My thoughts on 6s Plus video capture

[Travisimo]

I bought my iPhone 6s Plus on launch day, and I have thoroughly enjoyed using it in a variety of situations for capturing photos and video. Overall, I am very impressed by its capabilities, though there is always room for improvement.

Here are two videos I created entirely in iMovie on the phone:

The first is a montage of video captured recently at a Chris Tomlin concert, where I sat pretty far back. I shot mostly in 4k, but zoomed in while recording because I was so far back. Normally I would use digital zoom very sparingly when shooting video on my phone, but with 4k, I get a little more latitude. Instead of a blurry mess, it just softens a little when zoomed in pretty far. I also made liberal use of focus / exposure lock because shooting concerts is very difficult. Normally you end up with a washed out mess if you don't manually turn down the exposure. When I was done at the concert, I used iMovie on the phone to put this video together. Obviously this is not as good as having a dedicated camera with optical zoom, but I think it turned out pretty well. The sound quality is not terrific, but at least it's not completely distorted and inaudible. This one is in 1080p on Youtube.

The second video is just something I threw together quickly after spending a couple of hours going for a photo walk near the Mississippi River. I shot entirely in 4k, but also included a couple of time lapse videos. I noticed that as the sun went down, the video obviously starts to get a little grainy. One of the last time lapse shots of the barge was taken when it was pretty dark, so it's very grainy. At the end, a panned a couple of panoramas as well. I don't know why I chose that song - I just like it, even if it doesn't entirely fit. It was the kind of mood I was in. Anyway, everything was hand-held, and I was pretty impressed with the image stabilization on the 6s Plus. This one is in 4k on Youtube.

I was incredibly impressed by how easy it is to edit video on the phone in iMovie. Even with a couple dozen 4k clips, the app didn't stutter or crash. And even though you can't do as much in iMovie on the phone as you can on the desktop, it's still quite useful for those smaller videos that you just want to throw together quickly.

Youtube, of course, does introduce some artifacts in its compression, so the video quality is not as good as the original. I am getting a 5k iMac soon, and I look forward to having a native way to view 4k videos. In the meantime, 4k is incredible valuable for providing crop and zoom latitude, as well as future-proofing. I'm certainly not going to shoot everything I do in 4k, but I definitely think I'll use it more than I originally thought.

 

[Givmeabrek]

Very impressed, especially with the first concert video. The lighting makes that very difficult. Best concert I've seen from a cell phone.

 

[Travisimo]

Very impressed, especially with the first concert video. The lighting makes that very difficult. Best concert I've seen from a cell phone.

Thanks! Yes, the concert videos were very difficult. I had two obstacles to try and overcome: distance and lighting. As you can see from a couple of shots that weren't zoomed in, I was sitting quite some distance away from the stage. But I was actually surprised how well the video still looks when zooming in when shooting in 4k. Obviously, you pay for that with extra storage space taken up by capturing in 4k, but that isn't a big deal to me. The lighting also poses a big problem for any camera at a concert because 1) the contrast is extreme, 2) the conditions are low light, and 3) the focusing can be difficult. I made it a practice to lock exposure and focus by holding my finger down on the point I wanted in focus. Then I swiped my finger down to lower the overall exposure, and then began shooting the video. This kept the exposure constant, which is something that messes up a lot of concert videos: if you don't lock it, it will constantly adjust exposure because of the variable contrast and lighting.