TRANSCRIPT
Hi! I’m Aubrey Mozino from We Make Movies.
In this video we’re going to discuss the basics on how to get up and shooting quickly using the professional video app-- FilmicPro! For around $15 FilmicPro gives you complete control over the video settings on your smartphone and allows you to make the same custom adjustments found in almost any DSLR or professional video camera.
To get started, make sure your phone is in airplane mode, or at least with cellular data turned off so your shots aren’t interrupted.
Let’s open the app and get acquainted with the screen. You’ll see the start/stop record button on the bottom right, the playback button to review your footage next to that and the settings menu next to that.
You’ll also notice two reticles — the square is your focus and the circle is exposure. You’ll want to set focus first by dragging the square around the screen to the main area of your subject. Tap it once to lock the focus — great for static shots, not as useful if you’ll be moving camera to other subjects or areas of focus. Once set, drag the circle around to the area you want exposed - drag it to highlighted areas to darken the exposure and to darker areas to lighten the exposure— once satisfied, tap once to lock exposure. However, you can let FilmicPro do all the work for you by turning on the autofocus and autoexposure setting — just double click either or both of the focus and exposure reticles to turn on auto mode. You can still tap either once to lock exposure or focus which is great if you want to lock either just for a moment. Tap again to unlock and double tap to go back to the dual reticles.
Your zoom is located on the right side — slide up and you’ll notice the bar turning from green to yellow to red. These colors indicate the quality of your shot — the more you zoom in, the less crisp and poorer quality the video will be. Try to stay within the green for HD quality —if additional zoom is needed using external lenses or digitally switching to a telephoto lens on your iPhone can help. We’ll cover that later.
Settings Menu
Next up, we’ll adjust our frame rate and resolution by hitting the gear wheel on the bottom right. Tap RESOLUTION first to open up your options - 16:9 is the standard format you see for most TV, movies and YouTube content. A few choices over you’ll see 1:1 which is the square format Instagram uses.
Most content creators need to shoot video content that lives on multiple platforms, and FlimicPro gives you these white bars as visual guides to make sure you know how much is staying in your frame. If you turn on CROP SOURCE TO OVERLAY FilmicPro will automatically crop your footage for you — don’t turn this on if you want to use the content for multiple platforms or want to adjust the aspect ratio in post.
Next make sure you’re shooting in 4K or at the very least, 1080p to ensure a high quality image. Filmic Extreme is the highest bit rate encoding you can have, but also takes up the most amount of space on your device. If you have the data space on your phone always better to have the highest resolution and bit rate possible.
Next tap out of this screen to go back to settings and choose — FRAMERATE. For narrative, or more cinematic content you’ll probably want to choose the 24 Frames Per Second or FPS preset at the top of the screen. 24FPS is what most Hollywood movies and TV shows are shot in — however, if you’re shooting a documentary or for YouTube/social media you’ll probably want to switch the preset to 30FPS. This gives your video a more realistic quality and its what you’re probably used to seeing on your nightly news or from favorite video blogger.
Tap out of this screen and select AUDIO next. If you’re using any kind of external microphone (and you should be — bad quality sound is much more unforgivable then bad quality video!) make sure FilmicPro is registering the microphone at the top. If not, you can select the front or rear internal microphones depending on if you’re shooting selfie style or with the back lenses and only turn on AUTOMATIC GAIN CORRECTION to help improve the quality of the built-in microphones. Leave it off if you’re able to either do sound sweetening in post, or if you have an external microphone.
Tap out of this screen twice to go back to the camera view and test your audio levels. You can manually adjust the gain levels by dragging the audio slider — do an audio test to make sure your levels are staying in the green and yellow on the right hand side. Red indicates clipping and won’t be very usable so drag down the slider if you notice any peaking.
If you’re using the latest iPhone, FilmicPro allows you to quickly switch between cameras in the settings menu under CAMERA. Wide is great for the bulk of your shots, but the telephoto is great for closeups where you need to get 2 times closer and create a shallow depth of field, the selfie lens is pretty self explanatory, and zoom switches from the wide to tele automatically as you zoom — however, note that you can’t use any manual controls like focus or exposure when using the zoom lens.
Now, your Smartphone is officially a professional, high quality video camera. Start experimenting with adjusting focus, exposure and capturing clear audio before we move on to advanced FilmicPro techniques in the next video.