Shoot Pro Video on iPhone using Final Cut Camera

Hi, it’s Jacob here, and in this QuickTip video we’re going to be exploring the Final Cut Camera app for iPhone. This is Apple’s pro video camera app that lets you film content with all sorts of fine-tuned settings to really get the results that you want from your iPhone.

Excitingly, this video was filmed on location in Mumbai with a friend, Prashant. He’s actually helped me go through this video. He’s a videographer himself, so he really knows his stuff. So thanks, Prashant, for the help – I really appreciate it.

When you first open up Final Cut Camera, it looks pretty much like the regular Camera app. You’ve got the record button and the zoom options on the side, but there are a lot of things lurking just beneath the surface.

If we tap onto the options button on the left-hand side, we get a little tray of icons that appears on the right. These let you really fine-tune the results you get. The first thing we’ll do is lock the orientation. At the top here, we can lock it to landscape left, landscape right or portrait, which is great if you’re moving the camera while filming.

The next option is to change the focal length of the camera. This determines which part of the frame is in focus and which parts are blurred. Tapping here gives you a slider you can scroll up and down. As I do that, you can see the tree in the foreground becoming more focused and the building becoming blurrier, and the opposite is true when I move the slider the other way.

At the moment, we’re in manual focus mode, meaning we’re setting this value ourselves. But at the bottom, I can tap the little M icon in the circle to switch back to autofocus mode. From here, it works just like the regular Camera app, where you can tap different parts of the frame and the focus will lock onto that area, such as the tree or the building.

Our next setting controls the exposure value of the video. Right now, we’re on automatic exposure, just like in the standard Camera app, where the phone balances the entire image so nothing is too bright or too dark. But we can adjust this to bring out more detail in the shadows using the slider here.

If I pull the slider down, the image starts to become overexposed. You can see this clearly in the foliage on the tree, where the darker shadows gradually become lighter and the green becomes more visible. The sky also gets brighter, and at some point it would become overexposed, so we’ll stop before that happens.

If instead we want more detail in the highlights, we can move the slider the other way into negative exposure values.

For even finer control, we can tap the A at the bottom to enter full manual mode. From here, we can adjust both ISO and shutter speed. Shutter speed determines how long each frame gathers light, measured in fractions of a second. Right now, it’s set to 1/4,000 of a second, which looks perfectly exposed in bright daylight.

If we go even faster, such as 1/8,000, it still looks good outside, but indoors it would quickly become too dark. In darker environments, you might reduce the shutter speed so more light can enter, as each frame has more time to collect that light.

ISO controls how sensitive the sensor is to light. By balancing ISO and shutter speed together, you can achieve the exposure you’re looking for. Personally, though, I tend to prefer the simpler exposure slider we looked at earlier, as the full manual controls can be a bit overkill for what I need.

Next, we can control white balance. This also starts in automatic mode, but we can adjust it manually using the Kelvin slider to make the image warmer or cooler. As I move the slider, you can see the colour tone changing across the whole video. Increasing the value makes the image warmer than it was before.

We can also use presets as a starting point. Tapping the icon at the bottom gives options like daylight or tungsten lighting, which you can then fine-tune further if needed.

The final option in this slide-out tray is camera zoom. Instead of jumping straight to fixed zoom levels like 1x or 2x, this lets you dial in the exact framing you’re looking for.

That’s a quick look at some of the finer controls in Final Cut Camera. From focus and exposure to white balance and zoom, it gives you far more control than the standard Camera app. In the regular Camera app, you mostly rely on autofocus and automatic settings, but this lets you really fine-tune your shot.

There’s loads more that Final Cut Camera can do, so the next time I’m in a cool or interesting location, I’ll share some more QuickTips. Make sure you subscribe to my channel so you don’t miss them.

Thanks again to Prashant for helping with this video – I really appreciate it. I’ll see you again soon for the next QuickTip.