Intro to iPhone Videography

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to this course on iphone videography. My name is Ben Nielsen. I'm a media design educator and I'll be your instructor for this course. In this course, you can expect to learn all about the different video features on the iphone. Now, you don't need any prior experience to take this course, because we are going to be starting right at the very beginning. So even if you've just barely opened up a brand new iphone and you're just looking at that camera and wondering how you can shoot video on it. Or if you've already started experimenting a little bit, it doesn't matter because we're going to start right at the beginning and go over all of the little things that happen in the iphone for video so that you can feel like you have a really comprehensive view about everything. Some examples of things we'll be going over are what all the different lenses on the iphone do, how the different cameras work there, and all of the different modes and settings that happen in the iphone, as well as the basics of shooting video on your iphone in real life. Now, you also don't need any prior experience with video. You don't need to be a videographer or have done anything with other types of cameras or anything like that. All you need is an iphone. Now, most of what I teach in this course will apply to whatever iphone you have. But it is good for you to know that I will be using an iphone 14 Pro for this course. What this does mean is that depending on your model of iphone, there may be slightly different features. Some of the lenses or cameras on the iphone may not be exactly the same. And some of the features that are available for my iphone may not be available for your iphone. As a general rule of thumb, the last several generations of iphone, the pro model of the iphone, has had more lenses on it than the regular version of the iphone. So the iphone 14 Pro has three lenses on it, and the iphone 14 just has two lenses on it. And then there are iphones like the iphone SE that just have one lens on them. So things may vary a little bit, but if you have any questions along the way, please go ahead, drop in the discussion cab and ask them. Because it may just be a simple answer to, well, that feature is in a different spot on your phone, not available on your phone. And there's no reason for you to spend a lot of time worrying about it and getting frustrated with that when you can just hop in the discussion tab and ask me, remember I am here to help you on your journey as you learn to shoot video on your iphone. Let's go ahead and get started in the next video and talk about the project for this course. 2. Project: Okay, now it's time for us to talk about the project for this course. Now you learn a lot better by doing than just by observing. And so it is really important that you do make the project for this course so that you can really internalize the things that we're talking about. The good news is all you need to do is follow along with what I'm doing in the course. And by the end, you will be able to put together your project. Now the project itself is going to be just a compilation reel of different shots that you've done on your iphone. And it doesn't need to be long. The purpose is just for you to demonstrate that you've learned how to activate the different modes and be able to film in them. Okay, So there's four different shots that you should have in your reel. At least four. You can have more if you want to, but at least these four. The first one is going to be an action shot with the action stabilization turned on. And don't worry if you don't know how to do any of these right now. That's the point of this class. I'm going to teach you how to turn them on and how to use them in your videos. The second shot is going to be using cinematic mode. Now that's going to be the mode where the background is blurred out behind the subject of the video. The third shot is going to be using slow motion, so you're going to want to shoot something that is slowed down, so you're going to want to make sure that you use that slow motion mode to have a nice slow down video. And then lastly, I want you to choose a shot that will help you to express your creativity using whatever mode you want. So those are the four things. Now when you're done, all you need to do is put these videos together into a single reel using some kind of editing program. You can just use movie, which you can get for free on your iphone. Just put them together, you don't need to do any other editing to them. And then go ahead and upload that to Youtube or some other video sharing site so that you can get the link, copy that link, and paste it into your skill share project. And then I'll be able to see that and I can give you any feedback that you want on those projects. Now, it's really important to understand that at this point we are not worried about the story your video is telling. We're not looking for it to be cohesive or anything like that. So even if the four shots have absolutely nothing to do with each other, that's totally fine. They don't need to be good. They don't need to be cohesive. You're just showing that you know how to use the modes on your iphone to shoot video. Remember if you have any questions along the way, go to the discussion tab and you can ask me those questions there. And I will do my very best to answer them. Okay, I hope you're excited to get started learning. In the next video we're going to talk about the different lenses and cameras that are on the iphone. 3. Cameras: Okay, now the first thing that you might be wondering about when you start getting into iphone videography is what is going on with all of these lenses on the back of your camera. So let's go ahead and start out by talking about what each of these does and which ones which, and let's also not forget that there's actually another camera on the front of the iphone, which is the selfie camera. And that can be used to shoot video as well if you need it, although it's not always the best option. And we'll talk about why. The first thing to note is that I am using an iphone 14 Pro, depending on which iphone you're using, the number of lenses on the back of it may vary as well as the attributes and qualities of those lenses. So it's going to be important for you to just go ahead and Google which lenses your iphone has. Now right off the bat, we can talk about the difference between the regular iphones and the pro iphones. Pro iphones for the last several years have had three lenses, whereas the regular iphone models have had two lenses. And that's one of the things that separates Pros from the regular. Generally speaking, if you have three lenses, you're going to have a main lens, which is the wide lens. You're going to have a telephoto lens, which is the zoom lens. And you're going to have a super wide lens, which is the one that goes way out, lets you capture a whole scene. So let's talk about each of these. Bear in mind, like I said, this is the iphone 14 Pro and your specific model may differ. For example, on the iphone 15 Pros, which just recently came out, the zoom lens is a much, much further in zoom lens. Now one thing that I want to say is that when we talk about lenses and cameras and things like that, we can end up talking about a lot of numbers which can be confusing to people who are new to videography. I know that it was confusing to me when I first started out, so don't worry if you don't comprehend what all the numbers mean. Right now, the numbers are really equivalence because this is not a regular camera. So we're really talking about equivalence. They're really only useful for people who are coming from traditional videography so that they can kind of know what they're working with on a phone camera compared to what they were used to on their big cameras. Don't get too caught up in the numbers, but I will tell them to you so that you start to become familiar with them. And if you are coming from traditional videography, you may find them helpful. The next thing that we really need to know is that each of these lenses is not actually a separate lens so much as it is an actual separate camera. Which means that each of these lenses has a different sensor behind them. Whereas on a regular camera, you will switch the lenses out and all of those lenses will go over the same sensor. Each of these has a different sensor. Why is that important? Well, the quality of each sensor is going to vary in terms of how many megapixels it has and how large it is. Large sensors tend to be better than small sensors, so we'll talk about that as we go through here. Let's start with this main camera right here. This is the main camera. And on the iphone 14 Pro, it is considered a wide lens. Not a super wide lens, but a wide lens. It's a good field of view for most shooting, which is why it's on the main one. This is the equivalent of roughly a 24 millimeter field of view. And it's on a sensor that is 48 megapixels. And it's the largest sensor on this model of iphone. Generally, if you have a pro model of iphone with a larger sensor, it's going to be on the main camera. And so the very best footage is going to come off of this main camera. And it's kind of the default for most iphone shooting. Likely you're going to want to shoot on this camera more than any other camera. Now, the aperture on this main camera is an F 1.8 What that means is that it is a fairly wide open aperture that can collect quite a bit of light based on the size of the sensor that it is in front of. If you don't really understand aperture right now, don't worry a lot about it. But this might be useful information if you're used to working with traditional cameras. All right, next let's go ahead and let's talk about the middle camera. The middle camera is the super wide angle lens. This is the best one for getting really wide shots, which sometimes you need to do when you're videoing, particularly if you're trying to capture a really expansive scene. This is a 13 millimeter equivalent and so it's going out very wide. And it also helps to get really stable shots, because wide shots just tend to look more stable than zoomed in shots, because when the camera shifts, it doesn't shift as far. And so it just tends to look a lot more stable coming off of the super wide lens. Now you'll notice I'm using lenses and cameras pretty much interchangeably here. That's generally we think about them as lenses, but they are actually separate cameras. All right, We said this is a 13 millimeter equivalent that if you're thinking about degrees of view, is about a 120 degree view. And this camera is represented by a 0.5 symbol in the camera app. Now this one has a 12 megapixel sensor behind. There is a 12 megapixel sensor. It's a pretty good sensor, but of course, it is not nearly the size of the 48 megapixel sensor on the main camera. So you may notice some difference there. The thing to remember though about that main camera is generally it's cropping down either to a 12 megapixel image by using four pixels as one pixel. Or a 24 megapixel image by using two pixels as one pixel. And so you're not often getting the actual 48 megapixels off of there, because those files would be super, super huge. We'll talk more about file sizes as we get into the settings for iphone videography. And this one has a 2.2 aperture, so the wide angle has a 2.2 aperture, which means it's a little bit of a smaller aperture. It's not receiving quite as much light as that main camera is. All right, now let's go ahead and let's talk about this top lens here at the top lens is going to be your zoom lens. So the zoom lens is where you're going to get in really tight on the subject. And having a zoom, or sometimes called a telephoto lens on a phone is so useful because you often see people trying to pinch to zoom. And that's just digital zoom, it's just a crop. That's all digital zoom is, is cropping. And really you want to actually be able to have a lens that can get closer. This lens is really, really useful to have. On the iphone 14 Pro, this is considered a three X lens. But on others like the iphone 15 Pro, it's considered a five X lens. And on some older models it's considered just a two X lens. So that just depends on which lens they had on there, how close it's going to get to your subject. So mine here is considered a 77 millimeter equivalent. Some are considered a 50 millimeter equivalent. It just depends on what camera you're working with. So make sure that you look that up for your own phone. This one is also a 12 megapixel sensor up here, but it is actually a lower quality sensor than the ultra wide on this particular camera. So you just want to be aware of that, that the quality of your videos coming off of your telephoto is going to be the least quality of any of these back cameras. And it has an aperture of 2.8 which means it is gathering the least amount of light of any of these cameras. Okay, so that is your telephoto. Then you have the front facing camera, the selfie camera. As it were now, for a long time, this camera was considered really bad. So if you have an older iphone, like a 789 or ten, I would not even think about using this camera for anything in video. But around the time of the 11 and the 12, it started to get improvements and it has gotten better. So it is in some cases, particularly if you're logging, you might want to use it so that you can see yourself. It's not one that we'll be using a lot. We probably won't use it again in this class. But let's just talk about it real quick so you know what it is. This is a 23 millimeter equivalent camera, so it's fairly wide out, just a little bit wider than the main camera. And that's so if you have somebody next to you, you can get both of you in the shot. It's a 12 megapixel camera. Again, it's not a super high quality sensor because it is packed in there and it is the smallest of all of the sensors on the phone, but it will do in a pinch. Its aperture is an F 1.9 so it is gathering quite a bit of light. Not as much as the main camera, but more than the ultra wide or the telephoto lens. Okay, So we've gone through all of these cameras and all of these numbers, but the really important thing to remember is just that you need to use the camera that's right for the shot that you're trying to get. Now in video, I'm going to say that, generally speaking, it's going to be that main camera. But not always, I think that sometimes you'll want to use that ultra wide lens to really capture an expansive scene and sometimes you will want to use the telephoto to really get in close on your subject. The other thing is these cameras work together to be able to feed lots and lots of information into your camera app, which your phone then uses to do computational photography to figure out how things work best, particularly with lighting and things like cinematic mode that we'll get into later. Now that we've gone through what the cameras are, let's go ahead and we'll jump into the settings on the phone so that we can figure out how to get our phone set up correctly for the videos we want to take. 4. Storage Settings: Now it's time to talk about the settings available to use on the iphone. Cameras settings may not seem as fun as getting out there and shooting videos, and you're right, they're not. But knowing the settings is what takes you from just pulling out your camera and shooting, to actually making intentional choices about your filmmaking. So we're in the Settings app on my iphone, and this is again an iphone 14 Pro, and I'm running IOS 17 on it. So yours may vary a little bit depending on your model and the operating system that you're running. And when you're watching this, I know it can be a little annoying that the settings are in a separate app. Not just there in the camera app, but that's just the way it is. In this case, it's actually useful for us because before we get into the video settings, we really want to talk about storage space which is going to be found under the general option and then under iphone storage. The reason we're going to start out talking about storage is that I want you to realize how much space you have on your phone before you start filming. Because that will determine how much video you can take. A lot of the settings we are about to see will have to do with the video quality. And the quality of your videos will determine how much storage space they take up. So it's good to have an idea of what your storage space is like before we make it into the camera settings. The iphone I'm using has 256 gigabytes of internal storage. Iphones come in many different storage options. This model can have anywhere 100-28 gigabytes of storage and 1 terabyte of storage. But if you have a different model, your lowest and highest storage options will vary. You can see here that my phone is using 117.53 gigabytes, the 256 gigabytes, which means I have 138.47 gigabytes available to be used. I can't use that all for video because this storage has to handle everything I do on my phone, not just my videos. So I have to be conscious of that. Many people were surprised when they first get into shooting video, just how much space those files can take up. Unfortunately, if you start running out of space, there's nothing you can really do except to start offloading and deleting things or purchase a new phone with upgraded storage. I know that it isn't fun to pay for storage, but I've seen so many people just buy the base model of a phone and then decide they like taking pictures or videos. And then be frustrated that their phone is always running out of space. So the next time you're buying a phone, be sure to keep that in mind. Thing that you want to consider when thinking about storage is whether or not you are using cloud to sync your photos and videos across your devices. This is really important thing to consider because most people don't have as much storage in cloud as they do on their phone. If you have it turned on, your cloud can suddenly be very full and stop sinking, which can affect things like your messages as well as your documents and even e mail if you use cloud for your e mail. So I would suggest making sure that you know how much cloud storage you have and probably turning off syncing the photos app. If you are planning to take a lot of high resolution videos. This setting is found under your account in the settings cloud. Then going down to Photos and sync this iphone. Now this setting is a little bit misleading because it says Cloud Photos, but it actually will take everything from your photo library which includes your videos. So I would suggest making sure that you know how much cloud storage you have and probably turning off Sinking the photos app. If you're a planning to take a lot of high resolution videos, that's what I do. Okay, that's going to be it for the storage settings. I know that is not a super fun video, but it is important to help you avoid frustration. Later in the next video, we will talk about the actual settings for videos. 5. Camera Settings: Okay, now let's talk about the actual settings for the videos you are going to shoot. This is found in the settings app under camera. So the first thing that we're going to talk about is the formats section, which is fourth down from the top. So go ahead and tap there. This first option up here called camera capture is going to determine the file formats for both your photos and your videos. It's unfortunate that these cannot be set independently, but that is just the way it is set up at the time of this recording. There are only two options here. There's either high efficiency or most compatible. These terms obscure what is really going on here, which is why they now feel the need to put an entire paragraph of text underneath to explain it. Basically, if you choose high efficiency, your videos will be taken in the high efficiency video codec, which is known as H 265. Apple prefers this format because it takes up a lot less room on your device. Unfortunately, it also isn't super compatible with other systems. Although this has started getting better lately. If you instead set it to most compatible, it will use the much more common format of H 264, which almost any video player or editor will be able to read. But it will take up more room on your system. Probably wondering which one you should choose. Basically, if you're planning on mostly just using your iphone for your video editing, you can keep it on high efficiency, but if you're planning on editing somewhere else, you should test and see if that system and software can handle H 265 videos without a problem. Generally, Apple products like Imax and ipads will handle them great. Non Apple products like PC's and Android phones will have more trouble. But that can also vary by software. The other thing to consider is how it will affect your photo format. Since this one setting controls both photo and video, they can't be separated. If you leave it on high efficiency, all your photos will be taken in the Or HE IF at the high efficiency image format, which again uses less room but isn't compatible everywhere. Although that has been getting better as well. If you go with most compatible, your photos will be taking using the standard Jpeg format, which can be used almost anywhere. The last thing to know is that regardless of what you choose, some types of video can only be captured using the high efficiency video codec. These are listed at the bottom of the paragraph. This is to help protect your storage from extremely large video files. Those types of videos will produce if captured normally. So you will need to make this decision based on your own editing needs and storage space considerations. I normally leave it on most compatible, so that my photos will be taken as Jpegs. And I just know that when I use mode like cinematic video, it's going to shift to the HEVC file type. The next setting is just for photo, so don't worry about that right now. But the last setting on the page is for video capture. That is the option to turn on Apple Pro Rez. This will allow you to capture ten bit video, which is really awesome because you can edit a lot more than regular video, but as you will see below, it takes up tons of storage space. We're going to turn this on so that you can see it, but in reality, most of you probably won't use it. As you can see, if you have pro res turned on, a minute of HD video would take up to 1.7 gigabytes of space. Meaning that on a 128 gigabyte phone, you could capture less than 10 minutes of video. It is good to know this switch is here though, in case you need it or in case your video files start taking up a ton of space. Chances are this accidentally got turned on. One thing to note here is that if you happen to be shooting on the brand new, as of this recording, iphone 15 Pro or Pro Max with a USBC port, you can actually record out directly to an external hard drive. You may be able to shoot your Apple Pro resin to an external hard drive and save storage space that way. That was probably very confusing, so feel free to ask questions if you need some help on that. In the next video, we're going to finish up the settings by talking about resolution and frame rate options. 6. Resolution and Frame Rate: Okay, this will be our last video in the settings that back on the main camera settings page, we can see that there are three settings at the very top that deal with the resolution and the frame rate. Before we make a decision on these, I'm going to really quickly explain what resolution and frame rate are. Because if this is your first time really doing video, this might be new to you. Let's start with resolution. This is described as either 720 P, ten P, or four K on your iphone. This determines how many pixels will be recorded on each frame of video. You really don't need to know all the technical things that go into these numbers for our purposes, just know that the higher the number, the more resolution your video will have. Basically, the more clear and crisp it will look. The second piece of this is frame rate. Remember that all video is just a series of still pictures shown in rapid succession. The frames per second, or FPS, is just how many images your iphone is going to take for each second of video. For example, a setting of 30 FPS is going to take 30 still images in each second of video. And a setting of 60 FPS is going to take 60 still images in each second of video. Now the key to understand here is that most people have settled on 30 FPS for videos, although a lot of movie makers enjoy using 24 frames per second, which is why you will see that sometimes this means that shooting higher than 30 frames per second gives you the opportunity to slow down the video without going below the 30 frames per second in your final output. For example, if you film at 60 frames per second, you can play that back at half speed and still have 30 frames per second of slow motion video. If you film at 120 frames per second, you can play it back at a quarter speed and still have 30 frames per second. Of course, the more frames you capture, the more space these videos are going to take up on your iphone. Okay, with all that being said, let's go and take a look at the actual settings first. Here we have record video, let's tap on that. You can see here that we have a bunch of options, but that you cannot choose the resolution and the frame rate independently. Because not every resolution goes with every frame rate. The standard is the second option, 108 P at 30 FPS. But you could choose different options depending on what you want. I really wouldn't suggest choosing this top one and going down to 720 unless you really don't have any space on your phone. And you will notice that this last option, four K at 60 FPS, is actually limited to the high efficiency format that we talked about earlier. That is simply because it takes up so much more space. It's a very high resolution, at a very high frame rate. I don't want you to get super hung up on this right now because I know it can be confusing and annoying. And the truth is that for most people, the standard 1080 P at 30 FPS will be just great. And we can actually adjust this in the app later if we need to. So just leave it set to that for now. The other thing we need to know here is that if you the United States, you might want to turn on show Pal formats with this toggle here. When you do that, you will see two options with 25 FPS added to your list, which you might need in other countries outside of the United States. I'm going to turn that off because I am in the United States. The next options are toggles for various settings. You can turn them on if you want to use that feature. First is Enhanced Stabilization. This will help your videos look less shaky, but it will do that by zooming in a little bit. I personally like to keep this one on. Next is action mode, lower light. This just means that if you are using action mode to get super stable footage while running or some other motion, it will decrease that stabilization when in lower light so they can gather more light and produce a brighter image. The next setting is HDR video. Turn this on. We're going to record video with high dynamic range. Basically, we will get more detail in our shadows and our highlights, but it will only record in the high efficiency format because this is another thing that will take up a ton of space if it was in the compatible format. Next we have Auto FPS. This is a setting that will allow the foam to reduce the frame rate in low light in order to make a brighter video. This can be set up for 30 FPS or both 30.60 FPS or it can just be turned off. I leave it set to auto 30 FPS. Lastly, we have two options for locking the camera or locking the white balance. Locking the camera will stop the iphone from switching cameras when you are filming. For example, if you start filming on the wide camera and then zoom into one X, normally it will switch one X camera, but that will produce a flicker in the video when the camera switches. So if you don't want that, you can turn this on, then it will only use digital zoom based on which camera you started filming with. Locking the white balance just allows it to not change the white balance while it is recording video. So whatever white balance it started with, it will continue with throughout the duration of that video. Okay, let's back out of these record settings here and we're going to look at two more frame rate settings that we need to deal with. The first one is record slow Mo. This determines what resolution the frame rate will be when recording slow motion video. You can record at ten DP with 120, which is a four time slowdown. Or you can drop the resolution to 720 P and record at 240 FPS, which is an eight time slowdown. If you want to use high efficiency format, you can also choose to record at ten eightyP with 240 FPS. Now we can adjust this. While we are in the camera app though, it's not super critical that you choose this right now, unless you want to switch to the 1080 P at 240 high efficiency video format. So now I'm going to set mine to 1080 Phd at 120 FPS. The last setting here that we need to deal with is our cinematic setting. This is what your camera will use when recording in cinematic mode. You can do either 1080 P at 30 FPS or four K with 24 FPS or 30 FPS for most people, most of the time you will probably want to leave it on the first option so you don't completely burn through your storage. Okay, that's going to be it for the settings app here. There are other settings. Most of them deal with photos. You can take some time to look through those if you want, but I don't want to overwhelm you by talking about tons and tons of settings here. Just the most important ones. Now I know that going through these settings isn't super fun, but it is important to know where they are so that you can deal with them as you need to. Remember that with most of these settings, you're choosing to make a compromise between quality and storage space. Okay, that's going to be it for the settings. And in the next video, we'll get into the actual camera app and start learning how the app interface works. 7. Camera App: Okay, now that we have dealt with all of these settings, we can finally see how the video options are set up on your iphone. Now remember the app interface can change based on updates. And some features may only be available on certain iphones. So if yours doesn't look exactly the same as mine, don't worry. Just hunt for a minute and see if you can find it. And if you can't, just go ahead and ask me. Just make sure to let me know which iphone you are using if you ask a question. Now I'm going to show you the interface here in vertical orientation because that's kind of how a lot of people start out, because that's how they're holding their phone. But it's important to note that when we film with the iphone in a horizontal orientation, everything stays in the same place. But some of the buttons will rotate 90 degrees. As an interface element, the first thing we want to notice is our camera modes, which are located along the bottom of the screen, right above the shutter button. We're currently in photo mode. To get to the video modes, we're going to swipe over to the right, which will move us into video mode. Yeah, you'll notice immediately that video mode crops in a little bit and gets a little bit closer. So you might need to readjust where you're at. I have my phone on a tripod right now just to help hold it steady. I'm just going to reorient a little bit there. We'll talk about each of these different video modes that are here in a separate video. I'll just show them to you real quick right now, Cinematic, slow mo, time lapse. Right now let's go back to the standard video mode because that's going to show us the most interface elements. But if you ever feel like you're missing a feature, don't see something. It's probably just that you're in the wrong mode and you should just swipe in between them until you find what you're looking for. Now, one thing that you might have noticed when we swiped over from the photo mode is that the button in the center changed to red. This is a good visual indicator that you are about to take a video instead of a photo. When you push that red button in video mode, it will begin recording and the button will change to a red square to indicate that pressing it again will stop the recording. Let me show that to you. Pressing that red square stops it. To the left of this is a small square that takes us to our camera. Roll right here where we can see our videos. And to the right of that is a button with two curved arrows in a circle, which will switch between the front and rear facing cameras. There's me and then we switch back above. The camera modes are four numbers on my screen. You may have different numbers or less numbers based on which phone you are using. These essentially represent our zoom level, with one being the regular main camera like we talked about in the camera video. 0.5 is the wide angle, which will show us a lot more of the shot here. Three is the telephoto zooms way in. Two is the 50% crop on the main camera. It's not really changing cameras there, it's just doing a 50% crop on that sensor. Continuing up, you'll see this main area with these rule of Thirds crosshairs here. This is the viewfinder that you've been looking at this whole time and this is where you'll see what you're actually going to capture. The rule. Third set up can be really helpful because it can help you know where to place your shot when you are framing it up. Now the thing that you can do within this area is tap to go ahead and set your focus point. So if I want to focus right there, I can tap to set it. I can also swipe up and down to my exposure. Or swipe down to lower my exposure. You can see the little sun going up and down there. Now, the iphone tends to do pretty well, setting both focus and exposure for these videos. So I don't use that a lot, but it's good to know that it's there just in case you need to. This brings us to the top of the screen where we have access to some quick settings up here. These can change depending on which video mode we are in. Currently, we have the flash option up here, so we can turn the flash on and off Pros option because we turned that on before. So we can turn that on or off. You can see that it has to change a little bit when you do that. And there's a little chevron which we'll come back to in a second. Then there's our Action Mode button, which we can turn on and off. Remember we'll talk more about all of these later, and of course our resolution and frame rate. So you can see we can change between HD and four K and 30-60 on our frame rate. Remember that here when we say HD that means 108 P. Now the little chevron will open up settings along the bottom. Some extra menu options here. These can change depend on which video mode we're in. So don't ask me why is Chevron at the top opens up a menu on the bottom. I don't know why. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's good to know that it's there. Unlike with photos where there are a lot more options, this sub menu for videos only gives you settings that you already had access to elsewhere on the screen. So it's not all that useful most of the time, unless you just find it more convenient to have that there. Maybe your thumb can reach it easier or something like that. But you can see we have flash exposure turn on pro res and the action mode there. And that's going to do it for the interface tour. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and start talking about actually shooting the video. 8. Video Basics: All right, now that we know about the app interface, it's time for us to actually start shooting video. So we're going to start here in the regular video mode. But I want to talk to you about what you should think through when you're starting a video. Now you can see I flip horizontal so that you can kind of see how that looks and how some of the icons have changed, but not all of them. You can see that Prores is still in exactly the same orientation that it was before. So when you are shooting video, the first thing that you want to think about when you get in there is, am I in the right mode? Right now I'm in the standard video mode. Cinematic, of course, is going to give me more of that blurry background. Slow mo is going to allow me to slow it way down like we talked about in the settings. I now can change this 240 at 07:20 or 120 at HD. And time lapse which will essentially be the opposite and will speed up time. So you really want to think about that mode that you're in, the standard video mode is going to be your best bet most of the time. But sometimes you'll want to be doing something else for specific reasons. You want to make sure that you're in the right mode for the settings that you need as far as your frame rate and your quality are concerned. Because of course here I can only go up to 60, I can't go up to 120 using my regular mode. Also, remember that pros is over here. Pros is going to, of course, take up a lot more space, but it's going to bring out a much higher quality video. So you just want to be thinking about that. Want to think about your zoom level right here. My zoom level. It's not great for the shot that I'm trying to get. I'm going to go ahead and check what it would look like at two and at three. Now at three, that seems to be much better for the panning shot that I'm trying to get across these figures. I'm going to use three here now. Is three the best camera? No, it's not. But it's the best camera from you right now, because it can get the shot that I need. Let's go ahead and let's just take a shot with this now. To take the shot, you're just going to press record, making sure that you have all your settings in place. I'm on a tripod right now, so I'm not worried about turning on an action mode, but we'll talk about that later. I'm not going to use the flash. The flash is really not very useful most of the time. We're just going to go ahead and hit Record now. And then we're just going to a panning shot and then hit the square two. Stop it. You can always go back to play back through that. Remember, it doesn't matter if you have some empty space at the beginning or end of your shot. In fact, that's pretty good. You can always cut that later when you are editing. Okay to go back, we'll just hit the back arrow. Sometimes you will want to take a video, but you won't have time to go through all those things that we just did because sometimes something is happening and you need the video right. Then in that case, you'll end up a photo mode. And what you want to know is that you can start a video really quickly by just sliding your camera button. So you just need to take your photo mode and just swipe up or to the right. And then that's immediately going to start taking a video. That can be a really useful trick to know as well. A couple of other things to note here are the rule of thirds, if I in video mode and I zoom in here, if I want to put this guy right on the rule of thirds, I just line that right up there so that he's right on that rule of thirds line. Now a couple of other things to note. Now I'm on a tripod, so I've got things pretty stable right here. But when you're not on a tripod, even if you don't have this action mode button turned on here, it's still going to stabilize your footage. So the iphone is always stabilizing, but if you are in action mode, it will apply even more stabilization. So that's the basics of shooting video with your iphone. And in the next video, we're just going to go ahead and talk about some considerations when you're thinking about shooting in vertical mode or horizontal mode. 9. Orientation: Okay, so now that we know how to shoot video on the iphone, I want to talk to you about one of the most important considerations you're going to make every time that you shoot. Before we go into all of the different specialty modes that are available to you, this consideration is whether you're going to shoot horizontal or vertical orientation. This is really important because it changes dramatically what your camera sees and where the footage is going to be useful. So just to illustrate this for you, I'm currently in a horizontal, or what we call landscape orientation. I'm going to switch this to a portrait orientation. I am going to swap this. And when I go over here, the field of view that you can see changes a lot. So let's swipe this back over and you can see that now you can kind of see the legs of this stool that's holding it up and more of the up and down, which might not be what you want. So you really want to think about that as you are working on your videos, because it's really going to change what you are going to get out of it. And when you're shooting video, the thing to remember is the only stuff that matters is what's in the shot. It really doesn't matter if these legs down here exist. If they're not in the shot, right? You can use whatever you need to try and support your shot outside of the frame, But what's in the frame really matters, Whether you're shooting horizontal or vertical, really makes a difference there. Let's pop this back and you can see that little level bar right there. I'm just using that to level off my shot here. That horizontal orientation really makes a big difference in what we can see. It also makes a really big difference on where this footage is useful because different places cater to one of these or another. Now of course, you can always crop your footage later to change its aspect ratio, but when you do that you're going to lose lots and lots of resolution. Not normally recommended. If you can, you want to shoot in the orientation that you're actually going to end up using. The biggest consideration with this is what you're planning to do with the video after you shoot it. The end destination needs to be considered. People view things on their phone. They often view them in vertical or portrait orientation. Whereas when people view things on a TV, computer or tablet, they're usually viewing them in landscape or horizontal orientation. This has led to different platforms working in different types of videos. If you're taking a cute video of your child or pet to send someone via text message, you'll probably choose a vertical orientation. But if you're shooting a scene for your short film, you'll probably do it horizontally. The second consideration is what you are trying to capture. Maybe you're trying to capture a view of something that requires you to see wide on both sides. So you can see how much wider I can get here in the wide with my super wide lens. Then if I go ahead and if I rotate this here, pretty much my field of view is still the same. I'm just getting more on the top and bottom. You really want to consider what your subject is and what's going to work best for it, as well as which platform you're going to be in. So keep in mind some common orientations for platforms. Short form video like Tiktok, Youtube shorts, and Instagram stories and reels are all vertical. Whereas longer form video like regular Youtube videos, Vimeo, short films, and feature films are normally horizontal. So just make sure that while you are filming on your iphone, you're being conscious of which way you're holding the phone based on the end result of your footage. Now it's time for us to get into some more specific modes for filming on your iphone. So we're going to go ahead and take this outside and get started by talking about action mode. 10. Action Mode: All right, now it's time for us to start talking about the modes you have when shooting on the iphone. And the first one we're going to talk about is action mode. Now the iphone does a lot of stabilization to start out with, but when you turn on action mode, which is done here by pressing this little action button, it's going to actually do a lot of extra stabilization. So we have my daughter here and we're going to see what action mode looks like. Now you would use this when you're like running along a subject, trying to keep up with them. It's really you that's moving while they're moving as opposed to if you were just filming her move without being next to her. You wouldn't need action mode. You could just be stabilized right from where you're at, but when you are moving as the videographer, you want action mode on to stabilize it. So we're going to film her running along here and going up the monkey bars. Al right. Are you ready? Yeah. Okay. Let's go. Okay. So now we'll go ahead and we'll take a look at that footage shot with action mode so you can see how stabilized it is even though I am running behind her. This footage is really nice and smooth. Now, one thing that you want to remember is that you need plenty of light when you are doing this. And sometimes if you turn on an action mode and it's too dark, it will tell you that you need to get more light. Now, right now we have an overcast day, which is really great for filming. And there happens to be enough light because we're outside that it can pick it up. But if you were inside, it might tell you that you needed to turn on some lights in order to do it, because it needs a lot of light to process this, Okay, So that's action mode, which is really, really useful when you need to do something really smooth where you are running along or moving along beside the participant. One of the things to note about action mode is that it's not a separate mode on the mode dial, You turn it on by pressing a button, But it's not available in all modes, so you really want to be on the main camera for this. Now, in the next video, we'll go ahead and we'll talk about cinematic mode. 11. Cinematic Mode: Okay, so now we want to talk about cinematic mode. Cinematic mode is what happens when you swipe up if you're holding it horizontal or swipe over to the right when you're holding it vertical. So let's go to cinematic mode and we're going to go ahead and show you how this works. Cinematic mode basically works a lot like portrait mode. When you're doing photography, it's going to blur out the background. So you can see here that it's focusing on her face and it's blurring out the background. Now you can change focus. Say I want to focus on this swing set over here. I could tap over there, and it's going to change focus there. And then she's going to go out of focus. So this really makes your shots look more like a movie, more like they would do on a movie set because it gives you that nice shallow depth of field. Now you'll notice you only have two lenses here. You have the one X which is normal, and the three X which is super, super close. So then we can really see her up close. But let's go back to one X, okay, And let's focus in on her face. Now, when you tap to change focus, that's called pulling focus. And it really makes your shots look professional. So you can see I can pull focus to these trees and then I can pull it back to her and I can do that wall filming. So let's go ahead and see how this works. We're going to go ahead and press record. And if we wanted to show her, we could just do a nice pan around her here. And then if we wanted to pull focus to this tree, we could do that, focus over here. And then we can pull focus back to her face. So you can get some really nice shots using this cinematic mode to focus in on your subject and kind of blur out the background. Another thing to note here is if we switch this to four K, we can then change this to 24 frames per second. 24 frames per second is what's used on a lot of major motion pictures. So it's really nice to have that option if you're working on a short film with your iphone or something like that. You'll also notice this option, this is the F Stop. This is how much background blur you're going to get. So if we go look at her here and we move this up, the background is going to come more into focus as we raise our F stop up so you can see the backgrounds more in focus. Whereas if we go all the way down to two, it's very out of focus. And that's basically what cinematic mode is for here. You're going to be able to get those nice shots with that blurry background and it's a really nice feature. It really ups the professionalism of your video shot. On iphone, you will notice that there are some features that are available, like you can't shoot action mode here. That's because cinematic mode already requires a lot of light to make it work, so there just isn't enough light for it to do cinematic mode and action mode at the same time. So in that case, you're going to have to choose which one you're going to use. And making films is all about making choices. Okay, that's it for cinematic mode, you will need to take a shot with cinematic mode for your project, so make sure that you get comfortable with it. And now we're going to go ahead and move on to slow motion. 12. Slow Motion: Okay, now it's time for us to talk about another mode here on the iphone, which is slow Mo, short for slow motion. So let's go ahead and swipe up to get to slow motion. And we're now going to shoot in slow motion, which means that our frame rate options are different. If you look over here at your frame rate, you're going to see that you have HD at 01:20 or we can change that to 720 at 02:40 Now one of the things to note is that if you enable the high efficiency video Kodak in your settings, then you can get HD at 02:40 but you have to be using that HEVC video codec, which is a little bit more difficult to work with sometimes in post processing, okay? So, slow motion will start out with the very beginning being at regular speed, 30 frames per second. And then it will slow it down to whatever you have it set to. In our case, it's going to be 120 at HD. Now remember when you play back 120 at 30 frames per second, that's going to be four x slow mo, because 30 times four it's 120. So let's see how this works in practice. We're going to do a slow motion video of her, Okay, go ahead riding this horse. So we're going to do just a few seconds of that and then stop it. Now when we go back and we look at it, it's going to be slowed down. And it automatically slows it down. So you can see we're getting that nice slow motion there. As she goes back and forth on the horse. Remember that it's automatically already slowing it down. If you were shooting on a regular camera, you would need to slow that down yourself. But the iphone automatically slows it down and it gives you a little speed ramp at the beginning and at the end. Note that you have three lens options here. So you can go super wide, you can do the regular wide, or you can do the very close up. Number three, okay? So those are your three options in slow motion and that's pretty much it. You can't do action mode in slow motion. You just have those three lens options. And you do have the option to use the flash. But again, I wouldn't do that because I don't really like the flash here. So that's slow motion. In the next veo we're going to go ahead and talk about the time lapse. 13. Time Lapse: Okay, so now it's time for us to talk about the last mode here, which is the time lapse mode. So we're going to go ahead and time lapse the sunrise because that's a really great option for taking a time lapse because it's something that happens over an extended period of time. But you won't want to film the entire thing in real time because that would take too long for your video. So I'm on time lapse, which is the last mode after slow mo here. I'm just going to time lapse the sunrise happening here. So sunset or sunrise. Great things to do also like movement in a car or something. A great thing to time lapse. So let's go ahead and start this and then we'll see what we get at the end of it. So one thing to kind of know about time lapsing on the iphone is that it's not very like settable. There's not a whole lot that you can do with it in terms of actually adjusting the settings as it goes along. It's going to take a lot of photos, and then it's going to go ahead and adjust the frame rate after you're all done with it, in order to kind of keep it into a reasonable amount of time. You aren't allowed to manually set up the interval for taking a photo like you would be on a regular camera. Basically, you're going to set up a time lapse and then you're just going to let it go. Now another thing to note here is time lapses work best when you are using a tripod. So I have the phone on a tripod here so that I'm able to steady as it's taking the time lapse. So that really works best, particularly if the time lapse doesn't involve you moving. It's a little harder to do that if you're like doing a driving time lapse or hiking time lapse or something like that. Okay, So we're just going to let the time lapse run. Now you can see that the only controls you really have while the time lapse is going is the stop button. So you can watch as the little wheel moves. But really that wheel doesn't actually tell you when the photos are being taken because it's taking a lot of photos and then it's going to figure out how to put them together after the fact. Which does mean that it might take a little bit of processing time. So of course, I'm not going to make you watch this all in real time. We'll just skip ahead and I'll show you what we got from it. Okay. So we've been running for just about 20 minutes here on the time lapse. So we're going to go ahead and stop it now. And all you do to stop it is just press the little red square. Okay, now it's stopped. And we can go ahead and watch that in playback right now, check this out. Let's just look at how long this is here. This is about 20 seconds long. That's good to note because the iphone will almost always try to make your time lapses come out to be 20 to 40 seconds long, depending on how long you've filmed them for. But it's important to know that they're always going to be coming back at 30 frames per second no matter what you do. It's going to be a 20 to 40 seconds and it will always play back at 30 frames per second. A couple other things to note here is that you have all of your different focal links here. You have super wide regular, the two X crop and then the three X telephoto lens. You can use all of those in this mode, but those are really the only settings that you have. If we hit our little menu button up here, the only thing that we have is an exposure control, and that is the last mode here on the iphone. In the next video, we're going to go ahead and wrap up the course. 14. Next Steps: All right, I really hope that you've enjoyed learning how to use your iphone for video. And I hope that this has helped you to improve and helped you to feel more comfortable shooting video on your iphone. Now let's talk about what your next steps might be. Well, the first thing is that you need to practice more if you haven't completed your project, make sure that you do complete your project for this course and upload it to the project section so that I can see it and I can give you feedback. The next thing, if you haven't already taken my iphone photography course, you might want to take that as well. Because that goes into how to use your phone better for taking pictures. And so if you're taking video, you're likely going to want to take pictures as well. So you might want to go ahead and check that course out. Lastly, this course did not deal with the theory of videography really at all. We didn't go into how to get the best shots, and that's something that you might want to learn. There are lots of courses on videography here, on skill share that are not specific to phones, but can teach you the theory behind the shots. But if you are interested in having a course specifically on how to apply videography theory to your iphone, go ahead and let me know that in the discussion tab. And if there's enough interest, I may be able to develop a course on that as well. I can't wait to see what you're going to make on your iphone. And I will see you in the next course.