Smartphone Cinematography 101: Learn To Shoot Cinematic Mobile Video

1. About This Course: Hey guys, I'm Blake Calhoun. And in this course you'll not only learn the fundamentals of cinematography, but you'll also learn how to turn your smartphone into a professional quality video camera. This is the studio I worked out of, and so it will be the backdrop to many of the lessons throughout this course. And this is Ripley. She's a mannequin who does a stand-up job as a stand-in for many of the various composition, framing and lightning demos I do. Speaking of demos, I use an iPhone and the filmic pro app in this course. But you can use any kind of smart phone or video camera app you prefer. Apple, Android, or whatever you like. I want to make one thing clear, this course is not just about tech and apps. Yes, they play a role in how you create content with a smartphone. But technology changes all the time. You'll always be learning new stuff is that's just the tech driven world we live in. But the craft and techniques of cinematography don't change. They apply it to today and to any and all future ways to shoot video. One last thing, I will be showing real-world examples from my video and film work. Some shot on smartphones, and some not. Ultimately, cinematography is all about storytelling. No matter what kind of camera you use. I'll see you inside the course. 2. What Is Smartphone Cinematography?: Let's forget about the camera tech aspect for a moment and just talk cinematography, the foundations of what it actually is. This is really the most important thing to learn here. Technology changes all the time, but the fundamental principles of visual storytelling do not. Cinematography is capturing motion pictures. And that can be with video or film with the right framing, composition, and lighting to tell a story. And this applies to using any and all kinds of cameras. In this course, we'll focus on shooting with smartphones. But you can take most of what you learn here and apply it to whatever camera you choose to use in the future. Right now though, mobile video technology is getting so good that with a little bit of know-how and a few camera accessories, anyone with a desire can shoot amazingly good video with their smartphone. 3. The Cinematographer & Key Crew: Along with the definition of cinematography, we need to define the crew on a movie set. That would be the director of photography or the cinematographer. That's not always the name that's used in some countries it can be called DOP. We call it in America, we call it DP, short for a director of photography. It really just depends on where you are in the world. However, in the end it's the same job no matter what you call it. Now, this would be more for movies and TV and music videos and more narrative work. If you're doing corporate work or any kind of other type work, maybe news. You might call the person that shooting a shooter. You might call him a videographer. And in some cases you might actually call them the video guy or the girl, not my favorite name, but as long as you're getting the work and getting paid, it doesn't really matter what they call you. But in addition to the cinematographer, you have an entire crew around you. And again, it really just depends on what you're doing on movies and commercials. You would have a bigger crew. On corporate video, you might do a one or two-person crew. And then on news, you might end up being a one man band. Lots of times on news mobile journalism, you end up being the shooter, the producer, the editor, everything. On larger shoots though, you would typically have a crew. And depending on what you're shooting, that would consist of normally a gaffer. A gaffer is the person who works with the DP and is in charge of the lighting. And then you'd have a G and E crew which has grip and electric grips, move equipment around and help with lighting, help with dollies. And they report to the gaffer who then reports to the DP of a cinematographer. So on film sets or music videos, there is a hierarchy. But really it just depends again, what kind of project you're doing and how big of a job it really is. If you're doing YouTube videos, then you might be the one man band crew as well. And it might just be you kinda like with mobile journalism. So the point is today, the word cinematography or the word cinematographer can meet a lot of things. There's so many different ways to produce content today, and there's so many amazing ways, including smartphones to do that. 4. Different Kinds of Video & Film Work: When you think of cinematography, you probably think of movies and you might not connect that with smartphones though. Would you be surprised to learn that Steven Spielberg and Zack Snyder, too big Hollywood directors have you smartphones in their work. Steven Spielberg in particular has shot to feature films on an iPhone. Then of course, there are indie film directors like Shawn Baker. His movie tangerine was a hit at Sundance and it was shot on an iPhone five S several years ago, even before the newer devices have gotten so good. And then there's a New Zealand filmmaker named Steph Harris who made a really great indie film called Blue Moon. You never introduced yourself. I'm Daron. What's your name? Jones. Nice to me today. And what's your real name? I did an entire episode on my YouTube channel about that. They shot it on an iPhone seven and that movie really turned out great. You should check that out if you get a chance. But of course, movies are really only a small part of this. You can shoot any kind of project on a smartphone today and get really, really amazing results. And the thing is the same principles of cinematography will apply no matter what kind of project you're shooting. Now of course, if you're shooting a movie, you'll approach it differently than if you're shooting a corporate video. For if you're shooting a music video, you would approach that differently than a YouTube blog. Really more from the scale of the job and the crew, more than the actual way you shoot it. Because again, shooting things, once you learn how to do that properly, using composition and framing and lighting, you'll apply that to any and all kinds of projects. In my work, I routinely use my phone to shoot B-roll from my YouTube channel. I also use it a lot for travel films at documentary work. And I routinely mix and match that footage with other cameras. For me, it's all about the right tool for the right job. But that's not to say you can't use a smartphone for pretty much everything these days. It really just depends on what you wanna do, what kind of project you're producing. E.g. mobile journalism is a huge player mobile video. Today, here at the BBC, many people are using iPhones. And while a lot of the advice in this video applies to those phones, specifically, many of the tips apply regardless of the phone you're using. The BBC in particular has really grabbed onto this technology. And they produce full-on stories that air on TV and the Internet using their mobile devices. Lots of corporate video producers now use smartphones to do interviews and just shoot training videos. Real estate is a big player with smartphones. Lots of Realtors will shoot their own videos. Or really the companies will shoot video is routinely used in smartphones to help market their properties. So really smartphones can be used in a wide variety of ways. Whether you're making a movie, a corporate video, a real estate video, a training piece, YouTube blog, it really doesn't matter. So the bigger point here is, in all of these basic cinematography concepts are the same. Yes, you'll approach things differently depending on what you're shooting. But when you learn the foundations, the fundamentals of cinematography, you'll be able to work on any and all kinds of productions. 5. What Are Composition & Framing?: Okay, We're going to talk about technique and craft first, which as mentioned earlier, is really the most important thing to learn. Then later we'll move into the technical realm. If you'd like to skip ahead and watch the tech stuff though first, that's totally fine, but definitely come back and watch this. Composition and framing are really what cinematography is all about. Do you shoot a wide shot? A close-up? Is the subject centered or offset? Do you shoot high angle or maybe low? These are questions asked on every shoot. And in this section we'll go over what each one is and why to use them. Composition and framing or two of the most fundamental aspects of cinematography and visual storytelling. And two of the most important. You probably don't give it a lot of thought when you watch a video on YouTube or TV series or a movie. But there's a reason behind every shot. Every shot has a meaning. Often before you produce a movie or an advertisement or commercial, you'll do storyboards. I knew where I wanted to frame. I knew that I've drawn out the shots are new ways, ways that where I wanted to place the camera. I don't want us to keep the camera moving the whole time. This was the style of the film, is to have a camera, the briefs and moves with the actors and the story. Storyboards are just a way to pre visualize your shots. You're framing and composition. Simply put, composition is how you compose an image within a frame. And framing is the field of view and angle you decide to shoot. So the two are very interconnected and work together to create a shot. And of course, lighting plays a big role here too. We'll get to that in the next section. This is Ripley, our mannequin stand in that will be helping throughout the course. And she's standing in the studio. I'll workout up next to a payphone. This is a pretty standard look shot on a normal lens at about eye level, maybe just a little bit below eye level. But if we move closer and put the camera lower, you get a totally different feel. So all I did here was moved the camera closer and lower. Didn't even change the lens. But if I raise the camera up and change the lens here, I put a telephoto when you get a totally different feeling. Again, the exact same scene, just a different way to compose and frame a shot. Or I could put a wide lens on pretty much stay in the same place and do some unique composition. Had the shot composed a little lower in the frame. This then evokes another feeling, probably more of a comedic field. Or you could put a stylized lens on. This is a fisheye. I lowered the camera, now have a big wide shot here. And this could fall into the comedy world because of the distortion of the lens. Or it could almost be a superhero look without changing anything in the scene besides where the camera is, in which lens I'm using and how I can pose and frame the shot. You get completely different feelings with each shot. So now we'll look at a couple of these examples in more detail. This is one of my personal favorite kinds of shots. It's often called a hero shot. You lower the camera and it makes us subject look bigger than life, especially on a movie screen. But this could work in any kind of production, commercials, music videos. And this is a normal size and lens and so there's no distortion. And she's framed offset. That's called the rule of thirds, and I'll talk more about that shortly. But this can be a very cinematic style shot, makes the person on-screen seem powerful, being controlled, strong. And I think it's just a great way to frame up characters in a narrative piece, especially. I always try to watch out and not shoot too much eye level. I level can be fine, but you want to vary your angles. Now this shot, I change the position of the camera. I'm still following the rule of thirds, which has her a little bit offset, especially when I'm looking at her eyes. The eyes are very important feature of the face. I always really tried to pay close attention to where I compose people's eyes within the frame. The shot is also just a little bit low angle, which is nice I liked that just gives a little bit of style and energy to the shot. And then this being on a tele lens, a telephoto lens. This typically is to incite more emotion, usually drama. But it could be sadness, it could be anger, it could be comedy. You're really getting into the person's head when you get a shot this close. And that goes for any kind of production. Movies, TV shows, even corporate video. Think of 60 min where they do a really tight frame on people's faces during interviews. They are telling the audience that something important is being said or is about to be conveyed. And more times than not has to do with emotion. Whatever kind of emotion that is. Fisheye shots like this or stylized shots, It's almost like a GoPro. So for action sports, you'll see this Look all the time. You'll see this in music videos a lot, but also narrative. And even YouTube blogs, that kind of thing. Usually it's for more of a stylized look. And it can also play more as a comedic field. Especially if you've got the camera right up in a person's face, it'll really distort people's features like their face, their nose, that kind of thing. And here I've got her slightly offset. Often with these kind of lenses, you might Center somebody up. But here, even though I'm using a stylized lens, I went for a little more traditional composition, albeit with the low angle framing. This definitely feels different than the previous shots. It just gives you a totally different feel, a different emotion. One final shot here. I'm shooting approximately eye level. I would call this an extreme wide shot, and I am using an 18 millimeter wide lens. Oftentimes a shot like this would be simply to establish a location. Especially if you're doing a news story or even in a movie, you're just trying to show where the character is to get the geography for the audience. But from a symbolism perspective, primarily in movies or TV. A big wide shot like this makes the character feel small or insignificant or lonely. So it really just depends on what kind of project through shooting. And of course, I probably should mention, it's always a good idea to get a variety of shots like this just for pragmatic reasons and that is editing. You want to be able to have a variety of shots to edit a scene together. So learning the fundamentals of composition and framing will really help you be a better visual storyteller. There's a reason behind every shot. And you dictate that with how you choose to shoot. 6. "The Rule Of Thirds": The rule of thirds is one of the most fundamental principles of composition and something very important to learn and use. So the rule of thirds divides the frame into three sections, horizontally and vertically. You typically want to frame your subject, in this case, someone's face in the crosshairs, so to speak, within one of the sections of the rule of thirds. When it comes to faces, I like to really focus on the eyes. Make sure the eyes feel properly composed within the rule of thirds. For beginners, often you'll want to use the grid that's inside your camera. In this case, I'm using filmic pro and it's a setting within filmic pro. You can turn the guides on or off. So I'm going to go ahead and roll on a clip here and I'll demonstrate how to frame this up. So again, that would be a centered shot and centered would be something you might do for news. Or if you're doing an introduction like we did on this course, where we had Aaron centered up in the frame. But for most stuff you do, whether it's interviews or whether it's cinema, you are going to want to offset people. You can also call this lead room or negative space. This side of the frame over here would be considered negative space. Or look room. Look room is another way it's called. So our mannequin here, she can't look necessarily, but I'm gonna go walk over and make her look. Now she's looking over here to this side of the camera. So that would be called Look room. And look room is a really common look in movies. Or again, any kind of interview situation. Now, if you are shooting this as an interview, you would typically want to do this though, because the key light is on camera, right, her left. Alright, so now I have her looking camera right to her left. And that is how you would normally want to frame up if you were doing an interview or something, you would typically want to look into the light, look into the key light. Something you'll often hear is to say shoot into the dark side. So the left side of her face, that is a dark side of where we would want to shoot into. So she's looking over here on this side of the camera. You don't have to do this. I'm going to say this throughout this course, rules are meant to be broken. But whether it's in photography or video, shooting with the rule of thirds is a pretty standard way and for the most part a pretty good way to approach things. When I was just starting out, I worked for a company called Dynamite films. And the director there, a guy named Gerald Kane, had me do an exercise and I thought I would pass it along here and it was really pretty helpful, especially when you're just starting out and you're learning how to shoot, how to keep control of the camera. So what he had me do was take the subject and keep her right along the edge of the frame. So it's just a good exercise to really work on your motor skills, but also being able to keep something within the frame. And especially when things are moving. You can also work on the quadrants of the rule of thirds. I've got her face lined up right now. And one of the quadrants. This may seem simple and it is once you've been doing it awhile, but it's a really good way to hone your craft and to begin to understand not only composition and framing, but how a tripod works, a fluid head tripod works, and how things just flow when you're shooting video. No matter what you're shooting, whether it's a movie, whether it's a new story, whether it's a music video. This is a very basic setup here, but this is how you learn. Okay? Now I'm going to do the same exercise, but with a telephoto lens. And this is an external lens that you put on the camera. This one happens to be by a company called moment. Now we have a much more traditional looking shot. So I'm going to do the same thing. But first let's look at the rule of thirds again. You've got the grid pattern here. This would be awkward framing, although in a show like Mr. robot, they frame shots like this. Again, rules are meant to be broken. But traditionally speaking, whichever way the actor is looking or the person the interviewee is looking. That is where you have the negative space, this space over here where nothing is. You could also do alternate framing like this. Again, you're still utilizing the rule of thirds. You'll see this kinda look in movies, sometimes especially comedies where you're doing unique framing. You might also see the occasional interview done like this, especially on a wider lens. But let's do the exercise. And you can go back the other way. Again, it's just good to work out the hand-eye coordination, but also to be familiar with the frame. Alright, so that's a very general look at the rule of thirds, something you will utilize on every shoot you ever do, regardless of what kind of shoot It is. 7. Composition - Centered or Static: The rule of thirds is something that is there as a guide. And again, more times than not, that's what you'll end up using. However, there are times depending on the project, where sintering something, breaking the rule of thirds is the way to go. You may scream now, it makes you feel better. Who are you most in the town called me the founder. You may call me that. Somehow I can't see us being on a first-name basis. The man. Where did you take your still inside the glass house. This is a hidden room built for my use long ago, but I didn't think vampires could get into this house. You are vampire, right? I am the founder of Morgan Ville. In all ways that count, I am the vampire. This house knows its master, even if it's resonance. Don't. My role on a clip here. I've got a big wide shot here. I'm using a moment 18 millimeter lens and I have her centered up. This is sometimes called static composition, where you are framing something straight down the middle, straight down the alley, so to speak. Composition and lens choice and lenses we'll talk about here in just a minute. Evoke emotion. And that's one of the main things to take away from any kind of cinematography is, what are you trying to tell on your story? What is the emotion you're trying to convey in the shot like this, a big wide shot like this. Typically it's showing that someone is maybe small or far away. Maybe they're lonely. Again, every story is different, every shot is different. But as a general rule, that is kinda the idea behind a big wide shot like this. Now again, I'm talking about narrative film making more here. If you're producing YouTube content or if you're producing mobile journalism, doing new stories. That's a little bit different case. In those situations. You're gonna do it for different reasons. You're gonna get a wide shot, a medium shot, and a close-up typically speaking. And that just helps in the edit. You're not necessarily conveying emotion, although you can, depending on the story or the senior shooting, you also might use a big wide shot like this to establish a location, to establish a scene. Again, regardless of the kind of project, but the rule of thirds wouldn't necessarily apply in that regard. It could, depending on what you're shooting. I always think about that in the back of my mind. Once you've shot like this for awhile, it just comes second nature. You don't really have to think about it. I don't typically use the guides myself, but I've been doing this a long time. So composition works together with framing to create emotion. There always is a reason behind the way you compose something or frame something. Okay, now I've got a close-up shot using a 58 millimeter tele lens from moment. The same idea here with the close-up I've got here reframed in the center. Let me roll on this. So traditional rule of thirds would be something like that. But framing grep in the center. This is just a different way to approach it. When you're referring to movies, those big wide shots that are centered could also portray comedy, be more of a comedic feel. Same with these kind of close-ups. Typically though, she would be looking like maybe either directly in the camera or above the camera. But it's just another variation on composition. If you were shooting for YouTube, like doing vlog style video, this is a way you would shoot a lot of your stuff. So whether you're shooting wide or tight, this kind of framing is another option that may go against the rule of thirds, but depending on what you're shooting and doing can look really good. 8. Composition - Dynamic: Okay, one other kind of composition that I wanted to show here, and again, this is composition 101. And so you've got the rule of thirds. You've got more static or straight on composition. And then you have one called dynamic composition. Dynamic composition is where you have lines are angles in the shot. So I'm shooting the grid here. You can see the angles, you can see the lines of the grid that would be considered a dynamic composition. So even though the light is in the center, the composition is interesting because of the lines. Let me pan over here and do the same thing. So right there again, you've got lines going across that are interesting composition. So this kind of stuff would apply more towards architecture maybe, or real estate videos. It can apply though, and music videos or movies. You could do high angle kind of stuff, looking down and composing two characters sitting across from each other maybe. But this is a good general look at how dynamic composition using diagonal lines in your frame can add some creativity and visual interest to your shots. 9. Framing - High Angle: Alright, now we'll talk about framing. Framing relates to composition, but framing is more about the field of view and that's the lens choice and the angle of the shot. This is a high angle shot with a standard lens. Now the same thing with a wide lens. This is a moment 18 millimeter wide. It creates almost a comedic field looking down on someone like that. Of course, this can be used in a wide variety of ways, establishing a scene, a point of view. This can almost be like a peephole shot, not quiet, but in that world. Hi angle typically is also more flattering to people's faces. Not necessarily using the wide lens just in general. Okay, and then now here is the telephoto look, high angle telephoto look. And this can be a very flattering shot. Keep in mind, high angle can vary wildly. This isn't that high angle of a shot. You can have the camera at 10 ft up in the ceiling if you wanted to. But high angle is always something to consider along with low angle, which I'll show next. Shooting everything at eye level is a beginner's mistake. Actually, it's not even just the beginner's mistake. A lot of people, even experienced people, will shoot things at eye level. And high level is fine for some stuff. But try to get away from my level and give a different perspective. 10. Framing - Low Angle: Next up we'll show low angle. Low angle is lowering the camera and shooting up at a subject. This sometimes can be called a hero shot. And this again is more for movies, but it could also apply to a wide range of different kinds of productions. E.g. shooting news. If you shoot news, not necessarily the people, although you can shoot the people that way. But getting B-roll of stuff, getting different perspectives again, like high angle, use low angle to show the world from a different point of view. And here's the same thing now shooting with a wide angle lens, the moment 18 millimeter wide lens. One more look here. This is the moment telephoto lens. A telephoto low angle shot can really be a hero shot. Hero shot. Imagine the rock or whoever walking towards the camera makes the person seem superior, bigger than life, especially on a movie screen. But again, regardless of the project, you're shooting a low angle shot can add a very cool look. Then here one last low angle shot, this is considered an extreme low angle. This could definitely be in a big action movie, you might see a dolly shot tracking in front of guys walking. Again, this is really all about getting unique perspectives and being creative. But make sure it ties in with the story you're trying to tell. Hi. 11. Framing - Side Angle: Another way to frame a person in particular is a side angle. You could frame anything with a side angle. But when you're framing a person, there's a couple of things you really need to pay attention to. First would be the look room. And right here in this shot, she's on the left side of the frame. And so she's looking to this side. This would be a traditional way to shoot it. You could even you could frame are way off to the side. Or you could do like the Mr. robot kind of framing. If you've ever seen that show, it is very unique framing. Even though they're looking to their left camera rate, they frame them offset like this. Since this is a one-on-one course, I'm not going to dive too much into that. Typically speaking. You would frame it more like that. The second thing to keep in mind is seeing the people's eyes. Now unless you want to do an exact profile shot, I always like to see two eyes. Meaning you can see both her eyes. If her head was turned a little bit more or if it was a profile, you wouldn't see the second eye. And it's just not as flattering. A lot of profiles are not necessarily an overly flattering shot. It really depends on the person of course. But typically speaking, I like to see two eyes. It's a more flattering shot. And then if she was talking to someone across the way, you would shoot a similar shot of the other person looking back at her. This is probably more for movie or narrative stuff. This wouldn't be for interview kind of stuff. If you're doing an interview, you wouldn't have her look that far off camera. She would look over here closer to the lens. So I've readjusted the camera and her look. And this would be more of the kind of look for an interview shot. So a traditional side angle and a narrative. She would be looking over there. You get two eyes. If you're doing an interview. Most interviews, whether it's corporate video or news, I like to have them look off camera. If you're doing a live shot than they would look into the camera. But traditionally speaking, have him look over here and again, look to the side of the camera that you have the negative space on, the look room as it's often called. So this relates to the side angle shooting. Another way to frame up and compose a shot depending on your project. 12. Framing - Dutch Angle: Okay, one last aspect of framing I want to touch on unrelated to angles is something called a Dutch angle. Dutch angles are simply turning the tripod and shooting at an angle. You might sometimes hear this called a Batman shot. Because that series from the 1960s, the Batman series from the 1880s used a ton of a Dutch angles. A lot of filmmakers use Dutch angles. And you can do at handheld. Handheld is a pretty common way to do it. Actually. It just gives energy to a shot. You might see a low angle shot of a street and a car comes up. You can obviously shoot him with people if you're doing interviews, like incorporate video, event video. Oftentimes when you're doing an interview, you might frame it up like this and just have a little bit of a tilt, a little bit of an angle. And it gives a little bit of energy to the shot. Or you can leave it on a tripod. This particular tripod has a way to adjust the head to where you can tilt it. This is a personal preference thing, but when you're talking about look room or the way you look, when someone's looking screenwriter or to their left. I like to have the Dutch angle tilted the other way. Like that. To me, that's just more visually interesting. It opens the frame up. You've got nice negative space over here. Don't overdo Dutch angles though Dutch angles are something that are nice to throw in every once in awhile. But too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing. I think that's a good general rule of thumb for everything I've been showing so far, especially the more unique shots. You want to mix different things in here and there. Whatever helps tell your story, but don't overdo them. 13. Framing - Over The Shoulder (OTS): Okay, Another way to frame this shot is using a style called over the shoulder. Let me go find my phone. I'll call my boss and I'll see if this is okay. What did you not hear me? I am a star. B. Stand behind the camera. Typically, this will be used in narratives and movies, but it's also used the news. You might see a reporter with a shot over his shoulder talking to a subject, talking to an interviewee. So that's what I'm going to demonstrate here. In this case is just me talking through our mannequin friend. I've affectionately called her Ripley. You're looking over my shoulder into her face as the subject. Sometimes this is actually called dirty framing because the little bit of my shoulder and the side of my face or framed up. She's the main part of the composition using the rule of thirds. She's pushed over to the side of the frame. And we will be having a conversation if this was a real seem or again, if I was a reporter, I might be talking to the interviewee and she's talking back and the cameras over my shoulder. If this was a movie, however, you put the camera on that side of her shoulder, shoot back again towards me. Now there will be called a reverse angle shot. And then you would edit the two shots together. And we'll talk more about that later. But right now, just to understand that this is a pretty common setup called over the shoulder. It's used in movies, it's used the news. It can be used really in a variety of different things. Whether you're shooting B-roll or whether this is the main subject that you're shooting. This is another way to frame and compose a shot in the world of cinematography. 14. Framing - Lenses & Shot Sizes: Okay, The other component to framing is shot size. When you're talking about shot size, you're typically talking about lenses. When you're shooting on a smartphone, the native lens is usually considered the wide lens. Although newer phones have a built-in super wide lens. So you'll have a wide, a type, and a super wide. In this particular model of iPhone, I have two lenses. I have a wide, which is they are right now. This is the wide shot. And then I have a telephoto. This is the telephoto shot built into the iPhone. Now beyond the practical reasons for going between a wide and the tight. In other words, framing a shot, whether you want to see more of a shot or less of a shot, there are reasons behind different shots. I'm not sure which is worse. My husband thinking I'm crazy or him not believing me. It's gonna be okay. A tight shot like this. This would be considered a close-up shot. This is typically more for inciting emotion, whether that's sadness or fear or happiness. But getting in tight on somebody's face is usually because there is something intense going on in their life and tints going on in their world. Again, I'm talking more about movie production here. But this would apply to new stories. This would apply to YouTube blogs. Tight shots tell the audience that you are getting emotional with this person, whatever kind of emotion that is. And wide shots do the opposite. You have to go Daddy. See you later in the week. I love you baby. Let the bedbugs byte. Wide shots. Not this necessarily why this would be considered a medium shot. A medium shot like this would be more of a traditional shot. A big wide shot would be an establishing shot. And then an extreme wide shot might be a shot of an entire neighborhood that could establish wherever you are in the world. Actually. Your sentence will bring me out. Being late. Shot sizes are things you see every day. You just may not realize that you're seeing them. You just may not realize what they mean. So now I'll run through the various shot sizes that you'll use on most productions. Keep in mind though, there are no rules. These are just really general guidelines and best practices. Now, depending on who you talk to you, this would be considered a close-up or really it would almost be considered an extreme close-up. Right now I'm using a moment tele lens on the iPhone tele lens. So it's like a four times telephoto. Depending on the project, this would again insight, some sort of emotion, something dramatic, maybe usually go in tighter on shots as drama unfolds or there's conflict. So now I adjusted the camera to be even closer. And this would be what I would call an extreme close-up. This is almost getting in the Spaghetti Western close-up style where the old Clint Eastwood movies from the 1880s, Sergio Leone. This is more of a stylized shot, probably more used in a movie, but varying your focal length is always something good to keep in mind. In this case also, it's not just the focal length by actually moved the camera. I moved the camera closer to the subject. That's something to keep in mind. You don't always just put a new lens on. You often have to put a new lens on and then move the camera closer or further away. Okay, and now here is a wide shot. This is an extreme wide I would call this usually for me knees up like this. I would call it a wide. Some people might call this a medium wide. There are wide shots, medium wide shots, extreme wide shots. To me, you're talking about a person. This would be considered a wide shot. Now I'm only using the iPhone wide lens. So the iPhone lens on this particular phone is about 26 millimeter roughly. And so it's not super wide. I've also got the camera just a little bit low, a little bit below eye level. Again, when you're shooting, you wanna think about the composition where you want to place the subject in the frame. The framing, the field of view, which lens, and then the angle. Now I'm going to demonstrate an extreme wide shot. And this is one thing nice about using lenses, because I'm going to add a moment wide lens to the iPhone wide lens. And it will instantly give us a much wider shot without having to move the camera. So now you've got a head to toe shot. My book, this would be an extreme wide shot, in particular, being at a studio. If you're outside, that's a different story. An extreme wide shot might be a landscape or again, the exterior of a house. But in this environment, a head to toe shot like this would be an extreme wide or it could just be called a wide shot. Now, just to demonstrate this, this could also be called an extreme wide shot. The only difference would be now you're seeing the entire set. And so while this is cool, it's behind the scenes and you could call it an extreme wide. The previous one I did. Where you're seeing her head to toe. I would consider that an extreme wide in that scenario because normally you're not going to see behind the scenes, you're not wanting to see the walls and the lights and that kind of stuff. You've got extreme wide shots, wide shots, medium wide shots. You've got medium shots, close-ups and extreme close-ups. Use all these in your production to help tell your story. And remember, there's a reason behind the different shots. 15. PRO TIPS - Compostion & Framing: Be sure to pay attention to headroom when you're composing and framing a shot. You don't want it to be too high in the frame and you don't want it to be too low either. Really depends on the shot and what you're shooting. But a good rule of thumb is to keep it about ten to 15% down from the top. That is, unless you're framing someone's eyes, then their head can be out of the frame. If e.g. you're shooting an extreme close-up of someone's face. When you're doing interviews, whether corporate interviews or news interviews or any kind of interview, it's really best to have the camera just slightly above eye level. I mentioned high angle is more flattering and this wouldn't be high angle necessarily. But just a little bit above eye level is good. This will help minimize any double chin look even from people that aren't heavy set. The old adages, the camera can add ten pounds. And that's absolutely true depending on what lens you're shooting with. That's another topic, but doing this can create a more flattering shot. If you're filming kids. Maybe news B-roll or a marketing video, or maybe a school promotion video, whatever it might be. I'm talking about small children, preschool, elementary age. It's best to bring the camera down low. Don't shoot down towards the kids. Lower the camera down to their eye level or down to their level near the ground. That just creates much more interesting and appealing footage for the audience. And of course, remember rules are meant to be broken. Everything I've said is more of a guideline. Be creative, break the rules if necessary. Whatever works in your project. 16. Lighting 101 - Simple Interior: Moody film NWA, or a bright high key lighting can make all the difference in the world. Sometimes you'll even hear cinematography called painting with light, as lighting is a vital aspect of the process. And really, lighting could be a course all on its own. So here we'll go over tried and true techniques to get you started and later talk about some gear options. But this is something you'll continually learn about as you advance in your craft and as technology advances and changes. This is a scenario you might encounter when shooting video. A small room lit with fluorescent lighting. So we'll say you want to shoot an interview, or perhaps it's a scene in a movie. What do we do here? Well, the first thing we'll do is bring the camera in and set that up. So here's the initial setup minus the lights, and it matches the overhead diagram. And so now here is the actual shot from the iPhone pre lighting. I'm going with a little bit more, what I would call movie framing here more than interview framing. Although this could be interviewed framing, I've got the camera a little lower than I probably would for an interview. But they look room and the composition could work for probably either. So now let's add some lights and make this thing look good. The first light we're going to add is the key light. Key lights are traditionally the brightest light that you're going to use on a set. Not always, but more times than not. And it's the main instrument and the main light that will be lighting the subject. Here I'm using a large LED with a soft box and also a grid on it, a grid pattern. We'll talk more about that later. I like to use soft gliding, especially on skin. Soft lighting is probably my favorite for key lights. Here is that look with just the key light on. This is a work in progress. I'm going to adjust the light here in a moment, but this is going in the right direction. Next step is the backlight. This slide I actually had to put outside the room and I'll show that in just a second to get a good angle on her back, lights are great for separating a subject from the background. They can give more dimension to a shot. And in this case I'm using an aperture LED. It's a spotlight more or less. And this is not a soft light. This is more of a harsh light. And I'm shooting it through this opening in the wall. You could diffuse, you could soften a backlight like this. But in this case I chose not to. And so here is that progress. We now have the key light and the backlight. Now I'm adding a background light. This would be the third light in the setup. And background lights are sometimes not necessary and sometimes they are. The idea behind the background light is, as the name indicates, is to light up the background. Here I'm using an LED panel that does have some diffusion built-in. And I'm basically just lighting up the back wall behind our subject. Now here's the shot with the background light. You've got a key light, a backlight, and now background light. And the last thing I'm going to add as a fill, this can be a light, or in this case I'm using a bounce card. And the way that works is the key light will bounce into the card, onto the subject. The balance card is also called foam core, has a white side that bounces and it has a black side that will cut the light. Alright, so we've got our key light or back light or background light and our fill. And as a reminder here is the backlight outside the room shooting through an opening, through a window. And just a different angle here of the final setup. And now the overhead diagram of everything. This is a pretty simple and pretty common way to light a scene like this. Keep in mind though, five different people lighting the same scene with light at five different ways. But it would be done in a similar fashion with the same techniques. And now here is the final look. And a quick camera tech note here the ISO is at 76 and the shutter is at 01:48, shooting for k 24 frames per second. Now the final look with the key light, backlight, background light, and fill. In this case a bounce card. The shot does have color correction in post-production to so here's the shot with no fill, no fill and no background light, no fill and no backlight. And the original shot with only the fluorescence on. By the way, a side note, I did turn these off to do the other lighting. And now just a final recap with different lights on and off. So here's the shot without the key light on. The key light obviously does a lot in this setup. And so there it is back on. Now without the background light. The background light too does quite a bit in this scene. Now without the backlight. I'll show that to you again. On off. You can really see what it's doing here. Now without the fill the balance. This is kind of subtle, but look at her side. The shadows get really dark without it. And here it is back on and it's also adding a little bit of light to the background. Now off. Now I'll turn the background light back on. Now I'll put the fill back. And lastly, I'll turn the backlight back on. And so that's the setup. So again, this is a pretty common way to light something I do routinely regardless of the kind of project I'm shooting. Now every project is different of course. But the concept of this lighting scheme, the techniques used here can work on pretty much any kind of project. 17. Lighting 101 - Modifiers: Often you'll need to diffuse the light or NACA light down. And one way to do that is with these devices. White one is a silk, the green one is a net, and the red one is a net. And then this is a flag, this block slight completely no light can get through it. You typically use this to flag off unwanted light spill from a key light or from a back-light. You can also use this to create negative fill. This is a C stand and systems are one of the most used accessories in the film business, especially when it comes to lighting. Stands, are used to hold lights, to hold flags. Silks. You name it. A very versatile tool that you may not own yourself, especially when you're starting out. But if you ever work on any kind of production, there will be C stands on a grip truck or perhaps part of someone's lighting kit. If you're setting up a studio by one or two of these for your studio is a really good idea. 18. Lighting 101 - Reflectors & Diffusers: Another way to modify the light is with a flex fill or a bounce. This is a very nice small, compact one that zips up, you can drop it in your bag. So the default look is a white. So you could use this as a bounce or gold. You can unzip it. And it also has a silver inside. And then it has a black or it has a silk. So depending on what you're trying to do, this is a great accessory to have in your lighting kit. This kind is nice because it has a handle. So you can either hold it or you can actually mount this. Those are little quarter 20 mounts. You can mount this onto a light stand or even a tripod or a C stand. If you have the right kind of connector, I use these mainly out in the field. They're easy to travel with, especially when you're shooting outside. But they can also work in a studio setup or wherever you are in an office. This kind of stuff though I typically use for interviews or maybe product shots. Not necessarily something I would use on a larger production, although they can be useful depending on what you're doing. Okay, so I'm going to demo this flex fill now. Let me roll on the iPhone. I currently have the white card in the board, the foam core. But if I wanted to go gold or if I wanted to do just the white. It's very subtle. The main thing I was trying to do is raise up the side of her. Just gets a little dark. And with iPhone that can get really noisy. Ok, and now I flip this around and I've got the silver side. Or you can use the black. In this situation, this doesn't do much. This could be like a flag or it could be used as a negative fill. A negative fill is taking the light away. Again here it's not doing a whole lot. Silver does quite a bit. These are really good to carry outside and probably best used and running again, kinda situation. 19. Lighting 101 - Using Modifiers (Silks): Alright, it's probably a little bit hard to see, but on the key light there is a softbox and on top of the softbox there's an egg crate, which I sometimes also call a grid. The grid helps keep the light more directional so it doesn't spill quite as much. This is a large light, It's a big source and so it's a very soft light and it spreads out. So what I'm going to show though, he's taking the grid off and taken the diffusion off. So now I've got the light off and I'm going to take the grid and the diffusion off. They both just go on with Velcro with this particular light. And actually I changed my mind. I'm going to leave the diffusion ion for a sample shot and then I'll take that off. Okay, now I've got the grid off the main light. And so this is the exact same shot. Didn't change anything on the camera yet. Now it's a little bit overexposed. The grid was knocking the light down some, but mainly what it did was it controlled it from spilling all over that back wall. Now there's spill everywhere and that's really not what you want. You can control that with flags, but the grid helps keep that light more directional. I'm going to lower the exposure here just a little bit. Okay, I'm rolling again. I adjusted the exposure just a little bit, brought it down and now that looks about right to my eye. It was just a little bit hot with the grid off. Alright, now I'll take the diffusion off. So now the LED lights are just exposed. This is a light that can roll up. It's a really great light to travel with. But as I'll demonstrate now, it's also very bright and can be harsh, especially on skin tone. Alright, now that's the light with just the LED is no diffusion and it's hard to look at, It's hard to use. So now this is the lighting that is just the raw LED lights hitting her. And again, the exposure is too bright, which is not a surprise at all. And it's more of a harsh light now. It's not as harsh as a light might be with a single bulb, but it's still pretty harsh light. So what I'm going to do is diffuse the light. The first way I'm going to use is with this flex fill. So instantly you get a much more pleasing look on her face. So imagine being outside and I'll show this. You can use this outside to knock the sun down off of somebody. Without it. There's width. And now the same thing with a silk that I showed earlier. This is a big silk that you could use. You would normally put this in a C stand. But I'm going to hand hold it. And by the way, hand-holding a silk like this or hand-holding a flag on a film set. It's typically called Hollywood. In Hollywood, a flag or a silk or something out of the frame. So now I've got that in front of the light. Now I can't see the monitor right now, but just to my eye, it really diffused it and makes her skin tone looks a lot better. So there is without it. And that's with it. So these both help to diffuse the light, soften the light, and can be used on any kind of light, really including the sun. 20. Lighting 101 - Using Modifiers (Nets & Flags): Now, depending on the kind of light you're using, you may not need to soften the light. So in this scenario now, I'm going to use a net. The net simply lowers the intensity of the light. This is a green net and it's called a single. So now we'll see what this looks like in front of the camera. This will soften the light, but it lowers the intensity. So now I've reduced the exposure for lack of a better word of the light and made it more pleasing on her skin. So that's without the net. And that's what the net. Again, I'm Hollywood in this right now. But typically you might set this up with a C stand. It really just depends on what you're doing. And often you'll use these to fine tune things other than a key light. You might use it on a backlight or another way, e.g. a. Light that doesn't have a dimmer on it. I don't use nets that much anymore, but they are something good to understand. Now I'm going to show the doubleness, the red net. Alright, and here's the red. This is a double net. This drops down the intensity of the light with the exposure even more. Now you can see this is probably too much for this example. But you're really knocking the light down. Again. You could use this outside and the sun. You could use it on any instrument, any light though. So nets and silks are great thing to have in your kit to really help you modify or get the exact look you want with the various lighting that you're using. Okay, one last look here at a device to help modify the light and that is the flag. Let me roll here on filmic pro. So I've still got just the raw LED, no diffusion and no egg crate, no grid. And without that, there is major spill on the back wall. And so I'm going to use a flag. This is a flag. The flag the light off the wall. Now in this situation, pay attention to the back wall. This has nothing to do with her her skin tone or anything like that. I'm simply flagging the light off the wall. So I'm flagging the light from the key light off the back wall. There is the light from the key light. Now it's off the wall. So now the background light I hat is the only thing illuminating the wall. So again, there is without the flag and there is with the flag. And so Hollywood and this can get kind of tiring. And again, I would put this on a C stand back here. Unless you have a bunch of grips on your shoe. Typically you don't really do that. Whenever I have someone Hollywood ally, it's usually for a very quick shot. So they could just stand there for a minute or two and hold the flag. And that situation, it's fine. Sometimes it's faster to do that. Then set up a C stand. Okay, I added the flag in there on the siesta. And just so you can see, after I watched the footage back, I could see the flag was in the shot, which again, I was just doing a demonstration. So not a big deal. But I wanted to show what it would look like with the actual flag on a C stand. And this is the reverse angle, the other side of the flag, in front of the LED light. Depending on the shot, depending on the scenario. Using flags is a great way to modify the light. 21. Lighting 101 - On Camera Lights: Sometimes you'll find yourself shooting and lower light, especially if you're doing a vent production, maybe wedding stuff. Some people do shoot weddings with these smartphones and maybe a B camera. You might use a DSLR or mirrorless cameras. You're a camera. You might do corporate event work, or you might be a mobile journalist. And this is a really common thing for that. Shooting an interview in lower light. Right now I have it lit lower and I'm lighting it with my main key light like I've been doing, although I brought the intensity down. So what I'm going to do though, is I'm going to turn that light off and then light the scene or light the subject with only a camera light. Camera lights can create interesting looks. They can be good and bad. And I'll show you the differences right now. I want you to pay attention to how this side of her face is nice and lit. And then there's a little bit of a drop-off over there, which is nice. That's called modelling. And you want to have a little darker side. Typically speaking, when you're shooting something, just a little bit of definition when were doing an interview especially. So I'm going to turn this light off. So now if you were shooting this interview, you would be in trouble. You could crank up the ISO, but cranking up the ISO on a phone does bad things. Plus in the end, even crank and the ISO up, meaning brightening the image, it would still not look good. So I've got this light on top here. There you go. So now that it's on 100%, right now, it is illuminating her face. But it gives almost like a spotlight look. Some people call it a deer in the headlights look. I don't disagree because I mentioned a second ago with the key light here you can see on the side of her face the modeling right there. It's now gone because this is a totally flat look. Flat lighting, completely flat lighting. Sometimes flatlining is okay, but more times than not, you want to have a little bit of definition to add a little bit of drama to make it not so flat to give it a more 3D appearance. Now you could lower this light's intensity. The lights are redeemable. And so bringing the intensity down does help a little bit, but then you don't have enough exposure. So what do you do? Well, if you're by yourself, there's not much you can do. And this look is not uncommon for news or think about a red carpet where a movie star, it looks into the camera or as being interviewed by some reporter. Usually it's this kind of lighting. They just have a light on their camera and they might be handheld. Using these kind of lights are routinely you'll be handheld. But one option if you have someone with you helping a production assistant or maybe a producer, they can take the light off the camera and hold it to the side. I'm going to take the light off. And you bring it over here. You have someone hold it like this. Now you're getting the modeling on the right side of the face. So I can point that out. Yeah, right there. And you're still getting a nicely illuminated shot again to compare, bringing it back over here, It's very flat. Bring in the light over here. Have someone hold the light. And you've got a nice solution. But using an LED light like this can definitely work depending on what kind of job you're doing. But if more traditional filmmaking, you want to use the key light like this to get a polished look. 22. Lighting 101 - Golden Hour & Clouds: One of the best times you can shoot outside is called golden hour. This is the last hour or so before the sun sets or after the sunrises. I like to say golden hours, because for me it's usually 2 h maybe up to 3 h before or after the sun sets or rises. But it's a really great way to get beautiful footage using natural available light. The following scenes or from the feature film killing down that I directed. All of these scenes were shot with available light in or around the golden hour timeframe. So even shooting movies where you often have artificial lighting, using the sun, using natural light is a great way to go. This shot is also available light and we use the reflector to bounce the light in on her face. Well, what makes you think it's him? I think I recognize the voice. I was there and here if you notice the shimmering of the light, this is coming off the water and it's an early evening shot. A really cool way to add interest and texture to your footage, Evans and 85, which Hugo wasn't the main facility until this year. How do you know this stuff? Like I said, it's part of my job. Here's a reverse angle of that shot. Now in silhouette and you can see the water off there and then distance. That's what was the lighting their faces. And if you look closely in his glasses there, you can actually see the reflection of the water. One day these men come out of the jungle. Again, this is all available light, no modifiers, just golden hour type light, which is a great way to go. I don't know what they were. I still don't. One last scene here, It's a continuation of the same sequence. What are you gonna do? This is also all available light, golden hour. Although we are using a couple of reflectors to shape the light around the actors, just his conscience. And I really think this is a cool shot. It's one of my favorite shots and the entire movie, It's got great depth and just an all-around interesting feel. Maybe could be, you know, enough to know what can happen out there. So you wanna be **** sure you know what's happening in here before anybody else gets hurt. Maybe you're just going crazy. Yeah, maybe. And then I really liked this close-up insert shot. Alright, so lecture. Again, we're using a bounce. It's actually called a shiny board. That's why you see the light flickering ever so slightly on her face. That's from the water, but there's no artificial lights added here, just golden hour sunlight and some bounce. I'll think about it. Most of the time when you go out and shoot B-roll, you'll shoot it and available light as well. B-roll is cover video. It's video that goes over the main topic or the main subject. Whether that's an interview or a product review or a new story of whatever it is. B-roll covers that. And a great way to shoot that is at golden hour. But shooting golden hour footage is not just restricted to being outside. You can shoot inside too, with light coming in a window. I'm often amazed at how good natural light can look, especially this time of day. Golden hour light coming through glass bricks like this can add a really nice look and texture to a shot. Love the pattern on the wall. And if you notice the clock, this was about 2 h before sunset. I tend to avoid shooting outside at any other time of the day. Unless you have cloud cover. Clouds act like a big silk. They diffuse the light from the sun and can create a very pleasing look. This is a scene from the series pink that I directed. And this was shot under a tree on a cloudy day. So the light looks very soft and diffused and it's a really nice look. This was all available light with no modifiers. What would your girlfriend? A girlfriend from the museum. I see with her all over campus. You mean Hannah? No, no, no, no. She's my sister. I tried to introduce you to her. Why didn't you I tried. You ran away. Are you serious? I did. And here's something that often happens on shoots when you're shooting outside. It can be sunny like it is in this shot, which can make it challenging to shoot depending on the time of day. But then the cloud cover roles in and makes it okay to shoot. Actually, it makes it really great to shoot, right? This is a scene from the short film Miranda that I directed. Once we hear you say Miranda, the cavalry with bust through the door and save the day. It's like last time. But what happens if you have to shoot outside? There's no cloud cover and it's bright, sunny, and it's the middle of the day. Well, in that case, you create your own clouds. This is a twelv by 12 silt. This is not something that everybody would have access to. This actually was part of a grip package on a grip truck. This was for a book trailer that I directed. But you set up this large silk over the scene that you're shooting and it softens the light. Looks like this can also be used in a studio. This is an eight by eight celt. The eight by eight is a lot easier to use than the 12 by 12. And you can use it to diffuse large lights like this LED 12 by 12, you've got to have multiple people. So pay attention to the DPs arm there. That's Alan Love favor. He was the director of photography on this shoot. And disarm is very blown out by the sunlight. But the person underneath the silk, that's a crew member there. She looks great. Nice soft light on her. And so here's the actual scene that we shot. Notice the nice dapple of light from the tree on the right hand side on the guy's arm. But the overall image is very soft. It's very diffused. But the nice thing is silk still let light through. So you're not just blocking the light, you're diffusing the light. And again, it works like a big cloud diffusing the sun. I realize most shoots don't have access to a big silk like this though. But pretty much anyone has access to a reflector or a smaller cell. So I'll show you one more example from the short film Miranda directed, doing just that. Listening. I'm sorry. Okay. About every Let's just work together and we'll nail this guy. And after that happens, those charges against you are going to disappear. Plus you'll get your badge and your gun back to you got to backup just a little bit cliff. So that's Cliff holding the diffuser, also called a silt. And if you look at the actress that Susanna gib, you can see the bright sun on her face. It's directly above or creating very harsh shadows. So this is the actual shot from the movie, but you can see a little bit of behind the scenes here, right before I actually say action. I am rolling. Okay. Stepping towards the car. You're kind of leaning on the car. You're listening to him action and in case you're wondering and post-production, I actually pushed it on the shot to hide the reflector, to hide the crew. And now here's the actual final scene one more time. I'm sorry. Okay. How about everything? Let's just work together and we'll nail this guy. And after that happens, those charges against you are going to disappear. Less. You'll get your badge and your gun back to shooting outside and available light is a great way to go, especially if you can shoot during golden hour, give or take two or 3 h, either after sunrise or before sunset. And if that's not an option, shooting under cloud cover is a great way to go or create your own clouds with a silk. 23. PRO TIPS - Lighting 101: If there is a practical light in the scene you're shooting, regardless of the kind of video you're producing, that light should typically be turned on. And that's not necessarily to help light the scene. That's just because a light, otherwise we'll just look dead in the shot. And this can definitely help with the production design of the scene. Again, this could be for interviews, movies, whatever. Another way to diffuse light is to use sheets of diffusion. This kinda diffusion often comes in rolls and you just cut it and attach it to the light using clothespins, something we usually call C41 sevens and the film business. So this would be used if you're a light doesn't already have diffusion built-in, e.g. an LED light. Or if you're trying to add more diffusion on top of that. There's kinda diffusion is used pretty widely. I would say it's probably more for location shooting part of a light kit. If you're in a studio, you would probably use the other kind of diffusion that I already showed, silks and that kind of thing. Color temperature is related to white balance and lights come in different color temperatures and some of them are adjustable. So the most common LEDs are daylight balanced, and most are 5,600.5600 Kelvin. But some lights are by color, and they can be dialed into an interior color, which is normally called tungsten. That color temperature is approximately 3,200 Kelvin. This will depend on your scene and where you're shooting though. But with a lot of lights again, you can dial this in. Then you would white balance your camera or your camera app to match whichever color you want it. 24. Camera Movement - Pans & Tilts: Moving the camera can add lots of production value to your project. And it has never been easier to do than it is today. But makes sure it's motivated movement. In other words, make sure the movement reflects what's happening in the story. Now this mainly applies to movies, but it can apply to other types of productions too. So definitely consider moving your camera, but makes sure there's a reason behind the movement. Panning and tilting or two of the most basic camera moves you can do, but when done properly, that can be two of the most effective. One thing I want to go over though, is the difference between a pan and tilt. A lot of beginners make this mistake and a lot of clients when you're doing client work, we'll just use the word pan, no matter what they're saying. When they really mean that tilt. This is a graphic I found on the Internet and it is perfect for what I'm talking about right here. You've got each move you can do with a camera spelled out here, Dolly, boom or Gibb truck, which also can be track, pan, tilt and roll. But when I expand the full graphic, it's actually an Internet meme. You see what the client calls every one of those moves. So it's just a little bit of humor here, but the thing is it's really true. And I don't say this to be critical. I'm actually showing this because I want to make sure that you say the right thing when you're describing a shot. Pan goes left or right? It's that simple. A tilt goes up and down. Now you can tilt and pan at the same time. You can pan and tilt down. You can pan and tilt up. But you don't just pan up and down. Now let's see some panning and tilting inaction. Alright, this is from a series I directed called Morgan bill. And using tilts and pans here are a nice way to make this feel more cinematic. It's just one shot with no edits. Michael, make it up. We need to talk about the meeting tonight. And this is also from Morgan Ville, a good example of using pans to reveal different things. And also a nice way to do a transition with a tilt. Now this is from a short film I directed called home. I loved doing a simple tilt like this to set up a scene to reveal a location. This is from a Warner Brothers Digital Series I directed called exposed, using some pans and till along with some dolly. Died. Back to the series Morgan Ville. Everyone's set, this place is haunted and using whip pans are fast tilts is another way to add excitement or energy to a shot. Same with the sequence here, and I include a dolly as well. He's already toast. What did you do to Michael Fitch? And in this scene from Morgan Bill, I'm using width pans to follow the conversation, but to also add a little bit of a comedic element, smart. Oliver must have reported the book is stolen. Hear about some stolen property. Pans and tilts, although simple when used appropriately, it can really improve the look of your project. 25. Camera Movement - Handheld: All right, Another way to add camera movement is another simple way and that is to go handheld. The beauty about going handheld is you're very free to move the camera as you want. And from a filmmaking perspective, it helps add urgency or tension to a shot. It can also be good for a point of view because as the camera's moving, it looks like someone's perspective as they're walking through a room or what have you. It's used a lot in horror films or other kind of suspense thriller type movies and in a totally different direction. And it's also good for Event work, maybe shooting weddings or even new stories, lots of times the quickest and best way to go is to shoot handheld. This is a short film I shot and directed, all shot on iPhone. It was for the moment invitational short film contest. And I shot it all handheld to add tension and some suspense. I can't believe it. This is from my short film home. And this is more subtle handheld movement, but it does create a feeling of urgency, maybe a little bit of anxiety. Naturally. Another scene here from Morgan Bill and I incorporated a whip pans to add comedy, but also to make it feel suspenseful, we should get stakes is that what we need to fight vampires and Brandon can't come inside unless we invite him, will be fine if we stay in here. Monica is not a vampire, just your garden variety psycho. Really hoping you go a day without mortal peril. And this is a handheld POV shot from Morgan bill. Adds tension to the shot. My bad. This is a sci-fi series I directed called continuum. Here we're using a mix of static shots with hand-held to create tension. And there's also some cool POV shots. Another good use for handheld is shooting action scenes. Think of the Bourne movies or other kind of action scenes like that. Hand-held just heightens the action, heightens the feel for the audience. One thing to be aware of with smartphones though, is because most smartphones have OIS optical image stabilization. And so if you move the camera too much, bounce it around, you'll get jitters in the image. So we do recommend using image stabilization anytime you're going handheld and just be careful not to bump the camera. As long as you don't bump the camera, you'll typically be okay. This is from a feature film I directed called killing down. And speaking of the Bourne movies, that handheld vibe is what we're going for here. And we also mixed in some snap zooms just to really up the tension factor. Graphs and severe. In this sequence here is also from killing down using hand-held to complement the action. And here's another scene from Morgan bill, and this time a fight scene and go in hand-held really helps with these kind of action scenes. Ground. Ovo, stupid rules, gentlemen. The stupid rules are in fact mine. I'll see you for it lets you touch either one careful column. There, anyone I care about, I'll put them down. You know, ground rules. So shooting handheld is another great way and really a simple way to add production value to your next project. 26. Camera Movement - Gimbals & Steadicam: Gimbels. Gimbels are one of the coolest things I think you can add to your filmmaking kit as it relates to smartphones. They're great for other kinds of cameras too. But with smartphones, it's really amazing the production value you can add with a gimbal. There are traditional gimbal is like this one from June. This is a crane M2. But then there are smartphone gimbal is like this one from Free Fly. This is the movie cinema robot. This one is a dedicated smartphone gimbal. This one will work with other kinds of cameras. But it's really great how easy these are to use and how much production value you can really add to your project. This is another short film I shot and directed, all shot on an iPhone with the movie cinema robot. I'm going to show most of it here because it's a good example of what you can do with just a phone and a gimbal. Alright, now let's look at some other projects shot on a gimbal and we'll see how the camera movement was motivated. This is a short film I shot in, directed on an iPhone called Miranda. And at one the filmic pro short film contest in 2018. And this is more gimbal footage from the short film Miranda. Plus you lost your weapon. I have to be an acid. Just get the guy horizontal. Getting brag. Don't steer the conversation. You'll get there. Once we hear you say, Miranda, the cavalry with bust through the door and save the day. This is a music video I shot and directed using a red camera and then iPhone. These are some of the iPhone shots. This is another pretty high-energy seen from Morgan Ville shot with a gimbal. Long before Gimbels, there were steady cams. Now I don't have a steady cam here on the set with me. A steady cam is like a gimbal only it'll hold a lot bigger cameras, typically speaking. And it's also much heavier to use and they're much more cost prohibitive and really specialized. These days, Gimbels are everywhere, but steady cam primarily lives in the domain of bigger budget projects, Hollywood movies, NFL football games, that kind of thing. In many ways, steady cams are actually better than Gimbels because gambles you get the z-axis up-down movement that you don't get in steady cam. This is one of my favorite ways to shoot with a steady cam or a gimbal for that matter, I call it a walk and talk scenes, mark. And this is from the series Morgan bill that I directed in town to draw them off campus. Ever suspect the thing? Those that do transplant. So are any of them Morgan Bell kids? He's local. Him. Look how he walks. Natives are always ready to run or fight. Yeah. It's life. Whenever you see a Morgan real human that's not paranoid. Watch out. Why? Because they aren't afraid. That means they've got reason. The body of this is from a series I directed called paint. This was shot on steady cam and it was in 2007. Today I would probably use gimble on this, but this is still a good example. Is the white rock child killer. Police at this time have no clue as to the identity of the killer or even remains in our city. But parents are urged to use extreme caution. This is another sequence from the series pink that I directed. He'd been stuck in the neighborhood for weeks. Hey, there. You late for school. I'm headed that way you want arise? We want to write one more walk and talk example here from the movie killing down that I directed. This time we shot over the shoulder, back-and-forth shots corporate instead of just walking in front of them? I didn't think that they gave job interviews. The guy's like you. Yeah. I mean, they do. Thanks for coming to my shell. I wouldn't miss it. Now. From a smaller productions and indie filmmakers, Gimbels have become the way to go. But steady cam definitely offers a lot. 27. Camera Movement - Dolly Shots: Okay, dolly shots. Dolly shots are a great way to do more controlled and precise movement. This is a slider dolly. This is also a dolly, It's a tabletop Dolly. And then of course there's big dollies, There's Fisher dollies, There's all kinds of dollies. There's Dana Dolly. But the nice thing about dollies is they can add movement that are much more controlled and precise. And dollies are often used to add emotion to a scene. Fast dolly shot from my short film, Miranda. You understand the deal, right? Yeah, I understand. This is from my iPhone shot short film, Casey's favorite song. She said, This is her number seven favorite song. Okay, Casey, It's one of my faves as well. It's the police with don't stand so close to me. This is from the indie feature I directed called spilt milk. And that is Jake Johnson who has gone on to become a pretty famous, well-known Hollywood actor. What do you care? This is also from spilt milk, a really nice emotional scene here using slow dolly moves. She's my mom. You only play nice with them when you want something, Am I right? Yes. What are you afraid you're gonna lose your allowance? This is about at all. Sure it is. I'm pretty sure the feeling's mutual. Unless you actually get away with murder, Just so you leave her alone. She does time. Oh, here's some money. Go be annoying somewhere else. It's not like that. Sure it is. I know that. No. You do. Let's face it, Sabrina. She doesn't care about you. She never did stop it until now. Because you don't know, you got until it's gone. This is a Stanley Kubrick inspired shot from the sci-fi series continuum I directed. Take the hood off. This is a sequence from killing down Dali's work really well on these kinds of scenes. She's perfectly okay. Another nice thing about dollies is you can slide and reveal a character or an object, and you can establish the scene. This is from continuum. It was great being able to use the set we built to reveal things. Reveal character is revealed locations. This is a nice sequence from the short film home. I directed some subtle dolly moves that are very effective. I think. We move the camera a lot and spilt milk. I really like this shot. Password. The first thing he types every time, a very simple but effective shot from killing down. And a nice simple shot here from Morgan ville. But it really works well to establish the location and then reveal a character. Whereas another similar shot here from Morgan Ville, a nice way to reveal characters. You must be so laws. This is an actual university. I'm pretty sure janitorial school is on the site training. And one more from Morgan Bell. Another way to reveal the characters and show the location. I don't think I needed. Oh, well, yes, I do. Laura. Layer. Another thing about dolly shots, or they are an excellent way to help propel action in a shot or scene. More camera movement from spilt milk, this time an action sequence. This is another scene later in the movie with a similar aesthetic. Open the door. You don't have to keep pushing me, I just do it. And this one too, albeit not as fast of a sequence. The sequence from the short film home is not necessarily action packed, but the Dolly makes it feel more like an action scene. Dollies are also good to use as a tracking shot, kind of a walk and talk as pseudo steady cam or a gimbal. But with a lot more precision. These are some of my favorite kind of shots for dolly or steady cam. I can't open the safe. Hey, you got a gun. Remember, it's everybody had no choice. It doesn't matter. I can't open the safe is what I'm trying to go. She's got like 30 pictures of a cat owner Fool. Why? I can't open the safe bands when we get cork kit, Let's go. And in spilt milk, we use them a lot. So what happened with the whole school thing? I decided to get my own place. So your dad finally kicked you out? Yeah, he did. That's fine. It really have the money for books and classes and all that stuff anyhow. So when I got my own place, it's right around the corner. It's stamped smaller. I've got a cat now. Cool tool. I've been getting really into the stock market which is awesome. Like Wall Street. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, like Wall Street. Hey, man, I've been thinking all what you're saying about Colorado. You quit messing around, man. Hey, another way I like to use dolly shots is as a point of view or a POV shot. I mentioned that earlier in the handheld section, dollies can do the same thing, but as I've been trying to hammer home with a lot more control and precision. This is from the sci-fi series continuum. And we use this technique quite a bit in this show. And I think it was really effective. Let's call it. And this is a similar sequence in the short film homes 24 years ago. Scientists say this is the final time our eyes will see this particular astronomical event. So definitely get your telescope out this weekend and enjoy the view. And one more shot here from killing down using a doorway Dali on this one. Hey sweetie. Come from, I didn't even see you. So dollies are a great way to add camera movement and production value regardless of the kind of project you're shooting, I focused on movies, but you could use this in commercials, YouTube videos, corporate videos, product shots, you name it. 28. Camera Movement - Jib & Crane Shots: Okay, So this is a jib and jobs don't get used nearly as much as they used to. Largely in part because of the advent of gambles. Gimbels have replaced the subtle movement that you can get with a jib. And for the most part, they are easier to use. However, using a jib or a crane, even a little four-foot job like this can really add scale and size to a shot or scene. This is the opening shot to the sci-fi series continuum I directed. This is a great way to reveal not only the feel for the show, but the main character and the location. Glad you are awake. Now this is kind of a traditional old-school Hollywood crane shot to reveal a location and a character. This was shot with a large 25 foot-long crane arm. This is part of the same sequence and the movie killing down. Today, you could use a small drone to get this kind of shot. This is the same big crane, but we also use it to dolly in my submit Steven. I couldn't believe it at first myself. You can get some sleep. And this is another kind of classic Hollywood looking shot. Hold on. Stephen adds a lot of production value. Stephen, hang on. Hold. Yeah. Diane, I thought we were gonna shoot you, buddy. This is another big crane move. This is the ending of spilt milk. Later guys with a job. You can also do really small subtle moves that on-screen can look big. We move the camera quite a bit in this show to this continuum, we use a lot of Dolly and we also used a lot of these subtle Gibb moves. This is from pink, a lot, a little Gibb moves in the show too, but chance to Wilson half the different angles and subtle movement can really add production value. So I knew I would never have to go back to doing what I do. Now Changes Everything. I never even knew I had a biological clock that I've made my decision and nothing's going to change it. These next two shots also from pink. Subtle movement, but very effective movement. And then this is the big climactic ending of my short film home. So if you've never used a job, you should really consider adding one to your next production. This one was only about $100 and I've got it connected to my main tripod. So it's really an affordable option that can add a lot of production value on your next project. 29. PRO TIPS - Camera Movement: One way people really move the camera today is using drones. I didn't talk about drones in the main section because putting a smartphone on a drone is not something you really do much of today. A few years ago you did, but these days, a lot of the drones, the affordable drones like from DJI, have built-in cameras and they're really pretty good. So the main way your smartphone would interact with a drone is really controlling the drone. A lot of the controllers, you mount your smart phone or your iPad and to control it. But adding a drone to your filmmaking kid is a good idea. You wouldn't typically shoot video with your phone on the drone. This is more of a hack than anything else, but you can put your phone on the end of a mono pod and create your own DIY Gibb. I talked about Jim's, but this is another way to do it. And the nice thing about this is you can move it to wherever you want and you don't need to add counterweight. You can definitely get interesting shots doing this. You just have to of course, be careful not to damage your phone. This isn't necessarily camera movement, but it would be considered movement of the image and that is zooming. And I really discouraged zooming on smartphones. You can end up doing a digital zoom, which really degrades the footage. The only reason I would really zoom is to switch between different cameras. In that situation, that's okay, especially if you want to quickly go between the cameras. But to make sure you're doing an optical zoom, you want to make sure you switch the camera within the app versus the zoom lever versus zooming. The old saying is Zoom with your feet, not with the camera, not what the lens meaning. Move closer to the image or move further away. The only exception might be if you wanna do a stylized Zoom, a snap Zoom. Otherwise, I don't like zooming. We call it a node zooms zone. 30. Tech - What Is Exposure?: You've learned how to compose frame and light is shot. You've learned how and why to move the camera. Now it's time to take all that craft and combine it with the camera tech side of things. You don't need to be a technical expert to shoot great looking video. But there are some things like aperture, ISO, and shutter speed that you need to be familiar with. This section, we'll also look at how some technical aspects are different when shooting with smartphones as compared to shooting with traditional cameras. So what is exposure? Exposure is the amount of light allowed to hit the image sensor of your camera while capturing video or stills. And getting the proper exposure is extremely important to produce quality work. If something is overexposed, that will be too bright. If something is underexposed, it will be too dark. Most people probably don't even think about exposure because most cameras and especially smartphones shoot everything with auto settings, and that includes auto exposure. However, to get the best and most professional results, you really need to use manual control and set this yourself. There are three things that affect exposure, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. The aperture is the opening in the lens that allows light to enter. Most traditional lenses have variable apertures, and so making the aperture smaller or larger will affect the amount of light that hits the sensor. However, on smartphones, the aperture is fixed, so it cannot be adjusted. And this makes setting exposure with a smartphone somewhat different than traditional cameras. The size of the aperture is typically numbered in f-stops. A lower number indicates a wider aperture opening which allows more light to hit the sensor. This is often called a fast lens. Most smartphones, the standard wide lens is the fastest and thus also the best and low light. E.g. the iPhone 11 pros wide lens is an F18 and the ultra-wide land doesn't f2 0.4. So that means the wider lens lets in almost twice as much light as the ultra-wide. So just remember, the wider the opening, the center we'll see more light. And the smaller the opening, it sees less light. But on a smartphone, it's fixed at one opening. The shutter speed is the amount of time your camera sensor is exposed to light. And smartphones use an electronic shutter. Unlike the aperture on smartphones, though, shutter speed is variable and affects the amount of light captured by the sensor. The faster the shutter speed, the darker the footage, because the sensor has less time to expose an image. E.g. if shooting 24 frames per second at 01:48 shutter in properly exposed to light, the footage would look and feel natural to your eye. But shoot the same shot at 24 frames per second and in the same light. But with a faster shutter, the image would be much darker. Along with having different motion. So shutter speed not only affects the exposure, it also affects the motion, the motion blur. Motion blur is a big deal. In order to create the best looking and most cinematic footage, especially using a smartphone, you have to get good motion blur. Lack of proper motion blur is probably the single biggest giveaway that you're shooting smartphone video. And especially when shooting outdoors in bright sunlight. I'll talk more about this in an upcoming section. But you'll use neutral density filters, also called ND filters, to achieve the proper motion blur. But relying heavily on the shutter to set exposure instead of a variable aperture on the lens is one of the biggest differences between traditional cameras and smartphone cameras. Again, since the aperture is fixed on a smartphone, you have to use the shutter along with ISO to set the exposure. And ISO is what I'll talk about next. First, let me mention that some people say ISO, and some people say iso, which I've actually really only heard on YouTube. I say ISO and I've been saying it that way forever. And really everyone I've ever worked with over the years have said ISO. So it may be a regional thing. I'm not sure ISO. Iso, however you want to say it doesn't really matter. What matters is what ISO is, and how it affects an image. Iso is also known as gain, and it's the reigns of sensitivity of the actual camera's sensor. As you increase the ISO, you increase the exposure. And depending on the sensor, your image quality results will vary. On smartphones in particular, because they have a small sensor. The more ISO you add, the more video noise you'll see, especially in low light. And that's not a good thing. High ISO can also decrease the detail of an image. Again, not good. For best results, I always try to shoot with the lowest ISO possible. And this will depend on what device and video camera app you're using. The newer phones definitely do better in lower light shooting situations. Keep in mind that when you shoot a scene, whether that's outside and natural light or in a studio with artificial lighting. It really isn't. What you see is what you get your lighting for, what the camera's sensor sees, not necessarily what you see. So by knowing the aperture of the lens and the best shutter speed and ISO to use, you can make the exposure and the image look great. And if all else fails or you get an a jam. Remember you can always turn the auto settings on and check and see what the camera thinks is best. But then definitely either lock those settings or go back to manual once you actually start shooting. Properly, exposing your footage is obviously very important. And something you'll do on every kind of project you shoot. 31. Tech - Aspect Ratio & Resolution: Alright, so now it's time to talk about technical things. And in smartphone filmmaking and really all filmmaking, technology plays a big role. The difference in smartphone filmmaking versus traditional cameras though, is they are centered around him apps, because it really doesn't matter which kind of phone you use. All phones will shoot pretty good video these days, especially when you shoot for K. I use an iPhone, but there are lots of good phones on the Android side of things, in particular Samsung and Google Pixel. But I don't want to get bogged down in that right now. I want to talk about things that relate to both traditional and smartphone filmmaking. The first thing is aspect ratio and resolution. Now I'm using the filmic pro app here. Filmic Pro is the app that I use the most. But again, just like with phones, you can use whatever app you want. I would use a third party app though. And later in this course, I'll go over several of my favorite apps. So don't worry if you don't understand how this works right now. If you've never used filmic pro, this will look unfamiliar. But I'm going to use this app to discuss the various technical aspects. So first thing I'll talk about is aspect ratio. The aspect ratio of the screen in a video camera app or in a traditional camera, is typically 16 by 916 by nine is also the aspect ratio of your TV at your house unless you still have an old SD TV. But I doubt today you have that. The majority of things we shoot is centered around this aspect ratio. Now, there'll be widescreen aspect ratio is we can go into, but that is for using anamorphic widescreen cinema. And I'll get into those in just a little bit. 16 by nine is your standard one-to-one. That would be like more for Instagram to 3921 is what I just mentioned. It's a widescreen aspect ratio, 27621. These are all in filmic pro, but again, these are traditional aspect ratios used in any kind of camera. Not the social media ones, but the various cinema wins. Then you can also do three-two, which is a close relative to 43, which is like the old I mentioned, SD, there's 43. The old SD TB's of past, although in recent years, this aspect ratio has come back into style. A lot of indie films shoot this way now too, and music videos as well. To give it a vintage vibe. A movie called ghost story did it a few years ago. And then the Jonah Hill movie called mid-1920s. It also shot in this aspect ratio. But for most things that we do and most things that we'll talk about in this course, 16 by nine is the most commonly used aspect ratio today. Now, in addition to 16 by nine horizontal, if you're using your phone to create social media pieces, social media videos, then you'll obviously want to shoot in a vertical mode. And the nice thing is most apps like filmic pro will flip. So now it is nine by 169 by 16 is great for Instagram Stories, Facebook stories, that kind of thing. Sometimes you might go this route in more professional world by doing effects shots. You flip the camera on its side to do a green screen shot because you'll get more resolution and the vertical axis. But the majority of the time, you want to shoot horizontal. There are a lot of people out there that actually hate vertical video. I'm not one of those people. I can see the merits of it for social media. I don't like it when you see something on the news and footages provided by someone that witnessed the crime or witnessed whatever and they shot vertical. I guess that's the world we live in. I would like to teach all those people to flip their phone on the side and shoot and landscape or shoot horizontal. Vertical has its place. And especially with the advent of social media, there's a lot of potential there. If people will use it right? Like anything, use it. The best way to tell your story. I wouldn't shoot vertical video is a gimmick. I would shoot it as an advantage to your story. But a lot of what I do and a lot of what this course is about is really more about traditional filmmaking, narrative filmmaking, or corporate filmmaking, corporate video, YouTube video. And for that kind of stuff, you pretty much want to stick to shooting horizontal. The next thing is resolution. Today for k is pretty much the ubiquitous resolution. Although at home a lot of people still haven't adopted for k. However, everything that I shoot is for k. Now today, a lot of what we edit is still HD. But for K pretty much dominates everything that I shoot. Unless we're shooting in higher frame rates. And I'll get into that in a minute. But on a phone, most phones today, we'll shoot for k. Or in filmic pro. You can also shoot three K to K, HD, 720, PhD, and even sd. There's really no reason to shoot in these formats today though. The two main resolutions you'll use are ten ADHD or four K UHD. For K, The resolution is 38 40 across and 21 60 down. So 38, 40 by 21, 60. In HD, it's 1920 by 1080. Resolution and pixel count aren't nearly as important as people make it out to be. Don't get me wrong. It's good to shoot in a higher resolution. But it's not necessarily the most important thing. And especially the way you approach cinematography, it's more about your composition. You're framing, your final color grading and of course your story. But of course it is good to know what the capabilities of your device are. So depending on which phone you have, you'll need to determine based on your project, which resolution and aspect ratio is best. 32. Tech - Codecs & Bit Rate: Related to resolution is the bit rate and the codec you choose to shoot with. Right now, most smartphones shoot for sure. And H dot two, one-six-four, which is called MPEG-4. And now there's a newer codec called HEVC, which has high efficiency codec. That is h.265. Don't really want to get too much into technical weeds. But more or less what H.265 does is it compresses the video down to smaller files and higher-quality. At least in theory. In my experience thus far, it doesn't quite work as advertised. I leave my smartphone setup to H.264 and not as much necessarily for the production side, the shooting side. A lot of editing apps and computers have a hard time playing back H.265. So again, depending on your app and your device, you can go in and set that up. The iPhone, you can set it up in the main settings area. And then within filmic pro, you can also go in and other apps you can set it to record in high efficiency or in H.264. My recommendation right now is H.264 happening here with a quick update. The information you just heard about using H.264 that is still valid, especially for using an older phone or an older computer, because that is still the most compatible way to go, Apple has really embraced HEVC and it's thought to C65. And especially on the newer phones, this is an iPhone 14. But really starting with the iPhone 12s and further, HEVC is really what they recommend. And I've actually started using it the last couple of years, especially with the 13 and newer. And so were the later generation iPhone. If you want to shoot HEVC, go ahead, but just be aware that you may or may not be able to play it back probably in your computer. If we're using a new iPad, you'll have no problem. The other thing to note is if you want to shoot in ten bit color, you have to shoot in a TVC that, or ProRes, and I'll talk about pro rounds in just a moment. The other thing that I mentioned, bit rate, and this is specific to filmic pro, but other apps have similar functions. And later I'll discuss that in the app section. Higher bit rates, meaning the more information that is put into a file, the better the quality. So I always recommend to shoot in the highest bit rate you can. The only reason you wouldn't is if you have a smaller capacity device. This is a 256 gigabyte phone. So I really never run out of space. And whenever you do a larger shoot, you delete the midi off your phone anyway. But in filmic pro, you have filmic extreme, yeah, filmic quality. You have Apple standard. Apple standard is a lower bit rate. I don't recommend using that. Filmic quality is a little bit better bit rate. And then filmic extreme is the best bit rate. In this case, filmic extreme would be 100 mbps or higher up to 130 mbps. So if you're using a different app like Mavis or the Moment Pro Camera app, choose the highest bit rate. Both those apps shoot 100 mbps. Always choose the highest bit rate for the highest-quality. It will also really help reduce noise and noise as a big enemy of video in general, but especially smartphone video. So right now I would probably shoot H.264 unless you have a really fast, powerful computer to be editing this stuff with, like the new iPad Pros will handle it pretty well actually. Then I would always shoot with the highest bit, right? You can. And that depends on the app. I mentioned ProRes and starting with the iPhone 13, Apple introduced Perez video to their phone line. Now Perez video is a professional Kodak and you don't really need to use it unless you are shooting something more high-end in quotes, meaning really for me, anything and you're gonna be doing heavy color grading on or visual effects. And you can do it in the native app. Right here. You would de-select that and now it's shooting in progress. So progress video is really just gigantic files. They are higher-quality, but you have to determine whether that's worth it or not for your project, this is a 1 tb phone. And when I went into pro rata, this is actually called ProRes HQ. It's saying only have 74 min of record time. Now I have other stuff on this bone, so you'd get more if it was a brand new phone, but that gives you an idea, 1 tb with some footage already on there. I'm only getting it just over an hour of footage. And so I don't use ProRes a whole lot except on my short films, et cetera. But you can also shoot ProRes and filmic pro, or cinema P3 or BCE cam, whatever app you prefer. And so this is filmic pro version seven. Up here you would choose the codec. And right now I'm using HEVC. But if you wanted to do ProRes, you would go to this menu and choose ProRes 709 Perez 2020 is as h L, G or HDR. So I hope this isn't too confusing. It's a lot to take in. But just know that you can shoot in Pro Res in third-party app just like you can in the native app. And then of course, within third-party apps, you have all the manual control. So you can control the shutter or the ISO, et cetera, which you can't do in the native camera app. Native camera app works fine for some applications, but for higher-end, more professional work, I definitely recommend using third-party apps. Now with ProRes, pretty amazing that we can do with a smartphone. 33. Tech - Frame Rate: Now let's talk about frame rate. And frame rate will really depend on the device you're using. For most of our work and most of the things you see on TV and film, we shoot 24 frames per second. That is the standard frame rate for movies, TV, anything, narrative, commercials, music videos. And that's the same whether you're here in the US or anywhere else in the world. Iphones have the most flexibility with frame rate for sure. Now, that could change in the future. But right now with an iPhone, if you're shooting for k, and it doesn't really matter what app you're using. You can shoot up to 60 frames per second. So for k 60, now when we shoot 60 frames per second, or anything higher than 24 p.sit, we're doing it for slow motion. So when you shoot for k 60, you're getting a slow motion look, a 40% slow motion look. Now some people will shoot 60 frames per second, like for sports or something, or broadcast TV and just leave it playing back at 60 frames per second. That's fine. But our approach is more of a cinematic approach. And so anything over 24, typically speaking, is high frame rate and that will be slow motion. Within filmic pro, you can shoot 48 frames per second, which would be 50% slow-mo. One note here, I'm talking about cinema rates of 24 p, and I'm relating that to NTSC. Ntsc is the standard for North America. That's mainly the US and Canada. Pal, PAL is the standard in Europe and really the rest of the world. So shooting 25 or 50 P is what people overseas tend to do. Although if they're shooting a movie or something narrative, they still shoot 24 p. But if you want to shoot a higher frame rate to get more slow motion, you have to drop down resolution. So at ten ADHD on an iPhone, you can actually shoot up to 240 frames per second. And that is really slow. That is a 10% slow motion look, when played back at 24, 24 frames per second. You can also shoot 120. One-twenty is probably the most popular, what would be called cinematic B-roll frame rate. If you watch anything on YouTube like Peter McKinnon or any of those guys, Maddie had polyA. Whenever they shoot their cinematic B-roll sequences. More times than not, they're shooting 120 frames per second on my YouTube channel. I've also done a lot of videos about smartphone B-roll and different frame rates. 120 or 60 year, the ones that I use the most as well. But it's pretty remarkable that a smartphone will allow you to shoot 120 frames or 240 frames per second. A lot of traditional cameras won't even do that. You've gotta get up into the higher end cinema cameras to see those kind of frame rates. Now granted, those cameras are obviously more expensive and have a better image quality. So there are major differences in that respect. But getting these kind of frame rates on a camera you carry in your pocket is really, really remarkable. Again. So while I'm using filmic pro to demo this, even in the native iPhone camera app, you can get the same frame rates. 34. Tech - ISO and Shutter: Okay, I've changed the setup here a little bit. I'm going to talk now about ISO and how it relates to shutter, an aperture. On a smartphone, you control the exposure through ISO and shutter. Smartphones have a fixed aperture. I've mentioned that a couple of times. On the wide lens of this phone, it's a 1.8. So it's a wide-open aperture. Now that makes it different than traditional cameras. With traditional cameras, you can set the exposure with the aperture primarily. You can also use shutter and ISO, but you don't have to depend on the shutter, especially the shutter on a smartphone like you do on a traditional camera. And the shutter presents a lot of problems with a smartphone. And mainly because of the way the footage can look fast shutter speeds make your footage look like a zombie movie. That's one of the number one ways that you can tell if someone is shooting smartphone footage and you control that by using ND filters. And we'll get into that a little bit. But again, I'm in filmic pro here, but this would work the same in any app. The manual apps. You're controlling the exposure by moving this slider right here. And on the left, you have your ISO and your shutter. Right now it's at 01:24 shutter, It's very overexposed. And the ISO is at one-twelfth. Now it's very underexposed. Let me actually turn on some live analytics feature within filmic pro. These are zebras. Anything that's blue is underexposed, and then anything that's red is overexposed. You can auto expose as well. And I'll get into that when I talked about the app. But the main thing to understand is that your exposure is controlled in a different way really than a traditional camera that you might be familiar with. Now, in different apps like filmic pro, you can lock the shutter and then you can only move the ISO. And that's a good way to do it because I mentioned motion blur earlier. No matter what kind of camera you're shooting with, there is this rule called the 180 degrees shutter rule. And it's all about motion blur. In that rule, whatever your frame rate is, you want to double your frame rate to equal the shutter, which then is ideal motion blur. Motion blur is an important thing that gives an image a more realistic look. It really is almost like your eyes see it. If you move your hand in front of a camera, you'll see blur. If your shutter is really fast, you wouldn't see blur. You would see almost the stuttering. I'll refer to it occasionally in this course and other times that I talked to my YouTube channel, etc. But the famous Omaha beach scene and Saving Private Ryan, that was shot at a 45-degree shutter. And so a very fast shutter. So you had all the staccato study reactions, study images. On smartphones. This uses a fraction. There are absolute show it in degrees. So whatever the frame rate is right now I'm shooting 24 p. You would double that to get ideal motion blur. And in this case That'd be one-fourth, one-eighth. And this is the most common shutter speed you're going to want to try to hit. Now if you're shooting in a pile country, as I mentioned earlier, you would want to be shooting at one-fiftieth. Let me change the frame rate real quick here. If we put it up to 30 frames per second. Now you'll see the shutter change the one-sixtieth. The app is automatically trying to keep to the 180 degrees shutter rule. I'm now at 48 frames per second. And the app is at 196, doubling the frame rate. Even if I jump up to 60, the app jumped down to 120. So it's trying to keep the 180 degrees shutter rule. Now I'm shooting inside and a studio right now. And so the light levels are good for that. The problem you run into is when you're outside. When you're outside, the light is too bright. And that's where the app will compensate for the exposure by raising the shutter speed so that your images aren't overexposed. That's where you have to use ND filters. A very simple way to think about ND filters and what they do is they are like sunglasses for your camera. So they reduce the amount of light hitting the sensor. And that way you can lower your shutter down to a normal speed and get good motion blur. And in traditional cameras, they also help with depth of field. In that case, you would put in Dionne to open up the aperture to get a wider aperture. Because wider apertures allow you to get shallower depth of field, meaning blurry backgrounds. But with smartphones that doesn't have any effect because the aperture is fixed, it's already wide-open. One other little thing I wanted to talk about on exposure, and this is AP dependent. But with filmic pro and with other apps, you have RGB histogram, and you also have a waveform. This information is a little bit hard to read. So I tend to in filmic pro use the histogram. But let me show you how that changes. So when you go down to the left, you'll know your underexposed. And then when you go to the right, you see that line right to the right. You know, you're overexposed. When the little mountain, the histogram is in the middle. That is where you really want to be using a waveform is another way. This wave form is so small and filmic pro, it's really hard to use, to be honest. There's other apps that have a little bit different setups that might be better, but it is nice to be able to see where your images and to see if your clipping or not. This is probably getting a little bit too into the weeds here and do what I like to call the technical weeds. Because lots of times you can just let the app auto exposed and then lock it. You just want to make sure that your shutter is the proper shutter speed. And then one other thing I wanted to mention regarding ISO and using filmic pro in particular, you don't want your ISO to go over 100. If at all possible. You start going over 100, you're gonna get a lot of video noise. Now this will be apt dependent and device dependent. Some Android phones read ISO differently than iPhones, and then some apps read it a little differently as well. But generally speaking, you want to keep your ISO under 100 or under 150 tops. So whenever you're shooting in low light, that can be challenging. But it's just something you really do want to pay attention to. Because again, the technical stuff, you don't want it to slow you down when you're shooting, you really don't. But you don't want your footage to look bad and draw your audience out of your project. I know that's kind of oversimplifying things. But it really is true. In light like this, you're not gonna have a problem. I'm at 39 ISO and 148 Shutter. That's actually a really good, but it's outside and bright light where your shutter is going to be too fast. Or it's in low light where you're not gonna have enough and you're going to have to raise the ISO. That's where you'll end up having trouble. So again, it's just something to be aware of. These are just guidelines or where to keep these different settings. 35. Tech - Focus: The other thing that's a little bit different than using a smartphone is they focus. If you're using the native app, you'll just use autofocus all the way through. But if we're using a third party app like filmic pro here, you can manually focus or use auto-focus. So you can move the slider like this. And again, didn't matter which kind of app you're using different apps. They all have similar functions in this regard. And most of them have peaking too. You'll see the little green lines go around something that's in focus. But you can roll the focus and rack the focus to whatever you want to. And that is something that is pretty cool to be honest, that you can do with a smartphone. And a lot of people don't realize you can do that. This is one way you can knock stuff out of focus. It's gonna be a little hard to tell on this set. But when you get something tack sharp, the background will be soft, which is good. That would be shallow, depth of field. The other thing about focus too on a smartphone and this is a little bit hard to believe, but it happens quite a bit. And that is you can buzz your focus or get soft focus, meaning you've missed your focus. Here's what I tend to do. Let the app autofocus and then I lock it. That's if I'm doing a static shot because the autofocus is really pretty darn good, especially in filmic pro. But other apps to Mavis and the Moment Pro Camera app. Or if I'm moving the camera around, I'll let the camera autofocus while I'm moving. Filmic pro in particular is good at that because it has a full auto mode where the radical, the radical is what samples The Scream. A little bit hard to tell right here, but it just got larger. And so it will sample the center of the screen. So wherever you point the phone that will be in focus when you're in the regular radical mode, the radical is smaller. It samples a much smaller part of the screen. And thus you can get out of focus without even realizing it. If you're shooting a Lakoff subject though like this, there's focus speaking. I tend to just lock the focus though, don't let it move. Because inevitably you will end up getting some focus pulsing or some focus changes that you don't want. But it really is nice to be able to, to do rack focus like this where you can take an object. Let's say you were wanting to rack from something to something in the background. You can do that with third-party apps using a smartphone. But it's really important to pay attention to your focus. Believe it or not, a best practice again, I'm going to repeat myself. Let the app set it, and then lock it. 36. Tech - White Balance: Okay, one other thing that you need to do on any kind of camera, but it's a little bit unique on a smartphone, and that is setting the white balance. This is one important reason to use a third party manual app. If you use the native camera app, everything is auto. So there's no way to set the white balance. You can lock the white balance, but you can't set it. But using a third party app like filmic pro, you have professional features like you might find in a traditional camera. Yeah, Presets. This is a tungsten preset. I'm shooting with daylight balanced lights right now, so everything is going to look blue. There's the daylight preset, then there's cloudy and there's fluorescent. Or you can put it on auto. Here's the main thing when you're shooting with a smartphone app, regardless of the app, set up the white balance, but then lock it in filmic pro, you press Read and it locks. Or they have another mode where you have this orange icon That's auto lock on record, which is a great feature. And I'll talk about this when go over the app here a little bit later in the course. Because what ends up happening is if you don't lock the white balance, these cameras are very sensitive. These apps are very sensitive. And so every time you pan the camera, you'll change the white balance. So just to recap there, you can let the app auto white balance and you can lock it. Or you can use a preset. Or one other way is use a white card or a gray card. Now, in a perfect world, you'd want to fill the whole frame. You want to get it towards the light. With filmic pro, you can manually adjust things. But you can do this. And then you can long press on a, apply a preset. Now, that's the preset. That's what the camera thinks is white. You could use a white piece of paper, didn't have to be a professional color checker like this. But a color checker is a really good item to have in your kit. I will say that. But since I manually set the white balance now, that is locked and it won't change. And I've got it set to a so if I switch it back to this daylight look, I can come back and I can go back to a because I haven't saved. Or you can go to auto. In the end, you just have to decide which looks best for your eye to you. You can tweak this a little bit in post-production of course. But you want to get it the best you can in camera. But regardless of the way you said it, you want to set it and lock it. 37. PRO TIPS - Tech: I wanted to mention shallow depth of field. That's not something you usually associate with a smartphone, but it is possible. You just have to get close to your subject. I recommend using a telephoto lens and then also using the iPhone wide lens, because it has a wider aperture and wider apertures will help with depth of field. So e.g. putting a tele lands on the wide lens. However, if you put the tele lens on your camera tele lens, even though it's a smaller aperture, because you're getting more or less a four times telephoto look, you can definitely get shallow depth of field. But keep in mind that shallow depth of field is not the end-all be-all. It's great to get separation from the background, but that's super shallow depth of field look is really not necessary or required for something to be cinematic. I just want to make sure that's understood. If you're shooting something that's going to be heavily color corrected or color graded later in post-production. It's a really good idea to shoot a color chart. This will help you in post-production to get the best color correction. Now this might be a little more advanced, and this is not a requirement by any means. But it's a good idea and it's a good practice. Especially again, if you're going to be doing heavier color correction or color grading and post-production. And tying into the color chart. You especially want to use that if you're shooting log or flat footage log in particular, this would be more we're using filmic pro or the Moment Pro Camera app. Log is something you don't really need to worry about if you're just shooting everyday kind of videos. Or if you're doing quick turnaround videos for YouTube or maybe social media. But if you're doing commercials or real estate work, or music video or a movie for sure, you should consider shooting log or flat. Not only does it give your footage and more cinematic look right out of the camera. When you get in post-production, you have more options for color grading. And that's especially true with filmic pro log. Filmic pro log, you get more dynamic range. Now I don't want to get too technical here. But basically you can see a little bit more into the shadows and the highlights of the image. With the Moment app, I haven't found that to be quite as true. It's more of a look. You're not getting more dynamic range, but it does look pretty good. So the choice is yours. But these are really pretty cool and advanced features to have at your disposal, especially shooting on a smartphone. 38. Camera Apps - Airplane Mode: Using camera apps as an important part of shooting video with a smartphone. There are a lot of apps in the market and some are definitely better than others, but just choose one that works best for you and your project. In this section, blank gives a general overview of three of his favorites. And please note that some of what he covers might be more advanced and technical, but this will give you a good idea of what these apps can do. So before we do anything in an app, the very important thing you need do to your phone is put it in airplane mode. Depending on the device. This has done different ways, but it's still the same idea, no matter what kind of phone you're using. Go into settings. We do airplane mode. I also want to make sure that my Wi-Fi is off and even want to turn on, do not disturb. The other thing you might want to look at it, your notifications. You can turn your different notifications off. If you're shooting something really important, like a scene in a movie or an interview, I would turn all this off. At bare minimum, put it in airplane mode, and turn do not disturb on. That way, you'll be set up and ready to shoot. I'm going to go over several apps here. And I would suggest having one of these apps, whichever one you want to use, available to yourself. Don't necessarily need to have it open, but it's a good idea to have one so you can try out the various techniques we discuss. And that will definitely help you learn along the way. 39. Camera Apps - Native iPhone: So if you're just getting started in smartphone video, you might just use the native camera app on the iPhone or whatever phone it is you use. And so this is the iPhone native camera app. This app is fine for a lot of different things you can do. I use it for more everyday, kinda like family videos. Or if I'm just quickly needing to get a shot of something. But if I want something more professional with more control and more quality, I use third party apps, which we'll talk about in just a minute. But if you're just getting started and don't want to spend any money on apps. Or if you're just learning the built-in native camera app on the iPhone again, or whatever phone you have. Some of the Android phones actually have pretty decent built-in camera apps. More manual control is the main thing. So just use whatever works best for you. And I'll give you some pros and cons of each as we go through them. The number one point I wanna make clear though, and I just touched on it briefly is the manual control aspect. Shooting manual is imperative if you want to shoot professional quality video. I don't care if you're shooting on a mirrorless cameras, smartphone, a DSLR, it doesn't matter. Manual control, you have to learn how to do that to create professional-looking footage. And so even using the built-in app, you want to use manual control. You'll see here, putting my hand in front of the camera, you get all kinds of pulsing. The cameras trying to focus on my hand, the exposure shifts, the white balance actually changes. That's not good, none of that's good. The idea that it changes so quickly, like for focus and such, if you're just doing something like shooting a kid's birthday party, that's okay. However, some of the techniques you'll learn in this course, you'll want to use those even shooting your kid's birthday parties, I assure you, but I digress. Even using your native camera app, you want to use manual control. Now again, on the iPhone, you don't have a lot of manual control, but you can touch the screen, hold it down, and lock it. You'll see the AE AF lock across the top. That means your exposure and your focus and your white balance are all locked. So then when I put my hand out there, you don't get any shifts. Focus today is on the subject that I haven't locked to. The exposure doesn't shift in the white balance doesn't shift. Now, you can also take, if you lock it like that, you can also take and move this slider up and down and adjust it to whatever you think looks best. However, I would caution you that for most things, the phone does a pretty good job. It averages out the exposure. And again, it looks pretty good more times than not. However, if you're trying to, let's say the back wall was really bright. It would expose for the back wall and then your subject in the front would be dark. So in that case, you would want to bring it up and make your subjects bright. One thing to keep in mind, this is good advice again, on regardless of what kind of camera you're using, is exposed for the highlights, meaning exposed for the brightest part of the image. You can always bring footage up in post-production, meaning making it brighter. If your highlights get clipped, meaning there are overexposed, they're just all white. There's no information there. You can't bring those back. You can bring up shadows. They may get noisy, but at least the information is there. So always exposed for your highlights. So like in this example, I would pick the brightest spot on the screen and that's what I would expose for. So you could click on it and then you can actually adjust it as needed. But then when you click and hold, that is how you set it and lock it. Another reason you want to use third-party apps, though, beyond the excellent manual control features they offer, is higher bit rate. The native iPhone will vary the bit rate. A normal shot is anywhere 20-30, maybe up to 60 mbps. It really depends on what you're shooting. But third-party apps you'll get up to 100 mb. In some cases, like with filmic pro, you can get 130 mbps. And there's other apps out there that will even give you more than that, up to 200 mbps. Again, it depends on your device, Android or iPhone. So you really just want to pick whatever app works best for you. But if you're just starting out and you're learning smartphone video, smartphone cinematography, using the native camera app, it's probably a good way to learn. Iphone 13.13 Pro and Pro Max have actually updated the native camera app. And it does have more functionality. Just want to highlight two things. The first one is, you can now shoot a high-quality video codec called ProRes. Prores is a codec. And so you are now being able to shoot in a professional Kodak within the native camera app, but also within filmic pro and filmic pro, you have a lot more control, a lot more manual control. And that's one of the key things that I talked about in this course. As you want to shoot manually whenever you can. It is nice that you had that ability in the native app now. And this is really geared towards professional film-making because the file sizes are incredibly large. This is a 1 tb. And with that, I get 2 h of footage shooting in this Perez. When I don't have progress selected, I would get up to countless hours. And so only use this in certain situations like visual effects or if you want to do heavy color grading, or you're using your phone to do an insert shot, a B-roll shot into another higher-end type project. So that's one really nice addition that they did. You still don't have manual control features in the phone. Although you can now come in and do some exposure adjustments, which that can be helpful. But it's still not the same as using a third-party app. Now the other new feature that's worth mentioning in the native camera app on the iPhone 13.13 Pro and Pro Max. The ProRes feature I just mentioned, it only works in the Pro and Pro Max version, but the iPhone 13, we have cinematic mode now. And cinematic mode is more or less portrait video. So just like you can do portrait photography where you get simulated shallow depth of field. We now get that in video. And this is a pretty cool feature. It's not really for professional use yet because it's using math more or less, the LIDAR sensor to create a depth map. And the depth maps aren't perfect. And so the footage you'll see, whenever there are objects or people or subjects that have complicated edges or frizzy hair, that kind of thing. The cut-out isn't very good yet. This will advance and be much better in the future, but it is pretty good right now and it's a neat feature to use. I use it for social media primarily. And you could use it as an insert shot for B-roll and that kind of thing, matching any with some other cameras. And that is a cool aspect to this. But really right now it is limited. Again, this course is not really about specific phones, but I know a lot of people that take this course have iPhones. And so I wanted to include this information and make you aware that these new features to iOS and the new devices are definitely worth checking out. But now we'll look at some apps will offer you a lot more features and will really help you create more professional looking footage. 40. Camera Apps - FiLMiC Pro V6 App (legacy): Lots of apps to choose from. And by far our favorite or my favorite is filmic pro. Filmic pro will give you the most control. And especially when you're talking about from a cinematic point of view. It has features that the other apps don't have. And that's mainly talking about the cinematographer kit, which I'll get to here in just a second. Filmic pro works a lot like a traditional camera. You've got arc sliders. You can control the shutter, the ISO, the focus, and the Zoom. On smartphones, they have a fixed aperture. So you control the exposure through shutter and ISO. You have live analytics and filmic pro, which can really help you fine tune the exposure and focus that you want. There's focus peaking. Whenever the objects are outlined in green. There in focus. You have a false color mode, which will tell you the overall details of the image. Green is good. Blue is usually a little bit underexposed and red is a little bit overexposed. Now, you can auto expose with filmic pro or autofocus. And I often do that in the beginning to just see what the camera thinks is best and then I refine it from there. Or sometimes I just lock it and leave it. But these are your radicals. Focus, you can lock it and exposure. You can switch over here to zoom and you can zoom in and out. I don't recommend using Zoom that much because you can do a digital zoom and advertently and lose quality, optimal Zooms are much better. And the way you know you're doing an optical zoom is just a switch the lens within the app instead of actually zooming. So you could jump into the telly. If you want to Zoom with the zoom level though you can. There's an indicator. As long as you stay within the green, you're okay. You also have full control over your white balance presets, which right now I'm on a daylight preset. But you can manually set your white balance or you can do auto white balance. You have a variety of different ways to set your white balance. But the main thing is whenever you're shooting, regardless of the app you're using, you want to lock your white balance. And the way you do that and filmic pro, as you click it and it turns red. And there is a newer version where you click it again, it turns orange. This mode will change the white balance before and after you're rolling, before and after you're recording. But when you're recording, it will lock the white balance. A lot of people, including myself, when you get out and shoot, you might forget to lock the white balance and you'll get color shifts and it just messes up your footage. And so by having this new feature, it will eliminate that. And I recommend using this for more everyday kind of shooting. If you're doing something a little more detailed, I would go ahead and manually set the white balance. And then there's the cinematographer kit. And I mentioned that at the beginning. And this is something that is really great for filmmakers. You have different color profiles, different gamma curves. I have it on the natural setting, which is more or less like the traditional phone look. However you get the higher bit rate. So when you're shooting within apps like this, you can get up to 130 mbps. As a comparison, the native iPhone app does about 20 to 30 mbps depending on the shot. Sometimes higher, sometimes lower. But you get consistent high bit rate using third-party apps. The higher the bit rate more times than not, the better quality the footage. But you have different settings in here. You can do dynamic, you can do flat, or you can do log. For filmmakers, the log aspect is really, really important. And so it's flat. So when you shoot log, your footage will look milky like this. That is what you want though, and then you color correct? In post-production in color grade. What it's doing is giving you more dynamic range. Filmic pro log V2. We'll give you about two and up to three stops more dynamic range than the native camera app, than the native look. And that's on iPhones and it's similar on different Android devices in particular, it works well on Samsung. But there's other devices like the poco phone and the Google Pixel and others that filmic pro does work well with log footage. But log footage you do have to color, correct? Same with flat flat footage is in the same world as log. You just don't get quite as much dynamic range. You do get a flatter image, which is more cinematic, and then it requires some color grading and post-production dynamic. It's a baked in look, it's a little more high contrast. I don't personally ever shoot dynamic because then you're sort of locked into that look, you can change it somewhat post-production, but it's usually when you're crushing the shadows. Higher contrast, you can't bring those back up. So if I want it to look like this, I would probably do it in post-production instead of in camera. If you want to shoot in camera and not have to really worry about color grading, I go with natural more times than not. So you've got these different profiles that are part of the cinematographer kit that can really enhance the look of your footage and help you as a cinematographer and especially in more narrative kind of work. Movies or commercials, music videos, that kind of thing. For everyday video, I probably wouldn't use these. And just a note, the cinematographer kit is an in-app purchase. So beyond the cinematographer kit though, you have all kinds of other controls in the menus. And I'm not gonna go into detail here. But some of the highlights would be the frame rate. You can go in and choose 24 p up to 60 frames per second. In for K on an iPhone, if you dropped down to HD, ten ADP, you can get it to 240 frames per second. That's extremely slow. That's a 10% slow-mo look, if you're conforming to 2,420 frames per second, is a really nice slow motion look that a lot of YouTubers use. A lot of people use for slow motion type B-roll. But the main frame rate that I suggest using for cinematic footage is 24 p. And pretty much everything I shoe is in for k, for k, UHD. You have different bit rates, filmic quality, apple standard, and economy. You don't want to mess with the economy. So Apple standard is the same bit rate as the native camera. Don't really recommend using that. Filmic quality is okay. But if your phone has the capacity, I would go ahead and shoot with the highest bit rate because you'll end up getting the best results. And then filmic pro, that's filmic extreme. Another highlight is the hardware. With filmic pro, you can integrate different Gimbels with the app. This is a really great thing that filmic pro does. It allows you to control the gimbal within the filmic pro app. The other thing that's great is adding an anamorphic lens and then you can D squeeze it. Shooting anamorphic on a phone is really incredible and is another great way to make your videos more cinematic. You can also use 35-millimeter adapters, and that's where you connect an adapter to your phone and then use photo lenses, be script makes one and so forth, certain looks and for certain jobs, that's another nice feature and it also integrates with filmic pro. For our money, filmic Pro is the best all-around app, whether you're shooting cinema type projects or even just doing home video. It covers all the basis. And it's really the app on my phone that gets the most use by far. 41. Camera Apps - FiLMiC Pro V7 (subscription): We've been talking about it for months and now it's finally here. Filmic pro version seven, these subscription model. Now I know a lot of you aren't real happy with filmic pro, but don't shoot the messenger. Okay? So filmic Pro has been working on this a long time. I actually thought version seven was going to be out back in 2020. Who knows the pandemic may have stalled it. And then they got acquired by bending spoons this year. And so nonetheless, it's here. And today I'm gonna look at the main things they've changed with the interface that would of course include the controls. They have new manual controls. They also have a new info slider, which is really important and probably is one of the best things I've added. And then they've added these quick access modules are menus called clams, QAM. These are interesting too, and it gives you multiple ways now to do different settings. By the way, just to be clear, I'm not paid by filmic pro, I'm not sponsored by filmic pro, but I did better test them. So at first glance, this UI looks pretty much the same. You've got your white balance controls, your different profiles. If you bought the film looks, you've got the same presets over here. If you have the cinematographer kit, and then you've got your different saturation vibrance and histogram controls here. You also have your library which looks the same. You've got this timecode medallion down here with different wave forms. Those are a little bit different, but that's really it. The rest of everything has been changed some more dramatically and some more subtle. The camera picker looks a little bit different. Works the same, just a little bit of a different layout. I do like how there's more information there now, interestingly though, they don't have the two times lens yet, this is a 14 Pro Max and by the way, I'm using a small rib-cage. Then they have a menu up here. The menu looks very similar to filmic pro version six. And then when you step inside each for more detail, they are the exact same as what you're used to if you add filmic pro version six, basically they had started implementing some of V7 V6. The biggest thing to me is at the top here they now have a drop-down menu that shows everything that's going on, which is great. This has been sorely missed and filmic pro. So you can instantly look here and you see your ISO right now it's set to 195. You've got your shutter, which is 148. You got your white balance, the format you're shooting, I'm shooting ProRes four to two, and then also the color profile. So I love having information, but they take it one step further. And this is the really cool part. Now you can click on those and change it down here with a quick menu, clams, QAM, quick access menu. Now you can come down here and pick a different ISO, or you can slide the slider to choose the ISO you want that I really like. Same with the shutter. Now if you click on the shutter at the top, you can come down here and instantly choose a more or less preset 180 degree shutter rule would be what you would choose most of the time. And so I'm shooting 24 frames per second, which would be 148 Shutter. But I wanted to go to a faster shutter. You could do that 196. It's equivalent to 90 degree or a 45-degree angle. And the angles are nice because whenever you set it on that, no matter what frame rate you do, that will then create the proper motion blur for you that comes from film cameras originally, the different shutter angle. So I really like that. Then the same goes for white balance. So you click on that and the white balance comes up. You've got your various presets. You can be on auto. Everything works the same as in V6. It's just a little bit of a different layout and I really do like how you can quickly pop up. One thing you might be seeing here is this is more or less the same as going into this menu here. So you can do white balance here, or you can click here and do it quickly on the screen. So you have two ways to do it. Same with choosing your format. So now you click that and you automatically go into the menu. So instead of having to hit Settings and go down two or three layers into a menu. You can do it from the home screen. And of course lastly, same thing with the actual color profile. I want to shoot log, or flat or dynamic, which I never shoot by the way, natural is fine for this. So it's really quick and I think that's the overarching theme here of the new design. It's easy to use and easier to use and quicker to access. Now, the other thing that they've changed is when you come up here, you can choose the way you set the exposure and, or the focus. You can do radical, which is the way I've been doing it so far. You can do center weight. This is a way that I use a lot. That way you have a larger sample area for your focus and for your exposure. Or you can go to manual. Now this is where, again, the design has gotten considerably different. Instead of having the arc sliders, they now have regular sliders. I just go up and down. This is reminiscent of a lot of other apps on the market, and I do like it. I also think it's a little bit easier to see now because of the different colors I've chosen. I like the yellow and then the darker shade right here is nice too, that way you can kinda see the numbers. And so over here, just like when I hit shutter up here, you can go to ISO up here, or you can still swipe in. You can come over here and hit ISO and set your ISO with the slider. Same with the shutter. And these are independent controls. I'm setting it with the slider there on the shutter. And then there's a zoom right here too. At any rate, it's nice now with the sliders that you can individually set the different setting you want here. And when you move it, it will stay put hill lock and you can see up here when it says it's locked. And so when you come back out here, what I just did, ISO 3,490 s shutter, that's a lot. But then if you undo the radicals, it'll go back to auto until you lock it again. Same with the focus. Focus has a nice slider now too. And if you wanna do focus poles, which is a pretty cool feature and filmic pro, that's what this aqua and I guess that's pink arrows are for. And that's much easier now to see and to set. Again, that's kind of the overall theme here is step is easier to use and easier to access. And I do like it. Speaking of that audio, same thing now you click on the audio, the mic icon and it pops up that right now I don't have an external mic connected, so it's just using automatic gain correction. But if I had a mike, you can select the mic and you can set the levels right here. One other thing that is new to filmic pro version seven is this function button and you can set what it is. Right now I have it on reactive analytics. So that means if you go in and focus, peaking will come on. Or if you're setting the exposure, you'll get zebras. And if I turn that off, they go away. Now, you can choose what you'd like to put up there. Have several different options. This is completely subjective and I would tend to put stuff that I use the most up there and I liked the reactive analytics hiding interface might be a good one to occasionally. That way you could clear it off because one thing I'm noticing, again, I haven't used this long. But this top information here, while I love it, it is a black bar and the top of the screen is there. And so it could be a little bit confusing when you first look, especially if you're on a tighter shot. Like right there. If you just quickly glance, you might think you're framing is weird because of that line touching his head. But if you click it there, it goes away and the framing, the headroom looks proper. And so you can click that and do that. Just a minor little thing. Maybe they should make that a little more transparent or maybe it should be clear with just the numbers coming down. I'm not sure. Again, I'm brand new to this app, just like you, but overall, I do like what they're doing. I liked the new color scheme. You probably noticed that the radicals are a new color. There, kind of a bright yellow or maybe an orangey yellow. Easier to see. They were white, I believe before. And they still go read when you lock them. So I do like that. White sometimes when you're outside shooting, if you're shooting into the sky, e.g. a bright sky, you can lose the radical and you just couldn't see it. I'd always have to tilt away to something darker to find the radical and go back. So I assume that's why they did it. Overall. I think it's a pretty nice update I really do. Now, is it worth subscribing at $50 a year? That I can't tell you for me as I've said before, I'm going to do it for a year and see what I think and we'll go from there and remember, the biggest thing is you can revert back to legacy filmic pro version six by going into the settings menu and information. And then down here download filmic legacy. So you always have that. That's not going anywhere anytime soon. Now understand though, I am not a fan of the subscription model. Not at all. I'm just trying to make the best of it because I do like filmic pro 42. Camera Apps - Alternatives To FiLMiC Pro: What about alternatives to filmic pro? So I've put together a preliminary list of apps that I have either used or I'm pretty familiar with. And I had a few criteria that I wanted each to meet before I would actually recommend it. The main one being that they are a quote unquote professional app, meaning you get manual control with the app. That's super important when you're wanting to create professional-looking video. Now these aren't in any particular order, and these are just quick overview looks at these apps that I'm recommending. I'm going to hop over here to my workbench and show a quick little demo of each. But again, this is not a detailed tutorial. So first up is movie Pro. This is movie Pro, and I think it's very inspired by filmic pro. You hit this white balance. You've got the controls over there. You've got similar radicals for focus and exposure where you can lock and move them around. You've got a menu that looks very similar down here, although this menu is different than filmic pro. Now I'm not saying that they copied and I'm saying they were inspired by. And if you are a filmic pro user, this will feel like a fairly familiar interface. Everything that's nice about movie Pro is it's a onetime purchase app. I believe it's 799 at 10 min. Or you can get the app and the remote. It actually has a remote like filmic Pro has filmic remote. And so you do the app with remote, I believe it's $10. And the nice thing is with this app, you do have a lot of the same things with filmic pro. You can shoot with ProRes. So that is nice. A lot of apps you still can't do ProRes. You also have the ability to connect Gimbels and of course, anamorphic lenses. I think all the apps will let you do anamorphic, but not all of them will let you connect Gimbels. You can always use a gimbal with any of these apps, but the ability to control the gimbal, or at least the start stop from the gimbal is great to be able to do that within an app. This also has, of course, the controls. They call it DSLR, like which I guess today you should say mirrorless or DSLR or not really in vogue anymore. They're kind of old technology, but you have all your different controls of ISO and shutter, et cetera. Again, very reminiscent of filmic pro. The other thing that I like about this app, and this is something that I do like in any of these prolapse is when you record a clip, it goes to a library, it goes to a gallery within the app. It does not go to the photo app, although you can send it to the photo app. The reason I don't like going to the photo app is when you're doing a, let's say a short film and you're shooting 50 or 100 clips, sending it to the photo app, then sends it up to iCloud. And if you have that cloud match turned on and then it sends those clips through all your different devices. And if you're shooting big pro res files, it really becomes a pain in the butt. So I like apps that have their own individual gallery or library and movie Pro has that. Next step is the beast Cam app. Bce cam has become pretty popular, I would say, in the professional video app market. And it's only probably two years old, maybe not even that old. It's a relatively new app. All things considered filmic Pro has been around since 2010 as a comparison. But be scam is a great full-featured app. It also has radicals and it has detailed data management where you can go in and you have all kinds of control on the way you do file management. That's one of the selling points. If you want to really get granular in how you detail and save your files. But that's not necessarily glamorous. The fun stuff is, of course, the different codecs and different recording modes, and it is full-featured like filmic pro as well. You can record ProRes and you've got the different flavors of ProRes, including proxy in HQ. Some of the other apps like the native camera app, you can only record HQ. And the other thing these cam has is it does have a photo library or a gallery. So these clips are recorded in the app. They don't go into the photo app, which is great. There anything interesting about BCE cam is, it is also a photo app, which I didn't know until recently. So you can shoot photos with the beast Cam app and or video. And then of course you have all the manual control. You can set your ISO and you can set your different focus, et cetera. And so just like the other apps, they are similar in that way. They're just set up a little bit differently. The only thing about the beast Cam app is, to my knowledge, you can't control Gimbels with this app. You can of course use anamorphic or you can even set up using their DOF depth. They sell a very cool DOF adapter, so you have great control for that. Bees cam at the time of this recording is a onetime purchase and it was on sale recently, and it may still be Roebuck 99. So $2 for this very powerful app. Now we'll take a look at the moment Pro Camera app. The Moment Pro Camera app has been around a good while, and they used to support both Android and iOS and Apple. And this is a very solid app. I liked the app, but in my humble opinion, it's really a photo app first and then a video app. Let me switch over to that. So there's the photo app aspect you can see right now I have zebras on, so it has a full functions that you would expect an app. But one thing that has always been a little bit weird, and it's possible I've got it set up wrong, is it really feels like it's designed for more vertical shooting than horizontal. And that's probably what I would use this app for more anyway, truth be told, more social media, but it does have professional features. That's for sure. E.g. you can shoot in log like you can with filmic pro. Now there's a debate whether it's true log or it's just an effect. It's really an effect. And that's okay. The filmic prolog is a true logarithmic curve, but we're not going to get into that. But now, it is nice though you have different options to shoot the two negatives for a moment from my perspective. Number one, when you record something, it actually goes to your camera roll. They don't have their own library, at least not that I know of. And so that's a negative. And the number two thing, you can't shoot ProRes with the Moment app. That seems like a pretty easy thing to add. So that may be something they add in the future. But currently, at least with the version of the app I'm using, it's H.264 or HEVC H.265. But you have all the different manual control of ISO and focus, et cetera. And so in that respect, it's good. And you've got histograms and then you've also got radicals. Just like with filmic pro. And you can control Gimbels with this app. So that's nice. This has been a popular app I think, because it's also a onetime charge, I believe at the time of this video at $6.99. So seven bucks, they do have in-app upgrades, and so you have to purchase certain things to get different features, but you do get the basic app or one price. Next step, the Mavis app. Maybe this has always been kinda my number two app. I've always liked filmic pro, burst, and Mavis, second, That's what I recommended over the years. If you didn't like filmic pro for whatever reason. But maybe this is great and maybe this has been around a long time. I think they've been around as long as filmic pro or shortly thereafter. I've had this app probably nine or ten years. It seems like maybe this is also a very professional feeling app. And by the way, a side note, they recently got bought by animals and so they are now part of the Atomos family. Maybe they were acquired kinda like filmic pro was with bending spoons. Right now I have focus peaking out omegas. And so you can see that it looks very professional, just like filmic pro and the other apps. It's just a different way of working. They have their different controls on screen here. You control the exposure of the focus and you can go back to auto, the really cool thing that Mavis hazard, I've always liked as you click this little thing in the corner and you go into, I think they call it the directors viewfinder. The screen shrinks back, but then you have a vector scope and a waveform. And then of course you've got your audio meters and then you have your different readouts over here. And another thing that Mavis does that's nice is you can actually see the shutter in angles like a film camera. So 148 would be 180 degrees shutter, or you can do it in fractions. The other thing too is it defaults to timecode its time of day time code. But you can also connect the time code generator to this if you're getting really professional, especially if you're shooting audio and you want to sync the timecode. Mavis also shoots ProRes, which is great. And additionally it has its own gallery or library. So the files that I've shot here are in the app. There don't go into the Photos app, but you can select that if you want to, which I don't recommend. But then to my knowledge, and I've been through the app looking for it. I can't find any way to control a gimbal. Oh, it's not subscription, but it's also not as cheap as the other ones. So to unlock the all the features you have to do various in-app upgrades. But in the scheme of things, it's very affordable. And the last one is pro movie. So pro movie is a pro app in quotes, I personally think it's a step below the professional field. The other apps not saying it's not pro, because you have all the manual controls of white balance and ISO and shutter, et cetera. It's just a user interface feels a little bit in your face. The controls are all over the place. You can hit this and make it go smaller, kind of like Mavis, you have various ways you can do it. Then the audio meter, as you can see, I'm talking, it's up here at the top, these dashes, so that's a little bit different. Again, this kind of stuff is very subjective. In the end, this app absolutely allows you to have manual control of an image. It does have a library which I like, then you can copy them to the photos app if you want, or go to a computer. You can shoot 4k a HEVC, you cannot shoot ProRes, at least I can't find the polarizability. You do have high bit rates though, which is nice. But if you want ProRes, this is not the app for you, nor can you control a gimbal with this app. But you can slide the sliders up and down here. But this app feels a little bit simpler to me, which you may like. And it's the cheapest app I'm showing right now as I believe it's free to download. And then it's like $1 to unlock the watermark, because otherwise it has a watermark on it. It's a very affordable app and it's not a subscription per movie is one to consider. One bonus app. This is prototype, and I'm sure some of you are wondering if I was going to include all right. So hesitated including this one because this is a subscription app, at least to get the pro features right here. You can download it for free. And so it's great because you can work in auto mode and you have a lot of functions of the app, and it's a really good app and you can even use their portrait mode video for free. And so that is pretty cool. But when you want to use the manual controls and the various lengths they sell, et cetera. You have to go pro and the subscription is $20 a year. Now let me say that I really debated whether to subscribe or not because as a general rule, I'm against subscription apps. The reason I did it is I've had so many requests from people about this app. I went ahead and subscribe so I could do some demos, etc. But again, I'm primarily use filmic Pro, but now that they're going subscription, all options are on the table and protect works a lot like filmic pro. You've got the sliders on the side to adjust exposure and focus. You can set your ISO and I do like how the ISO controls the screens pop up. Same with the shutter. You can adjust the shutter. And in this app you also have a library. And so all your clips are recorded to a library which is great. You can swipe through them and see him at the bottom here. So I do quite like that. You can also shoot ProRes, which is great. And they have different flavors of Perez. They didn't have ProRes quad 44444. So that's really high bit rate. And then you can additionally shoot with Gimbels and DOF adapters and anamorphic lenses. Of course, you can also do the HDMI clean feed out very similar to filmic pro. Anna has time Code as well, which I like. And then protein also has dual cameras built-in, just like filmic Pro has doubled take, it's a separate app, but you can do that within protect. And I think movie Pro does that as well. So pro take is a great app. I really like it. This is a subscription, but only $20 a year, in my opinion, that's affordable. So out of these, the ones that I've probably used the most are obese cam or moment, although I've started using Procreate quite a bit to, it really comes down to personal preference and it can be very subjective truth be told, at any rate, checkout these alternate apps I went over today and by the way, this is just a few, there are lots of other apps out there. 43. Camera Apps - Cinema P3: Alright, this is not going to be a full tutorial. This is a brief overview of the cinema P3 app. This is the free version, so we'll look at what's in the free version and then what's in the paid version. The free version, I have to say has quite a bit of functionality. Pretty clean screen. One thing I like is that across the top here, you instantly can see what you're shooting for 24 P3 color. I'll get into that in a minute. Afc means you're using autofocus continuous light balances on daylight preset, got your ISO and your shutter speed, and then your battery indicator. Then you've got your normal settings buttons around the edges. Over here you can choose your camera. This does shoot photos by the way. You've got your creative section. Creative is going into using lots and different presets that they've created. This as part of the paid version though. Got to upgrade to do that. Speaking of that, I'll show that real quick. So you can get a seven day free trial. If you don't want to use the free one and you want to try the proton. And then after that it's seven bucks and seven bucks unlocks it forever, which pretty good, pretty good price. And it lists the Pro Tools that you get with that purchase. Right here is nice. You can instantly see what you're shooting. And so right now, it's set up in for K 24, H L G. It's good that you can know what you're shooting across the top and then change it right here. You've got rec 709, P3, and H L G, this down here, the ten bits, 7.9 as part of the pro, anytime you see these little yellow probe icon, obviously that means you've got to pay to get those upgrades. Over here on the right, I mentioned white balance and so you've got your white balance controls and you can manually adjust it right here, or you can set it with a preset, which I'll show in a second. You also have tint controls here, which I like. I probably wouldn't do that too often. But Liz, nice feature to have there. There's two different tools, menus. There's one here at the top, and then there's one on the right over here. So the one on the right that I just clicked on, these are the settings that affect the mode you're in. In other words, if you're in video mode, it will affect that. If you're in photo mode, it would affect that. Invideo, you can come down here and choose a different settings you want. Or appear at the top is global. This affects everything in the app. Right here, you've got a lens picker or camera picker have we want to look at it. You get 0.5 ultra-wide angle. You got to three times this, the iPhone Pro. Then you've got the standard lens. One thing they haven't added to this at the time of this recording is the two times lens. The 14 Pro has the 48 millimeter. I assume that's coming. You gotta record button. It does say record on there, which I find is unnecessary. I don't know. That's just the minor little nit-picky thing, but I think you can That's the record button without having that on there, you've got this play icon button here in the bottom. When you click that, it brings up the last shot you just did. And that way you can preview it. It doesn't, at least to my knowledge, bring up the library though. Actually, we should get to the library from here. To get to the library, you actually have to go into the Settings. Click that, and then you've got your library. Library is nice though, because it tells you right here you've got p3 color. You have all the different details and you can turn the details off if you want. I like having a mom so I know what the file was shot in. But then at a quick glance, this has Dolby Vision. And then this has 709 a shot, different clips in different profiles. I do like that. You can quickly see when you come to the library. And it does have a library which I like and you can record to the library or to the photos app. I prefer going to the library and that's a big plus in my opinion. Back over here to the menu though, I was starting to show earlier, you've got your white balance. One thing that's cool though, is you can actually, you can do auto white balance continuous, or you can do auto white balance where you actually hit and you choose your white balance and it does it for you. Now, that didn't really work, but let me pull out a card here. What you normally do is put something white in front of the camera or a gray card. And then you do it. Now it's got that setting, which is really cool and that will stay. You can go back into the tools now where you can choose your white balance right? Now it's set on the one I just did a custom setting, but you do have your various presets, daylight, interior tungsten or cloudy. And I think that's shade. Or you can do auto white balance, which I don't really recommend auto white balance unless you wanna do auto white balance and then you can lock it. So in other words, it's auto white balance. Until you do white balance. White balance is automatically until you roll. Very similar to how filmic Pro has it. Couple other things I'll show in the menu is you have different ways to set your focus up. I think the autofocus continuous is the way to go. It also has regular autofocus and it has based detection, which is pretty cool. Autofocus with the C autofocus continuous lets you focus and then lock it anytime you want. If you do regular autofocus, what it does is let me just show that real quick. So you can move it around and select something in focus. But whenever you release it, it locks. That can be handy, especially if you're doing something that's locked down. But if you're moving the camera around at all and you're fishing for focus, that really doesn't work well. In my opinion. I like autofocus continuous. And then of course you can also go in and manually focus too. One other thing I wanted to show is what the exposure mode you can do center spot or manual if you do center. Now the radicals gone. And so whenever you aim the camera, it'll focus for you, but you don't have control over it. But when you're just regularly shooting, I like spot or manual and then you do have a Zoom control as well. So again, I'm comparing the stuff that filmic pro and so these features are somewhat a filmic pro just implemented in a different way. And one little interesting thing this app has is it has this p3 button. So what that means is the color that it's highlighting is outside the norm of what you would record in rec 7.9. That means that would be better recorded in P3 color, P3 color, when I think of it typically is a wide gamut. It's an HDR color profile. I think about it in displays mainly like DCI, P3 is the way movies are displayed, many of many way. But the nice thing is with this app and this is a cool feature you can select, as I showed earlier, you can select a shoot and P3 and P3 color according to the app makers. And I've heard this, although I haven't done a lot with P32, truth be told, is shooting an SDR, not HDR, you can get about 25% or so more color information in your image, and that's an eight. So as you can see, you get quite a bit here with the free version of the app. Everything I've been going over right now is part of the free version of the app. But if you want to pay and that's where you can really get additional Pro Tools. You get scopes if you pay, you get the different analytics. And importantly, and this is almost worth the price and of itself as you get manual audio control as it is right now, in the free version, you only get automatic audio input. And I don t think even get meters with the pro version, you get meters, audio and sound are 50% or more sometimes of a production, good audio is vital, so that alone is really worth the upgrade to me. However, as a basic app goes, this is more than basic. This app really includes a lot for a free price, but now we'll check out the paid version. So now I have the Pro version activated. I paid the seven bucks. And you can instantly see the main thing you get are the different analytics ways to measure and manage your different settings, which is super important if you want to do more professional content. The very first thing, and I mentioned the audio meters. They're right here on the left, and you've got your scopes right here. And you can click there and they'll switch the different varieties like RGB Parade, histograms, Vector Scope, stuff that affects this button right down here. I did have this on P3, but now you can hold it down and you've got all the different analytics. And so you can see full-screen versions of what I just did there, which is pretty cool. I got to say, Oh, and then you can do zebras. And you can still do the P3 aspect if you want. And you got false color as well. You can set which one you want to have displayed all the time in the actual settings menu. Right now I've got false color set up. You can put that on whatever you want. Either way, you can, again hold that down and display and choose the one you want to do. Now you also have focus peaking. And I've got a loop set up there where you can really see what you're doing. And you saw the gimbal there go into focus speaking mode. Which focus peaking is great. Although if you've watched my videos, you know that they're not super accurate. It's contrast based. And so it can be out of focus, especially on a phone, but it's definitely helpful. And so then back into the menu. You've got all your different controls and settings for audio. As I mentioned, that way you can come in and change the microphone where the, if you're using the mike built in or if you use an external mic because you can do audio monitoring, you got to timecode track. You can do one thing that wasn't available in the free version is now you can set your data rate, your bit rate. So it's right here. You can do auto or you can come in here and choose the different levels. I guess 18 would be the highest. And Otto is just that. Now, I typically would always record the highest bit rate I can, because that way you'll get the best results for calibrating and post-production. And also my experience that helps reduce noise. But again, it just depends on what you're shooting. You can export the lungs. This is pretty cool. They include lots here for the different log profiles and sets that they use. These are basically transform or utility Lutz that will take the log footage and make it look normal and editing like a standard look a wreck seven to nine load. If you're editing an SDR, that is, but that is nice that they include that. And speaking of that, now that I did the paid version, you can go into creative and you'll actually have access to these various different profiles. And so they have a C log and a d log. My understanding is the c log and the d log is for shooting log in HDR. So let me go back to mp3. Now that shouldn't be a different log. A log, and it's not nearly as milky looking. But then they also have a bunch of different settings throughout here that you can play with. I haven't shot with any of these yet, so I don't know if this is a true logarithmic curve, but just based on the app, whoever has developed this, and I don't know the developer of this app. They know what they're talking about. In particular as it relates to HDR and color grading. This is pretty advanced stuff, especially for a phone. But the nice thing is of course, you don't have to use it, that you can just use the basic features, although if you want, but then you have the options. And I do like that. That's similar filmic pro, but I would say, at least with my initial impressions of this app, these guys take it even a step further. And one little thing I mentioned earlier about the Record button that I don't really like it saying Rick on there. But with the pro version, you do get a cool feature. When you hit record. You get the red box around that. And I do like that, reminiscent of my Sony mirrorless cameras, BCE cam does that as well. Just a nice way to look down and know you're recording. Little touches like that do make a difference to me. This video went a little more in-depth than I had planned on. But that is a general overview of using the free app, which by the way, you get a lot and the paid version of this app, I haven't used this that much yet, but so far, I'm thinking this is a really good alternative to filmic pro. If you don't wanna do this subscription, a lot of people asking what I'm switching to and I'm gonna keep filmic pro for the time being. I've mentioned that if you follow my channel, but there are some great options out there. Now there's cinema P3 camera app has really climbed to the top of the list. I would say for me it's BCE cam. Now this one, I'm probably movie Pro. I know there's other apps out there, but for what I do and the filmmaking realm, and I want to have a lot of control over my app and my final product. These kinds of apps are the way to go and they really do compete nicely with gnomic grow. And of course, this is $7 a onetime payment. 44. Accessories - Moment Lenses: One of the more fun aspects of owning a camera is buying accessories. And for smartphones, this can actually be more than just fun. It can be a necessity. You can't even put your phone on a tripod without a third party mount. So in this section we'll go over some of our favorite accessories and tell you why we like them. Third-party lenses or something that everyone really seems to like. They can add production value and different interesting looks to your footage for sure. And so they're absolutely something to consider. And getting into smartphone video, when smartphones cinematography, you really need to understand the different lenses and what they do. This is gonna be more of a general overview of the lenses. And these are moment lenses. Now, I'm not sponsored, are paid by moment. I just like moment gear. There are a variety of other companies in the market like see-through or sand mark. And then I also really like moon dog labs, they make anamorphic lenses. They were one of the first anamorphic lens makers on the market. And all the other guys have come later. And now it seems like everyone's making an anamorphic lens. By the way, anamorphic is something that we'll talk about. It is something that is pretty unique to smartphone filmmaking because putting an anamorphic lens on a larger camera is a lot more work and a lot more expense. Different animals, different quality. But being able to shoot anamorphic on a phone is something that is really unique and really, really pretty darn cool. So these are the five offerings currently from moment, you've got a macro, you've got a fisheye, a wide telly, and the anamorphic. So I mentioned the anamorphic and this is become their most popular lens, them being moment. And they are really good, they're good lenses and I don't know if you can see that little blue coating on the lens. That is what causes the lens flare. And that's the thing about anamorphic lenses. You get lens flare, you get a wider look. It has a little bit of distortion. So the middle almost looks like a telephoto lens. On the outside looks like a wide lens. The other thing is it squeezes me image 1.33 times. And so it stretches it out and makes it true widescreen. So it's a 24021 aspect ratio, great lens, very cinematic lens. And it's one if you're doing movies or any kind of narrative stuff that you'll probably use quite a bit. This is their telephoto. It's a 58 millimeter. It is a really solid lens. It's probably their best piece of glass optically. It's very heavy, very well-built, and it's sharp, it's very sharp lens. And the thing is, I liked this one because the iPhone tele lens is not a very good lens, especially for shooting video. I find it has instabilities. You'll get exposure shifts and evidently it's because of the tone mapping. It happens on all kinds of devices, not just iPhone, but it is pretty prevalent on iPhone. So I like to put a tele lens on the wide lens because the wide lens has a wider aperture and is a very stable lens. Again, when I say stable, I mean in the iPhone itself, I don't mean the way this connects, the connection of solid. I'll show that in just a second. Now you can put this on the telly. So if you put the telly on the iPhone telly, you get a four times telephoto look. And so it is a good look and it can give you more shallow depth of field. That's one thing to using a tele lens on a smartphone is a good way to get shallow depth of field. Shallow depth of field is the blurry background and it's hard to do with a smartphone, largely because of the small sensor. You can get it, but you just need to get close to the subject. And you need to use a tele lens. The wide lens used to be my favorite and it still is probably one of my favorites. On the iPhone, the wide lens is about 26, 28 millimeter, depending on which phone you have. This is an 18 millimeter. So it gives you considerably more field of view, considerably more width. These two on the left are more specialty lenses. This is 170 degree fisheye. They call it a super fish. It's a neat lens. It's really more for affects, almost like that shot where you're looking at someone through a peephole. It's like a GoPro, a really wide GoPro look. It's an interesting lens and might be used for music video or kinda fun stuff, travel videos. But it's not one that I use a whole lot. Then the last one here is their macro. Their macro lens is actually a really good lens. It's sharp, sharp where it needs to be, which is in the middle. Because the way you use a macro like this is you actually put it right against the subject. That's what this little diffusion is. It actually comes off. So you can use it without it. This allows you to put it right against the subject. And then it helps it to where the light gets diffused around the subject. You don't have a harsh shadow. So it just depends on what you're trying to shoot. You can shoot all kinds of stuff like flowers or money, or even this table. You can get really, really close macro shots with this lens. Using third-party lenses, while subjective, can really add a lot of production value to your shoots and they're pretty easy to put on. And I mentioned that go on easy. All you do is you take the lens, you've got a line on the lens and you light it up with on your phone. You have to have a moment case. And you line those two up. Twist it, and you're good to go. And now it's on. And then you've got a really nice telephoto look. When you want to take it off. You just twisted it comes right off. Same with the other lenses. They twist on and off really easily. This one's really wide. And by the way, these lenses, of course, we'll work with photos as well. So you can do photography or you can do video. So that's moment lenses, good third-party options. Again, lots of them on the market out there. I found when I use third-party lenses, these are the ones that I end up using the most. 46. Accessories - Tripod Mount: The number one thing that you're going to need is a way to mount your camera onto a tripod or to whatever device you want to mount it to. This is a shoulder pod and it's one of my favorites. So it doesn't matter which brand you buy. I like shoulder pod because it's strong. They're easy to use and they clamped down, well, I really like them. The only negative two, this one is it doesn't have a cold chew on top. And so there are some other ones that have cold shoes. The cold shoe that you would use with this comes out to the side. It's an attachment. So it doesn't have a built-in. But for most of the time that doesn't really matter for me because I'm shooting B-roll or footage and I'm not recording sound or using a light on my camera. And if I'm doing that, I'm using a cage. But you get a mount, your phone in the mount, and you tighten it down. Tilt secure. Then has a quarter 20 on the bottom. Then you can attach it to whatever you want to attach it to. This is a great tabletop tripod. I like it quite a bit. It's a Manfrotto. Then here's another kind of tripod. It's more of the Bindi tripod, the Casey nice that tripod. This one is by JOB, does the same thing, but this one obviously you can bend it around a pole or a, you know, any kind of handrail or something you might be shooting with. But you're going to need to get amount to mount your phone first. Then you'll need to get some sort of tripod. These are tabletop tripod is more or less or, or vlog or tripod. You might put your phone there and walk around with it. You could do that with this one too. That's one thing nice about these handles as well as grips. Or for bigger jobs. And depending on what you're shooting, you might want to look at getting a traditional tripod, either a photo tripod or a fluid had a video tripod. 47. Accessories - Portable LED Lights: Okay, we've talked about lighting and lighting a movie or lighting a corporate video is definitely different than lighting, say, a news interview or event video. However, you can use these lights in pretty much any kind of scenario. But what I'm going to talk about here is how to mount them on a camera. These are two nice options. This one's from bowling, and it is an on-camera LED light that has a unique design. As this arm flips out and mounts to your camera. You can mount it in different positions. Really just depends on how you want to use it. But it's a really bright LED. And it does different colors, which is nice. It's an RGB LED. This light does effects as well, which is pretty cool. There. It's doing lightning. That's a candlelight or a fire flicker. Here's a police light effect. Then of course you can just use it as a regular LED. And as demo. This slide has a lot of options for filmmakers. It's pretty cool because of the effects. And then for traditional event video, it will mount onto your camera. And just to make sure I was clear, this amount onto a camera or it'll mount onto a light stand. Or someone could just hold it at a frame to do the effects. Now this light is one of my favorite all-time lights. It's the size of a credit card. It's so small and it's very thin. It's made by aperture. And this light was about 45 bucks when I bought it. You can literally drop it into your pocket or drop it into your backpack and have this light with you at any and all times. You can also mount this light to a camera or to a light stand if you want. Or you can hold it. But it is surprisingly bright for such a small light. It also has double. And the thing is I can power either one of these with a USB battery, which is great. So they'll charge up and they last about two or 3 h depending on how bright you run them. But if they run out of juice, you can plug it into a battery. And again, you can mount this until I could be scrip or any kind of camera cage or case that you have for your phone or mount that has a cold shoe. So that way you can make it an on-camera light. Or again, you can make it an accident light anywhere in a scene, put it on the shelf, Do whatever you want. But these little LED accessory lights are really great and something you should really consider adding to your filmmaking kit. 48. Accessories - ND Filters (for Moment Lenses): I went over a moment lenses in our third-party lens section. And they are by far my favorite third-party lenses. Especially because of the assortment they have in the build quality. The thing is when you're using third-party lenses, it can be tricky to get good motion blur when you're shooting outside. Moment has devised an ND filter system. And it's interesting, It's not a screw on version, it just slips on the lens and I'll show that in just a second. But it's a 62 millimeter mount. And so one thing that kind of stinks about all these different mounts as they're all different. And I mentioned how ND filters can be pretty expensive and they can be. So you may want to use a different step-up or step-down ring to fit your other filters. However, the negative is on this. If you go smaller, you might get some vignetting. So I've picked up some 62 millimeter filters to work with this. And this first one I have here called a variable ND or a fader, AND more or less it's two pieces of glass put together. And when you spin it, they, they criss-cross and they create more or less in D. I don't know if you can see that here, but that says minimum and the maximum. So you can spin it once it's on the camera and you can control the amount of Andy that's being used. This can work really well because that way you don't have to change Andy's depending on the lighting situation. You can just twist this and a lot of guys use these on their DSLR or mirrorless cameras. Two very popular options, the negatives to these with some cheaper Indies and especially with cheaper variable indies. You can definitely get some weird colors going on. And you can get vignetting. You can also get just some overall weirdness with the edges. If you're not careful, if you spend these ND filters and the sun's hitting the wrong way. But they're good options to consider. And if you're going to buy one of these, I would spend the extra money and get a good one. Tiffany is pretty good. These aren't the best, but they're affordable and you can get good results. But Polar Pro makes a really good one. There's a Peter McKinnon version. I believe they have a variable. I know they have the traditional Indies, but spin a little extra money if your gonna get a fader Indy. Because if you don't, in the end, you might be disappointed with the footage you get. But let me show you how this works. Just threads on the filter. Now that's on. And then the lens actually goes right into that. This is a rubber holder, almost the rubber seal in a way, a Mullins goes right in there. But you want to put this on your camera first. Put the mama lenses, you take the line that's on the lens. You line it up with the case. Click it on. Now you put the ND to slide it over it. And that's it. The main thing you want to be careful about though, is since it's just slipped on, It's not screwed on or tightened on. You just want to make sure you don't accidentally bump it and this whole rig falls off, the lens isn't going to come off. But the indie potentially could if you hooked it on something. This works surprisingly well, but it is pretty bulky. I'm sure you can see that. It's also pretty heavy, makes your phone heavy. And so one thing that I like about moment typically speaking, the ability just to carry your phone with you, just the case and the lenses and pop them on and you're quickly shooting. You can carry this with you and you can be quickly shooting, but it makes it much bulkier and it's much heavier to use. But if you want to use ND filter a moment lenses, this is the current way to do it. But no matter what lens you're using or what phone you're using to get good motion blur into shoot professional quality, professional looking video. You definitely need to use an ND filter. 49. PRO TIPS - Accessories: This course is all about cinematography. But the one thing I did want to mention is don't forget about the sound. So basically that means good a good microphone. It can be a camera mounted mike, like from road or deity. Or it can be a lavalier mic or it can be a boom mic. It really just depends on what you're doing and what you're shooting. But good sound is imperative for a good video of good final product. A lot of people actually say sound is more important than video. I think they're both important. But don't forget about your sound. 50. Wrap-Up & Additional Tips: Congratulations, you've finished the course. We hope you found it informative and educational. Now it's time to take everything you've learned and go create something, go make a movie, start a YouTube channel, produce a new story, whatever it is. But before you grab your camera, here are a final few shooting tips to keep in mind. You've got this. When you're shooting, don't just think about pretty shots. That's important. But you got to think about your edit. Now this is a cinematography course, but in the end, you take your footage back and you edit it together to tell a story. So think about the shots you need to tell a story, think about your edit. And so that means get plenty of coverage. Coverage is more or less B-roll. You want a lot of wide shots, medium shots, close-ups. And this is for the practical reasons of editing. An editor will rarely complain that they have too much footage. It's almost always the opposite. So be sure to give them plenty of choices, plenty of shots selections. And speaking of post-production, cinematography goes hand in hand with color correction and color grading. Color grading is an entire course of its own. But along with thinking about your edit, you need to think how your final product is going to look, how it's going to be calibrated and color corrected, especially if you're shooting log or flat footage. Good color grading can really make a big difference in the look of your project. Shoot horizontally for most stuff, but vertical is okay for social media. But really stick to horizontal if you can more times than not. No matter what app you're using, always lock your exposure and white balance. This is imperative. Use a tripod. This one simple thing. Instantly elevate your videos and make them look much more professional. Or use a gimbal. The point is to stabilize your camera. When you're shooting outside and bright sun, always use an ND filter. I know it's not a glamorous accessory. It's not that exciting, but it really makes a big difference. I can't stress that enough, use an ND filter. And for me, the one biggest secret to shooting great video on your smartphone, that is, don't treat it like a phone. Treat it like you would any other camera. Take your time, be deliberate. Think through your shots, have a plan. And I think you'll really be surprised that the results you can get. Part of my goal with this course is to demystify this process, the filmmaking process. And so I hope that has been the case for you. And now you'll take what you learn here and go create something cool. No matter what that is. It's a great time to be a video creator and a filmmaker.