If you’ve ever complained that the iPhone camera doesn’t offer you enough control for your filmmaking exploits, there’s now a free app that does.
Phones do so much these days, and now that phones can be used for practically anything, you may be leaning on other gadgets less. No media player, because it’s your phone. No wallet, because it’s your phone. And no camera, because, yep, it’s your phone.
Replacing your camera with your phone isn’t just something you do for images, but could also be the domain for professional filmmaking to a degree. While most dedicated cameras offer better image quality, the fact that iPhones can be used as an actual movie making cameras is all sorts of surreal.
The latest app from Apple makes that even more surreal, though, with Final Cut Camera arriving for free on iOS.
An extra camera with more controls, Final Cut Camera provides codec control (H265, ProRes), format and frame rates, support for both SDR and HDR colour ranges, image stabilisation, focus controls, white balance, exposure control, and even the ability to take audio from another source, all in one free app.
There’s also support for the various focal lengths on an iPhone, which on the current flagship iPhone 15 Pro Max covers 13mm ultra-wide, 24mm wide, and 120mm 5x telephoto, allowing you to get close, complete with a slow zoom control emulating more of standard zoom controller on a proper lens and camera.
It’s a clever little app, and one that is designed to work with Final Cut Pro on the iPad, supporting Live Multicam so that more than one Apple device can be used as a synchronised camera. If you have several iPhones and a copy of Final Cut Pro on the iPad, the lot of them can come together for a maximum of four devices being recorded as one in Live Multicam.
Owners of Final Cut Pro on the Mac miss out on Live Multicam (sad face), but they can import video captured directly from Final Cut Camera to their desktop app.
The launch of Final Cut Camera for iPhone comes off the back of an update for Final Cut Pro on the desktop as well as on the iPad. Both received updates this week, the former of which added support for the Neural Engine with some of the features announced earlier in the year, while the iPad’s version of FCP saw Multicam and a few other additions.
You’ll still need to pay a monthly or yearly fee to play with Final Cut Pro on the iPad, but at least the launch of Final Cut Camera on the iPhone makes the whole thing a lot more interesting.
