. The other is the extremely limited number of available aspect ratios: 16:9 is all there is (unless I’ve missed something), no option for vertical or square. You can bring in footage in other aspect ratios but it will be fit into a 16:9 frame and exported as such.
Feelmatic also has two slightly special toolbar elements, one is called ‘Logo’ which basically invites you to add an alpha channel png file as a brand/broadcaster logo and gives you a choice of four common default positions within the frame. The other one is ‘Subtitle’ which adds text including a half-transparent background for better legibility at the bottom of the frame. This is great for actual subtitles/captions but as far as I could tell, there are no other title options like say for an intro. This is a bit too bare bones for my taste.
The UI is generally good and focused with one minor shortcoming: the toolbar is located in the middle of the screen which makes reaching it in one-hand operation a bit more difficult, at least on bigger phones. If the toolbar were located at the bottom beneath the timeline, accessibility would be better.
The process of getting your project out of the app is a bit more cumbersome than with VN (you have to select a category for your video even if you don’t want to publish it on the Feelmatic platform for instance) but it is possible. That being said, you do get a solid set of export settings including video and audio bitrate. The video bit rate however maxes out at 10 Mbit, the audio bit rate at 128 Kbit which isn’t exactly great. And there are even more limitations: resolution is limited to 1080p (no UHD/4K), fps to a maximum of 30fps. While on iOS this does at least include 25fps as well, the Android version only supports 24 and 30 which is disappointing because other editing apps on Android like KineMaster, VN or CuteCut don’t have a problem with exporting 25fps.
So while I think that Feelmatic is actually a pretty solid and interesting video editing app with great potential definitely worth checking out, VN is more powerful in terms of features and the export process is less cumbersome. You should definitely check out both apps if you are into mobile video editing unless you are worried about their business model. If you don’t mind a watermark on the exported video or paying for a subscription, KineMaster is still the best and most compatible option available for both major mobile platforms. Let me know what you think in the comments or on Twitter @smartfilming.
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.
Ever since Microsoft had built its quasi-monopoly in terms of an operating system for personal desktop computers and laptops with Windows, many assumed that they would have a good chance of utilizing this might in the emerging field of increasingly potent mobile phones with more complex operating systems. But that didn’t really happen. While Microsoft did introduce the Windows CE-based „Windows Mobile“ for pocketable computing devices in the early days of the 21st century, the real revolution in this market would only happen years later with the arrival of Apple’s iPhone. In a now infamous statement during an interview with USA Today in 2007, Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer was extremely skeptical about Apple’s first phone: „There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.“ Things turned out slightly different as we all know today. While Apple with iOS and soon after Google with Android went all-in on mobile touch-screen operating systems for smartphones, Microsoft hesitated for a long time – too long as history would tell. When they finally came out with Windows Phone 7 (the „7“ picking up from earlier OS versions under the „Windows Mobile“ moniker) in 2010 they were three years late to the party and never managed to catch up again despite occasional glimpses of hope. One, maybe THE crucial factor for failure was the fact that many popular 3rd party apps were not available for Microsoft’s platform or only in versions inferior to those on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. The acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone division in 2014, a tighter integration with its desktop OS Windows 10 in the form of Windows 10 Mobile in 2015 and the app porting projects “Astoria” (Android) and “Islandwood” (iOS) were last desperate attempts to turn the tide but to no avail. Satya Nadella taking over from Steve Ballmer as CEO in 2014 also meant Microsoft reevaluated its business strategy and philosophy to concentrate on platform-independent services instead of pushing their own platform. In October 2017 a Microsoft executive revealed that they would cease development of new features and hardware for the platform, in January 2019 the company announced that software support for Windows 10 Mobile will end December 10, eventually postponing the date to January 14 2020 which will be next week.
End of life, end of story?
So why would I now bother to write about Windows Phone / Windows 10 Mobile when it’s being lowered into the virtual „cybergrave“ right now? Does anyone care at all? While I do assume that many will not have exactly waited for someone to do this, I consider Microsoft’s passing mobile OS to be worth a look in retrospect because not only was it a really refreshing alternative to Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android in terms of design but it actually had quite a bit of potential as a platform for mobile content creation in my opinion – potential that was wasted or got lost along the way, that is.
Mobile photographers livin’ the Lumia dream
Nokia Lumia 1020 in bright yellow. (Photo Credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)
The Windows Phone device that single-handedly put the platform on the map for mobile content creation was without a doubt the Nokia Lumia 1020 which launched in the summer of 2013. Sporting a six-element lens array by Carl Zeiss with a whopping 41 (!) MP sensor to go along, optical image stabilization, a full set of manual controls for photography, a dedicated shutter button and (added via software update a bit later) the ability to shoot in RAW/DNG, the 1020 was a dream come true for mobile photographers, outshining pretty much everything the iPhone or Android handsets had to offer at that time. There weren’t any advanced photo editing apps around in the Windows Phone Store but as long as your focus was on the capturing experience this didn’t really matter much.
What’s with the video?
Things weren’t quite as impressive in the videography department however. Sure, the spectacular 41MP sensor was a very early example of how a photo camera megapixel „overkill“ could be utilized to provide a quasi-lossless digital zoom for video which only needed a small fraction of the 41MP prowess when recording in 1080p resolution. But while you had a pro mode with advanced manual controls for photography at hand, there wasn’t an equivalent for video – the fact that this asymmetrical feature distribution is still the standard with 99% of smartphones today isn’t really an excuse. The common simplicity and bare-bones functionality of most native camera apps doesn’t mean you have to throw in the towel for more ambitious videography work with your phone as long as 3rd party apps fill the gap but that’s exactly the point where we touch upon a sore spot with Windows Phone.
Video mode UI of ProShot on a Lumia 550. In addition to white balance presets and manual focus, an audio level meter and shutter speed / ISO control is available.
Up until very late in the game, when ProShot added video functionality to its advanced camera app for Windows 10 Mobile in the second half of 2016 there was not a single 3rd party video camera app in the Windows Phone store that provided a robust set of manual controls like ISO and shutter speed to set a precise exposure. You couldn’t even lock the exposure for video in any of the camera apps with video functionality. It wasn’t all bad though, there were some lights in the dark. I never owned a Lumia 1020 but had a 920 for over a year as my daily driver and I was pleased to find out that the native camera app supported the use of external mics via the headphone jack which is often an indispensable feature when using the phone for professional video work.
Video mode UI of the native camera app on the Lumia 950. White balance presets, manual focus and exposure compensation are available – but no exposure lock or precise shutter speed / ISO adjustment.
Another beacon (at least for folks residing in regions which use the PAL broadcast standard) was the ability of Lumia Camera (which was a separate app from the stock camera but could be considered an advanced native camera app) to shoot video in 25fps and not only the standard 30fps that is common for the native camera app of basically every single smartphone on the planet. Unfortunately, Lumia Camera did not support the use of external mics while the stock camera app did not support shooting in 25fps so if you needed both (and many did) you were out of luck. There could have been a happy ending to this when the Windows Phone native camera and Lumia Camera were merged into one app (I think they dubbed it „Windows Camera“) for the new Windows 10 Mobile. You now had white balance presets, manual focus and basic exposure adjustment (but only EV, not precise shutter speed / ISO values, and still no exposure lock!) at hand, plus PAL frame rate support. Devices running Windows 10 Mobile (at least the Lumias) were the only smartphones able to shoot in 25fps natively without the help of 3rd party apps. Up until this very day this has not been possible on any phone running Android or iOS! But incomprehensibly, the fusion of the two camera apps dropped the support for external mics (at least that’s what I found on the Lumia 950 and 550) despite the fact that it was still working in a Windows 10 Mobile preview version I ran on a Lumia 630 before the final release apparently killed it off. As mentioned before, ProShot (which had been a photo camera only for a long time) eventually added a video mode with a lot of pro features like precise shutter speed / ISO exposure control, an audio level meter and support for external mics. But it basically did so at a time when the MS Windows 10 Mobile had already hit the iceberg.
Windows Phone = Lumia?
If you are wondering at this moment why I have been only talking about Lumia devices in the context of Windows Phone and if Lumia phones basically equal Windows Phones you are both right and wrong. Yes, there were other companies than Nokia (and later Microsoft itself): Samsung, HTC, Acer, Blu and HP were among those launching phones running Microsoft’s mobile OS but their support for Windows Phone was very sparse and short-lived so it’s pretty hard to imagine that when someone talks about a „Windows Phone“ device now they are not referring to a Lumia phone.
It’s also undisputed that it were the Lumia flagships following the pioneering work of the Nokia Lumia 1020 which gave Windows Phone its reputation with mobile camera enthusiasts: photos and video footage from devices like the Lumia 920, 930, 950 and 950 XL were able to go head-to-head with iPhones and high-end Android handsets in terms of image quality. So why did Windows Phone fail to establish itself as a viable alternative for mobile content creation with smartphones?
Minding the app gap
Yes, we’re back talking about apps again. While the hardware was competitive (at least in certain cases), the software – or to be more precise: the software eco system wasn’t really compared to the other two dominant mobile platforms. I already pointed out that there was a serious lack of advanced 3rd party camera apps for video (FilmicPro actually ran a crowd funding campaign for a Windows Phone version once, it failed miserably) but the problems were not only confined to the capturing experience, they were just as imminent for post production.
UI of Movie Maker 8.1
UI of Videoshop
While Windows Phone 8.1 can actually be considered a huge step forward for the platform in terms of having any kind of video editing app available at all (apparently up until WP 8 the OS had prevented 3rd party apps from integrating even basic video editing tasks into their apps), seeing the launch of apps like Movie Maker 8.1, Videoshop (which turned out to become the only video editor available across all three major mobile platforms), MovieJax and the frustratingly short-lived Movie Creator Beta, they were all relatively basic – none of them offered a second video track for instance. That being said, they did allow you to create and produce a simple video story by adding several clips to a timeline, trim off unwanted parts, add audio like voice-over and very basic titles. But those who had hoped that this first wave of usable video editors would mature or bring about even more advanced ones over time eventually had to admit that their optimism wasn’t justified. The problems of a thin and often quality-lacking eco system in general which got caught up in a vicious circle involving poor sales figures and lacklustre involvement of app developers had a direct impact on the special case of using Windows Phone as a platform for mobile content creation.
You can still get things done!
That didn’t prevent some daring creators from using Windows Phone devices for actual professional videography however, tapping into its strengths while working around the shortcomings. I particularly want to highlight the work of Dutch/Frisian mobile journalist Wytse Vellinga who for some time used a Lumia 930 to produce news reports for the regional broadcaster Omrop Fryslan. Here are some fine examples:
Another example is by Croatian videographer Darko Flajpan who’s working for the national broadcaster HRT and also used a Lumia 930 as a main camera for a whole documentary, here’s the trailer:
To learn something about their personal experience working with Windows Phone in a professional context, I asked them a couple of short questions for the purpose of this article.
Q1: Why did you consider working with a Windows Phone at all?
Wytse Vellinga: “Windows Phone had the best camera quality on any smartphone in those days. And the fact that it could shoot 25fps with the native camera app was extremely helpful for me as a broadcast journalist.”
Darko Flajpan: “Windows Phone (Lumia 1020 in particular) got my attention at the time because of camera capabilities. It was a photo/video beast at that moment and still respectful even today. And with a battery grip which had a tripod thread and a shutter button it was the perfect tool for early MoJos. Also, it had 25fps which was very helpful for later editing and broadcasting. I’ve switched to Lumia 930 as soon it was released and with usable 4K@25fps it was unmatched in the smartphone world. So hardware was top notch and OS was quite polished and user friendly. The price of those smartphones was also on a fair side. I still have couple of 930s…”
Q2: What were the main challenges?
Wytse Vellinga: “The main challenges were the lack of good third party apps. There was no good editor, nor was there an app for making radio reports. And as the years progressed it didn’t get better but it got worse.”
Darko Flajpan: “Main challenges were on the software side. There were just two apps for video editing and those were buggy and not user friendly, so for any editing you had to transfer footage to a laptop. Lack of any support from Google (e.g. no official YouTube app) was quite irritating. On the hardware side, Microsoft never made a tiny bit of code to allow mic input to be used by a camera – for me that was huge.”
Q3: Why did Windows Phone fail in the end in your opinion?
Wytse Vellinga: “Because of what I just said. The lack of apps and the lack of support for those that wanted to build apps. It almost looked like Microsoft did not believe in their own platform.”
Darko Flajpan: “Third party developers were focused on higher value markets (iOS, Android), and Microsoft was not making an effort to attract them. From my point of view Microsoft had no clear strategy for smartphones. Brilliant engineers from Nokia (I’ve met a couple of them) were frustrated how Microsoft treated them – they’ve created great hardware and had just frustrations and lack of support from Microsoft’s side. Now, they are working for Apple and Chinese manufacturers.”
Q4: Do you think there’s any space left between Android and iOS for a third major mobile OS?
Wytse Vellinga: “There is always room for something new. iOS and Android are not perfect so there is room for improvement. But you will have to invest a lot of time and energy in getting app builders on board.”
Darko Flajpan: “This is very complex. If someone creates anything better and more attractive to consumers it will be bought, obstructed or destroyed by the two major players in its very early stage, that is my, not optimistic opinion.”
Finally, I would also like to share a short proof-of-concept video story I created using only the low-budget Lumia 550 (cost me about 50 Euro in used condition), shooting with its native camera app and editing with Videoshop. So it was completely produced on the mobile device. Notice: The Lumia 550 is only able to shoot 720p HD (not 1080p FHD) so the video has the same resolution.
“Slide down to power off”
It’s hard to imagine a more serious focus on mobile content creators alone could have made Windows Phone / Windows 10 Mobile a viable success story but it’s frustrating nonetheless looking back at the undeniable but underdeveloped potential of the platform and the devices that came with it. Fairly recently, Microsoft announced its return to the smartphone market: The long-lasting rumors about a supposed „Surface Phone“ will apparently materialize in the form of the Surface Duo smartphone in 2020. This will however only be a comeback in terms of hardware – the device is supposed to run on Android. So what was your experience with Windows Phone? Did you even know it existed? Did you ever use it and if so did you like it? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on the Twitter @smartfilming.
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.
Android
Google Photos The easiest way to stabilize a pre-recorded video clip on your mobile phone is probably to use a little known feature of an immensely popular (and completely free!) app: Google Photos. Select any video clip and open the edit panel (sliders icon in the middle), then tap on the rectangle with the tilted image inside (to the right of the “Export frame” button). When I first used it I was really surprised how well it worked! The stabilization process doesn’t alter the resolution and frame rate but you will have to live with a lower video bitrate (sample clip: 17 to 11 Mbit/s) while the audio bitrate remains the same. Google Photos is basically available for all Android devices which is great. I have however found that very ancient pre-Android 5 devices (I tested it with two devices running Android 4.4) do not have the stabilization feature baked into the app. “What about iOS?” you may ask as Google Photos is also available on the Apple Appstore. Unfortunately, just like with the ancient Androids, the stabilization feature is not available in the iOS version of the app. Maybe at some point in the future.
PowerDirector If you are looking for a stabilization feature already built into an advanced mobile video editing app with which you can produce your final edit, then Cyberlink’s PowerDirector was for a long time your only choice across platforms. Select the clip in your timeline, open the editing panel by tapping the pen icon on the left side bar and choose „Stabilizer“. Unlike with Google Photos where the stabilization is basically a one-button operation, PD does give you a 0-100 slider to increase or decrease the level of correction (default value is 50). The higher the level of correction, the more the image will be cropped. PD can keep the footage’s fps as long as it is a frame rate that is supported for export within the app. That means 24, 30 and 60fps – no PAL frame rates unfortunately. Resolution on the other hand shouldn’t be a problem at all, PD supports export up to UHD/4K resolution. You also get to choose between three bitrate options (Smaller Size/Standard/Better Quality), the actual bitrate will be depending on your export resolution. In the case of the sample clip used here the bitrate of 17Mbit/s remained unaltered when using „Better Quality“ but that seems to be the maximum for projects with FHD resolution. If you use a clip recorded in a higher bitrate it will be compressed upon export. The audio bitrate is reduced (sample clip 320 to128 Kbit/s). PD is free to download with watermark and some restrictions regarding certain features – watermark-free export and the complete feature set are only available with a paid subscription. In 2020, PowerDirector also became available on iOS for iPhones and iPads.
CapCut Following PowerDirector as the second full-fledged mobile video editing app with an inbuilt stabilization tool, CapCut comes from Bytedance, the company behind the popular video network TikTok. To stabilize a clip in your timeline, tap on it, then select “Stabilize” in the bottom tool bar. You can now choose how aggresive the stabilization process should be by placing the slider at the different options. “Minimal cropping” will be best if there’s only a little bit of shake in the image. “Recommended” is for more shaky video applying a bigger crop and “Most stable” will smooth out even more shakiness but also crops in the most into the frame. Once you have chosen your favorite, tap on “Stabilize”. While CapCut does not support exporting in UHD/4K resolution you can import such footage and it’s actually a good idea to have the original footage in a higher resolution than the final export since the stabilization tool has more additional pixels to smooth out the shakes and cropping might not have any negative effect on the image quality. CapCut is free to download and use without any limitations or watermark, it’s also available on iOS for iPhones and iPads.
Microsoft Hyperlapse Mobile There’s a third option on Android. Microsoft Hyperlapse Mobile shouldn’t be confused with Instagram’s „Hyperlapse“ app (which is only available on iOS so far). They are actually somewhat similar in that their main purpose is to speed up and stabilize video but while Instagram’s app can only do this for footage shot „live“ within the app, Microsoft’s version allows importing pre-recorded clips. By default, the result you get will be a 4x sped up clip but if you want the original speed, you can move the speed slider to „1x“ instead. As for the resolution, Microsoft Hyperlapse only supports import of clips with up to FHD resolution and you have to activate FHD export in the settings as the default setting is HD (720p). The frame rate remains the same, the video bitrate is seriously crunched (sample clip: 17 to 8 Mbit/s), the audio bitrate is kept intact. The stabilization result isn’t as good as Google’s Photos and while the app is free, you do get a Microsoft Hyperlapse branded bumper screen. There are no in-app purchases to get rid of this so you will probably have to trim it off using another app.
VideoStabilizer for KineMaster If you were asking me which app I consider to be the best video editing app for Android, I would probably choose KineMaster. It lacked a video stabilization feature though and many people have been asking about it. In 2020, KineMaster did something rather unexpected: They released a separate app called VideoStabilizer for KineMaster (alongside another separate app for speed ramping, SpeedRamp for KineMaster). The official take on this is that they don’t want the size of the main app to become too big (in terms of MB) and they also want to keep it available for as many devices as possible (resource intensive video stabilization might cause problems with entry-level processors). If you ask me, I would definitely prefer to have it as part of KineMaster and not a separate app. And despite the fact that the app is now out of beta and officially released, it can still be pretty buggy at times and the results aren’t as reliable as with some other apps. It’s not quite up to the standard that we have come to expect from the main app but I guess it will get better over time. The app is free to download but if you export the video directly to the Gallery, the video will have a watermark in the bottom right corner. You can only avoid the watermark by sharing the stabilized clip directly to KineMaster and you also need to have an active KineMaster subscription (because otherwise you will get a watermark when exporting from KineMaster). There’s currently no (beta) version on iOS but I think chances are good that there will be one later on or alternatively a version of the final production release.
iOS (iPhone/iPad)
Emulsio As mentioned above, while Google Photos is available for iOS, the stabilization feature from the Android version is not. Also, none of iOS’s best video editing apps including the likes of Luma Fusion, KineMaster, Adobe Rush, Videoleap or Splice feature a stabilization tool at this point. The only (fairly good) option to stabilize pre-recorded video that I was able to find was an app called Emulsio. The interesting thing about Emulsio is that unlike all other apps for stabilizing mentioned here, there’s a whole bunch of controls over the stabilization process at your fingertips. Just like PD it gives you a 0-100% scale for the strength of the correction, cropping more of the frame the higher the % is. But on top of that, you get control over which axes (X,Y,XY) are corrected, you can switch rotation compensation and wobble removal on or off and even reduce rolling shutter. Emulsio does keep resolution and frame rate intact but reduces both video bitrate (sample clip 17 to 15Mbit/s) and audio bitrate (320 to 256Kbit/s). It’s free with watermark, you can get rid of the watermark by purchasing a 8.99€ pro upgrade.
Microsoft Hyperlapse Mobile Before I wrap this up let me tell you that while Microsoft Hyperlapse Mobile isn’t available for iOS, it (still) is for their own (now quasi-dead) mobile platform Windows Mobile. So just for the highly unlikely case that you are a die-hard Windows Phone enthusiast still holding on to your Lumia: You can join the stabilization fun! It basically works like the Android version described above but only supports import/export of HD (720p) clips, higher resolution clips will be transcoded to 720p. So when the resolution is reduced it shouldn’t come as a surprise that video bitrate (17 to 7 Mbit/s) and audio bitrate (320 to 192 Kbit/s) are as well. The frame rate remains the same as the original source clip.
And here’s a video presenting the deliberately shaky sample clip (shot on a Motorola Moto Z in 1080p 30fps handheld) in stabilized versions by each mentioned app (in the case of Power Director and Emulsio the default settings were used):
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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?
Hardware features: Lost & Found
Well first off, let’s get that big thing out of the way that bothered me the most before I even bought the V30: abandoning the removable battery. LG was basically the last major phone maker to offer an exchangeable battery on a flagship with the V20, so kudos for that, but they eventually ditched it for the V30. I somewhat do get the idea that a unibody design without removable parts might just make the device look slicker and even has a practical reason when it comes to water and dust resistance (yes, you CAN submerge the V30 without a case thanks to the IP68-rating). But apart from the concerning fact that this is a considerable ecological issue because it makes it likely that you will just buy a new phone when battery life starts to falter, it also does away with the „power management security net“ and fosters the fear of running out of power with your phone. Especially when using such a device extensively for professional purposes, a back-up battery that lets you go back from 0 to 100% in a matter of seconds feels just very comfortable to have around. Sure, external batteries a.k.a. power banks are a common thing by now but they are not quite as compact and fast in getting the recharging job done. While dropping the removable battery is unfortunate, it’s an all-too-common thing, LG only follows the rest of the pack as nowadays you can hardly find a phone that still has this feature. Furthermore, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the V30’s battery life. It’s much better than the V10’s and while doing some tests with very long recordings, the phone only consumed around 30% of the battery when recording continuously for almost two hours. I just hope the battery doesn’t degrade too fast over time.
Speaking of useful features that are en vogue to get the sack: LG is still holding out on the 3.5mm headphone jack which will make a lot of people happy as it’s still a very easy and universal way to attach external mics for better sound quality (or do audio monitoring). The V30 also has a USB-C port which can be used for connecting external mics as well, but as of now there are hardly any USB-C mics out there to make use of that. One very clever and useful exception is the Samson Go Mic Mobile wireless system which comes with a whole bunch of connecting cables, including a USB-C one. One day in the (hopefully not so distant) future, truly wireless audio solutions sending audio in high quality directly from the mic to the phone’s video recording app might replace wired solutions but the current state of quality and reliability in that area isn’t yet up to the task as far as I can see. As for the internal mic, there are actually two, so the LG V30 is one of only a few phones that records in stereo natively. This is very useful if you are capturing a soundscape or if you have sound sources moving around. And to tell the whole story, the V30 actually has a third internal mic: the phone’s earpiece kicks in as a life saver in very loud environments (like say a rock concert) to avoid distorted audio. Another useful feature that the V30 fortunately kept was the support for external storage via microSD card, popping in a 128 or 256GB card is a pretty cheap way to have more space for media and apps on your phone.
Three and a Half Cameras
Let’s continue our inspection of the V30’s hardware and take a look at what might be considered the most important thing for a phone – when talking about videography: the camera(s). While the V10 had a somewhat peculiar lens set-up with a single rear camera but dual front cameras, the V20 flipped this around which I personally find more useful if you’re not a selfie-vlogger. Dual rear cameras have become all the rage in the last couple of years and almost something considered a must-have on flagship phones and even some mid-rangers (unless your name is Google Pixel). Not all secondary rear cams are created equal though. Some are only for shooting nice portrait shots with a blurred background, some feature a monochrome sensor for black/white photography with better low-light performance and dynamic range and some have a different focal length than the main camera, going either for telephoto (zoom) or wide-angle. For smartphone videographers, only the last two options are actually helpful. And while I have been known for whining about the lack of optical zoom on smartphones in the past, I do have to say that from a practical standpoint, wide-angle seems like the best, most versatile choice after all. Especially if you find yourself indoors backed up against a wall, having a wide-angle is just incredibly helpful to fit more of the scenery into the shot. And the ability to shoot two very different images from a single point without having to move around is fantastic. So while the wide-angle secondary camera is actually a rare choice in the market, LG can only be applauded for going down this route. And after the V20 had a noticeable amount of barrel-distortion on the wide-angle, the V30’s 12mm secondary rear cam has been more refined in that respect. It now also has a much wider aperture compared to the V20 (f/1.9 vs f/2.4 – smaller is better) which helps in low-light. There are three limitations when using the wide-angle however: The first one might actually be of use in certain situations – the fact that there’s a fixed focus and therefore no adjusting auto-focus guarantees that there are no unexpected and sudden focus shifts. A fixed focus might be a serious problem for the main camera, but for the wide-angle, it’s ok. The second limitation is a real one though: no OIS (optical image stabilization) and no EIS (electronic image stabilization) either. The third one is the biggest though: the V30’s new „LG-Cine Log“ profile (more about that later) is not available for the wide-angle camera, only for the main snapper.
The 30mm main rear camera has OIS (plus the option for additional EIS called „Steady recording“ – not available for UHD/4K though), laser auto-focus, a f/1.6 aperture and the ability to record in LG-Cine Log. Both rear cameras let you record in UHD/4K (but only up to 30fps, 60fps is only available for FHD resolution, 120fps only for 720p in slow-motion mode) and you can switch between them with a single tap even when recording. The colors of the two rear cameras don’t match 100% if you take a really close look but they are close enough for most purposes I’d say. Now while the main rear camera seems to be excellent for low-light with its wide f/1.6 aperture, the relatively small size of the image sensor (1/3.1“ with 1.0µm pixel size) unfortunately diminishes this advantage. With very few exceptions (especially when it comes to video), all smartphones still struggle with low-light situations so it would be wrong to single out LG for that. I would classify the V30’s low-light performance as solid, but not as good as one could have expected with regard to the promising aperture of the main cam.
What about the selfie camera? Well, I was already a little bit suspicious when I saw the tiny camera hole on the front. As it turns out, not only did LG scrap one front camera compared to my old V10 but the actual quality of the footage isn’t really better than the V10’s from two years ago as far as I could see. That’s a bit of a disappointment for sure but personally, I don’t care too much as I rarely use the front camera. As for resolution, you can shoot FHD in 30fps which is the solid standard but that’s it – no UHD/4K or higher frame rate. Another note: While there isn’t a second front facing camera you still get the option to switch between a wider and a narrower field of view – as there’s no second lens, this is done by a software crop of the image.
Processing Power
Before moving on to the software side of things, a few words about one other very important hardware aspect: the chipset. The LG V30 is equipped with a capable Snapdragon 835 that not only lets you shoot video in UHD/4K resolution (although only up to 30fps in UHD/4K) but also edit it. Importing footage into Android’s two best video editors KineMaster and PowerDirector reveals that you can even have a second video track when working with UHD/4K footage in those apps which is excellent news. For those interested in creating Augmented Reality (AR) enriched video: The V30 is compatible with Google’s ARCore and the Snapdragon 835 has enough muscle to let you use an app like “Just a line” for instance which lets you draw/doodle in AR space. There isn’t too much around in this category yet though.
Screen grab of the “Device Capability Information” panel in the KineMaster video editing app.
The King of Manual Video Controls
But while good cameras and powerful chipsets can also be found on other (Android) phones, the unique selling point of the V-series has always been its focus on videography with all the manual controls and features you get in the native camera app. I’ve already talked about that regarding the V10 when discussing native camera apps on smartphones in an earlier post (I still owe the second part of this article, what a shame!) but there have been some significant additions since the V10 so it’s worth pointing out in detail again. Let’s have a look at the interface of the manual video mode: On the far left on the bottom of the screen you find an audio level meter which reassures you that there’s actually audio coming in from the mic(s) and it also helps you to make sure the audio isn’t too loud (peaking). No other native camera app on a smartphone has that – you can only find it in advanced 3rd party apps like FilmicPro, Cinema FV-5 etc. To the right there’s information on what resolution, frame rate and bitrate you are currently using. Next is a button with a microphone icon and this opens up a transparent panel overlay with some advanced audio controls audiophiles will love: You get to change the input gain, activate a low cut filter or set a limiter. While recording, you even get live audio waveforms when having this panel open which gives you even more precise visualized information about the incoming audio than the audio level meter. From this panel you can also apply a wind noise filter and select an external mic if there is one connected via the headphone jack (edit: unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support mics connected via the USB-C port like I originally wrote in this post!) At this point I would like to mention that the app even allows for audio monitoring via cabled or Bluetooth headphones. There’s a small delay to the live audio so listening to it over extended periods of time can be irritating but it’s definitely good to quickly check the audio for possible unwanted sonic interference. The next button is for white balance and you can switch between auto mode and a Kelvin scale that ranges from 2300 to 7500K. No presets are available though. Next in line is focus. Again, you can switch between auto-focus and manual focus. When you choose manual focus mode you get to enjoy another staggering feature for a native camera app: focus peaking. Focus peaking adds a colored overlay to the areas of the frame that are in focus and is therefore incredibly helpful to get the focus right. It can usually only be found on professional „big“ cameras. Focus peaking can be switched on or off when using manual focus on the V30. One shortcoming: You can only use focus peaking BEFORE starting the recording which makes fancy rack focus action while filming still a bit of a gamble. The only Android app that allows focus peaking even while recording is FilmicPro. The EV button lets you adjust the exposure value without having to set precise values for ISO and shutter speed but as there’s no option to lock the exposure in that case I find it fairly useless. On to the two real exposure parameters: ISO and shutter speed. The ISO ranges between 50 and 3200, shutter speed between 1/25s and 1/4000s. One crucial improvement over the V10 regarding the shutter speed is that you can now select „PAL“ shutter speeds, most importantly 1/50s. This is important because in Europe and some other regions many artificial light sources emit light at the frequency of 50 Hertz which causes ugly banding effects in your footage if you are not shooting with a shutter speed that matches this frequency. The last thing you find on the far right of the bottom control panel is what I like to call the „panic button“ and it’s a very cool feature: If you ever find yourself lost fiddling with all the manual controls but need to quickly start recording all of a sudden you can just push the „A“ with a circling arrow around it and everything goes back to auto: white balance, focus, exposure.
But not only the control panel of the main recording interface is stuffed with controls and features, there’s more to find in the settings section which you can access by tapping the cog wheel on the bottom of the left side bar. The first option you can find here at the top of the list is the frame rate. And it’s in here that me and some other folks do miss a particular something: PAL frame rates, PAL being the broadcast standard in Europe and some other regions of the world. Normally you couldn’t really blame a smartphone for not having the option to shoot in 25 or 50fps in the native camera app (the only phones that ever did at least 25fps were Nokia’s/Microsoft’s Lumia phones) but with all the amazing bells and whistles in terms of pro videography controls on the V-series, it’s a real shame that LG didn’t pay attention to that as well. Truth be told, this option will only be of serious relevance to a certain group of videographers: Those who shoot for PAL broadcast and/or use their phone in combination with a ‚regular‘ camera that only shoots PAL frame rates. If you don’t belong in this category, you can be perfectly happy with the options at hand: 1, 2, 24, 30 and 60fps (60fps is not available when shooting UHD/4K or LOG). Still, for the highly unlikely case that someone from LG reads this blog, PLEASE do add the option to shoot in 25/50fps! How hard can it be? I hope there’s a golden future ahead where regional frame rates are a thing of the past but that future might still be a bit too far away to just ignore the present. Yes, you can use 3rd party apps to shoot in 25fps on the V30 but if LG gives us a native camera app so good with manual video controls and the idea that this is a serious videography tool, why be ignorant in that particular area? Next in the settings list is bitrate. Yes, you heard that right, you can adjust the bitrate. Another feature that can otherwise only be found in advanced 3rd party apps. You can choose between three different settings: high, medium and low. The bitrates depend on the selected resolution and frame rate and – upon closer inspection – turn out to be not as high as some power users would have liked. The maximum you get is 52 Mbit/s when shooting in UHD/4K, the „high“ option in 1080p with 30fps is 24Mbit/s. Still, it’s nice to have some control over the bitrate at all in a native camera app. Below the bitrate option, there’s another very interesting feature that will excite every audiophile: You can toggle on „HiFi recording“ which pushes the audio bitrate for video to a crazy 2400 Kbit/s (24-Bit PCM Stereo) while the regular set-up is 156Kbit/s (AAC) and no other smartphone I encountered exceeded 320Kbit/s. If you want to edit your footage on the phone be warned that not every video editing app supports PCM audio (KineMaster and PowerDirector do though) – and neither does Twitter’s video player by the way.
What the LOG!?!
But let’s move on to the big new feature that LG introduced to the V-series with the V30: LG-Cine Log. What’s „log“? I won’t and I can’t go into the details of this but let’s just say it is a special shooting profile that applies certain processing to the image which will give you a better dynamic/tonal range and generally allows more flexibility in post production when you want to create a specific look for your footage. It’s a feature usually only found on professional cinema cameras and calls for a certain amount of post production (grading/coloring) because the „raw“ footage usually looks rather dull and pale. So if your workflow includes a fast turnaround you probably shouldn’t use the LOG profile. It’s a very cool feature though, I absolutely love it, not least because the regular footage might be considered over-sharpened and over-saturated, an unfortunate habit of many/most smartphones as they are trying to satisfy what they deem the crowd’s taste. And while I’d say that the V30’s non-LOG image quality is a tad behind Google’s recent Pixel phones, Samsung’s S9/S9 Plus/Note 9 and the latest iPhones, the native LOG profile makes up for that in my opinion as you can really create stunning footage with it and have immense flexibility in post production. However it can’t be denied that shooting LOG probably is only of interest to a certain group of videographers. But hey, if any smartphone should have the ability to shoot LOG in the native app, it should be the V30! Two things to keep in mind when using LG-Cine Log: You can’t use the wide-angle lens and you can only shoot up to 30fps. Here’s a “show reel” of footage shot in LG-Cine Log on the V30 (graded in FCPX).
And here are two shorter videos with LG V30 LOG footage, one “raw” like it is originally recorded, the other with minor grading applied.
And as I already talked about bitrates earlier on, it’s particularly unfortunate with regard to shooting LOG that the bitrates can’t be bumped up to higher levels. One last thing: When using LOG profile you can find a button in the top right corner of the main interface that lets you toggle on and off at LUT (so-called ‚Look-Up-Table‘). Again, I don’t really want to get into the specifics here but suffice it to say that this gives you a preview of what the graded result of your LOG footage COULD look like, it is NOT recording that preview! The image that is recorded is ALWAYS the one that you can see when LUT is toggled OFF!
Let’s wrap up the settings menu with a quick look at some other features: Bright Mode and HDR can’t be used in the manual video recording mode (only in auto-mode) which renders them useless for me. Steady Recording is an additional (software-powered) stabilizing option that crops the frame and can’t be used when recording in UHD/4K. Tracking Focus tracks a person or object while moving about the frame which can be useful in certain situations. It doesn’t always work perfect but it’s worth trying out. Covered Lens gives you a warning when you (accidentally) cover part of the wide-angle camera’s image. This can indeed be helpful as I have occasionally found myself inserting my pinkie into the frame without the intention to do so because the wide-angle has a really wide angle. On the right hand side of the settings menu you can activate a timer (3 or 10 seconds) and select a resolution. Resolution varies between 720p and UHD/4K and offers three different aspect ratios (16:9, 18:9 and 21:9 – the latter two are only available up to 1080p). 21:9 is interesting because the ultra-widescreen format gives you a certain „cinematic“ effect. If you combine that with the according frame rate (24fps) and LOG profile you are setting the stage for that sweet silver screen look. And for those of you interested in creating vertical video content, you can also shoot vertically with all features & manual controls. Manual mode is however not available when you are using the front camera though – a little bummer.
More fun with shooting modes…
The manual video mode is outstanding but what about any other interesting video modes in the native camera app? There’s one particular mode that was also first introduced with the V30 and got a lot of attention before the phone’s release: CineVideo. The mode actually has two separate features bundled together in one mode – the bundling aspect however left me somewhat confused. So one aspect of the CineVideo mode is that you can apply a couple of slick „cinematic“ filters (some are even calling them LUTs, not sure if that’s correct though) to your image. But while you get control over the strength of the filter and the vignetting that comes with it, that’s basically it. Yes you do get some very rudimentary exposure value control but you can’t lock the exposure or set specific values for ISO and shutter speed which is really unfortunate and dramatically reduces the usefulness. The other feature in the CineVideo mode is Digital Point Zoom. You can choose a point within the frame and smoothly zoom in by using a virtual slider. Yes, the zoom is only digital but to my surprise the quality loss isn’t all that bad and even when fully zoomed in, the image can still be considered acceptable. So it’s a real shame that LG restricted this feature to the CineVideo mode – it would have been very cool to have this in the manual video mode as well. There you can also zoom digitally by using the common zoom gesture with two fingers but the zoom will be very abrupt because there’s no slider. And you also can’t zoom in to an off-center point of the frame like you can with the Digital Point Zoom.
So one small general gripe I have with modes and features on the V30 is that certain useful things are only available in certain modes / in certain settings and not in others which can be a little frustrating at times.
„Popout“ is another fairly interesting mode as it uses both the main and the wide-angle camera simultaneously to create a picture-in-picture video with two different views from the same camera standpoint. The cool thing is that you can apply some effects to the wide-angle image: Fisheye, Black&White, Vignette and Lens Blur. You can even combine some or all of them at the same time. On top of that you can also change the layout of the picture-in-picture to have a circle instead of a rectangle or have three segments of which the top and the bottom are filled by the wide-angle camera while the middle one is filled by the main camera. It’s more of a fun mode and I don’t use it often but it can come in handy when you try to create something more playful for instance for a short social media video.
The simultaneous use of two cameras gets even more interesting with the „Match Shot“ mode. This is a fantastic feature for vloggers and mobile journalists reporting as a one-(wo)man-band – I have already mentioned this mode in my blog post #12: It creates a split-screen recording using both the front and a rear camera simultaneously which means you can basically show yourself AND your own point-of-view at the same time. This is just super cool if you are doing an on-the-scene piece-to-camera for a news report or some travel vlogging. For each screen segment you can choose between the regular view and a wide-angle so you have some flexibility there as well. Best of all: external mics are even supported! Some downsides on the other hand: The aspect ratio is fixed to 18:9 (resolution of 2880×1440 is good though, so one can adjust to 16:9 in post), the frame rate is only 24fps and everything’s running on auto, no manual controls. Still, it’s an amazing feature with great potential and it’s a real pity that apparently LG has ditched this mode again on the V40. Here’s a video (not mine) with the Match Shot mode in action:
If you are into square video and doing super-short teasers for longer content you might find some use for the „Grid Shot“ mode which lets you shoot four very short clips of a maximum of 3 seconds each and assembles them into a split-screen square video (resolution: 1440×1440) playing back all four clips at the same time.
The last interesting mode for video is „Slo-Mo“. You get slow motion with 240fps – but only in 720p and with barely any manual controls. It’s nice to have but it’s definitely not LG’s strong suit – Apple and Samsung offer much better quality here in their flagship phones.
Camera2 API & 3rd party apps
So with the V30’s native camera app being so amazing is there any need at all for 3rd party apps? Yes and no, or as we like to say in German: Jein. The biggest reason for using a 3rd party app is probably the frame rate: As mentioned before, the native app does not offer any PAL standard frame rates (25/50fps) which might be important to some users. Other than that, the only app that can actually beat LG’s native camera app when it comes to features and controls is FilmicPro which gives you among other things focus peaking during recording, a waveform monitor and false color analytics to check exposure in difficult situations, the ability to shoot in higher bitrates and the option to use the more efficient (but not yet fully mass-market compatible) HEVC/H.265 codec instead of the standard AVC/H.264. But as I have pointed out in an earlier blog post, the ability to have advanced manual video controls in 3rd party apps on Android devices very much depends on how well the phone maker has implemented the so-called Camera2 API (if you want to learn more about it, check out my two blogposts about it here and here). Without proper implementation, 3rd party app developers can’t access/make use of certain controls. So how’s the Camera2 API support for the V30? Well, it’s a mixed bag. It does have the highest support level („Level 3“) for both rear cameras (only „Limited“ though for the front camera) so theoretically things should be fine but apparently LG overlooked a small bug that affects focusing in 3rd party camera apps. Sometimes, the focus gets stuck and you have to quit and re-launch the app. While I have experienced this first with FilmicPro it also happened with other 3rd party apps, so it seems to be a more general issue and not only related to a FilmicPro. Let’s hope LG can fix this nuisance with a software update. A positive aspect of LG’s Camera2 implementation on the other hand is the fact that 3rd party camera apps do get access to the secondary rear camera, something other Android phone makers are less welcoming about. So far, only FilmicPro and ProShot have actually integrated this as a feature though. In the case of FilmicPro this means that there is a way to shoot in LOG profile with the wide-angle lens after all! A word about frame rates: The ability to shoot in 25fps is one major reason for some to use 3rd party camera apps. Using the V30 with FilmicPro in 25fps has been mostly consistent and reliable so far (occasionally you do get 24.93 or something not 100% on spot) but you don’t get the higher frame rate PAL option of 50fps (something very few Android handsets seem to be able to allow at this point). And neither do you get 60fps which is available in the native app so LG still keeps some shackles on the API here for 3rd party apps. Surprisingly though, you can shoot at the even higher slow-motion frame rate of 120fps (up to FHD). So I’d say slow-motion capability comes out as a tie between native camera app and FilmicPro: The native camera app lets you record in 240fps using the slow-motion mode but only in 720p while with FilmicPro you „only“ get a frame rate of 120fps but a higher resolution (1080p).
In the long run…
Before concluding this rather detailed inspection of the V30 I would like to address one more aspect: maximum recording length. While quite a few smartphone videographers usually take relatively short clips and don’t really care if there’s a limit of say 20 minutes for a single video, it’s really important to know about that for others. Android used to have a single file size limit of around 4GB (this particular size seems to be related to the well-known FAT32 format but to my knowledge it actually isn’t as the limit isn’t exactly 4GB), but many phone makers were able to get rid of that with their own version of the Android OS (Sony, Huawei, Nokia, BQ, HTC for instance). Unfortunately, LG isn’t among them. That being said, LG vastly improved things compared to the V10. On the V10, the recording would stop upon reaching the file size limit and you would have to manually restart the recording. Not a good thing, if you were using the phone as an alternative angle for a longer event while having your focus on the main camera or if you really needed every second of the recording. With the V30 you don’t have to manually restart the recording anymore, it basically records continuously for as long as battery and storage allows. In the background however, the clip is chopped up into chunks of 4.29 GB and you lose a very short segment in between (I’d say it’s around 2 seconds maybe). It might not be the ideal solution for certain jobs but it’s definitely better than having to restart manually. After all, some might even argue that in case of file corruption it’s better to not have a single file. Of course then the ideal solution would be a spliced clip that can be seamlessly reassembled afterwards without dropping a single frame.
Conclusion
So, in the end, is the LG V30 a smartphone videographer’s dream machine? For the most part I’d say yes, its focus on videography is absolutely unique in the smartphone market, the range of advanced pro tools for shooting video that is available right out of the box without having to bother with 3rd party apps that might have certain quirks thanks to Android’s fragmentation is utterly brilliant. The native camera app has been rock-solid in terms of reliability, it hasn’t crashed on me once so far. It’s not quite perfect though: Especially when taking into account that this phone was made for (professional) videographers, it’s a bit puzzling that LG didn’t bother to include PAL frame rates for its native camera app. I’m not an expert on this but I’d say it shouldn’t have been too much of a problem technically to do so. Maybe they just didn’t care? Who knows… This leaves me with two wishes: a) Please, LG, go the extra inch and include PAL frame rates in the native camera app with a software update and b) to all you other smartphone makers out there: please follow LG’s example in paying more attention to your phone’s native camera app in terms of advanced manual video controls. Thank you. If you have questions or comments, please drop them below or find me on Twitter @smartfilming.
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