All that's left now is time In front of me with the answer, with the answer. This video is sponsored by Musicbed. So a couple of weeks ago, my family and I actually took a trip to Disneyland.
And the last time we went to Disneyland, I had my C70 with a couple of lenses. Huge mistake, by the way, if you have kids and you have a huge camera, it looks good. The footage. looks good, but it's often just not worth it. This time I decided I wanted to be a little bit more compact, but I also didn't want to have like a bunch of accessories on my phone because in my opinion, having an ND filter and a huge like chunky case and a grip and all these different attachments on your phone kind of defeats the purpose of using your phone, which is so convenient.
So I wanted to see what I could do with just the bare iPhone 15 Pro. Max. And actually I've split this video up into three different steps. First one is going to be your settings. The second one is going to be things that you do while you're shooting.
And the third step is things you can do while you're editing. By the end, we're going to be taking your footage from this to this. So let's dive in.
Okay, now the first thing and probably the most important section of this video is actually diving into your camera settings. There's probably lots of settings you don't even know about. A lot of these I didn't know about until I really started to hone in on shooting on my iPhone.
And I'm not talking about the obvious, you know, tap to focus and, you know, tap and hold to lock your exposure and your focus and all that. We're diving into some of the bigger settings that actually set the stage so they're shooting in the right codec, the right frame rate, the right resolution, and a few other things. So if you dive in your settings.
Then we go over to camera. The biggest and probably the most important setting you can change if you have a new iPhone 15 is changing it to ProRes Log. You don't want to shoot ProRes Log all the time.
If I'm just shooting quick little videos of my kids being funny or whatever, I'm not going to shoot that ProRes Log. But if I'm really intentional about, no, I want this to be a very cinematic clip and I plan on color grading it later, I don't mind that it's a big file size, then ProRes Log is the way to go. Everything you saw in that montage. was shot with ProResLog. So let's dive into formats and we'll scroll down.
Apple ProRes, just make sure that is selected and the encoding is on log. Next thing we're going to do here in that same menu is changing it from high efficiency to most compatible. Most compatible is basically going to give you files that are just easier to work with generally speaking. And if you're shooting like HDR then you have to use high efficiency because it basically makes that HDR image look the best. when it's being viewed on an iPhone.
But if you're taking cinematic video and you're gonna go color it and manipulate it and you wanna edit it, you want a file that's gonna be compatible with your editing program. So most compatible. Going back to the main camera menu, gonna make sure that record video is at 4K30.
There's a reason I'm using 4K30 and not 4K24. I think a lot of other people who are shooting on iPhone could probably back this up, but 4K24, especially at ProRes Log, just looks kind of choppy. It really shouldn't.
but it just is. So 4k 30 is going to give you a much smoother image and you can still take that file pop it on a 24 frames per second timeline and you're good to go. And if you want to you can also slow down that 30 frames per second clip to 80% and suddenly you have a semi slow motion clip. And then in that same menu we're going to go over and lock our white balance. If you're shooting professionally Hopefully you're not using auto white balance, at least not too often.
Generally you want to lock that white balance so that the color temperature isn't shifting between the beginning and the end of your clip. If it is, it just makes color grading a lot more difficult. Then we're going to go back. We're going to dive into the preserve settings tab. And then we're going to make sure the exposure adjustment is turned on.
So when you go into your camera, you'll see in the top left right here, I can actually control my exposure. So I have it set to negative 0.7. With that setting selected here, it's going to actually keep that negative 0.7 setting all the time, unless I change it. Now, the reason you want to do that is because when your iPhone is looking at anything through the camera, it's trying to balance the exposure all across the board. And a lot of the time, it's trying to balance out the exposure.
in the shadows. It's trying to bring those up, which in turn makes your highlights look blown out. And if your highlights are blown out, it's going to be a lot harder to actually bring that detail back once you go into color grading.
So when you pull your exposure down to negative 0.7, it's kind of a safeguard to make sure that your iPhone isn't automatically blowing out those highlights. And when you're shooting, I'd still recommend, you know, tapping on those highlights and trying to lock your exposure just in case. But this is something I always have set no matter what.
Okay. Now the second step. in making your iPhone footage look more cinematic actually isn't in the settings. It's about the filming itself. Now, when you're filming, I'd really recommend just using the main 1X lens.
Even if your camera has other lenses, it's not that they're terrible, but nothing's gonna be nearly as good as the 1X. I mean, if we were to like order my favorite lenses just on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, it would be the 1X, the 0.5X, the 2X, and then the 5X. The 0.5 is great, especially if you want to capture like... the wide landscape or whatever's happening around you.
I use that one a lot when I'm doing like a follow scene, like I'm chasing my daughter running down the sidewalk. The 2x and the 5x are good if you want to just punch in a little bit tighter. But generally speaking, with all these lenses, even the 1x, you need a good amount of light for them to look good. And actually something else that I've noticed is that depending on your subject, like what you're filming, the 2x and the 5x don't look very good. They actually look kind of muddy.
Probably the biggest factor here is going to be your lighting, but I especially notice it with portraits, like really, really tight shots of faces. So something to keep in mind, the 1x is always going to be better, but feel free to punch into a 2x or a 5x. The next thing here is actually just shooting in the best possible lighting.
Now, when we were at Disneyland, what was kind of nice is that I didn't plan on shooting midday. So in the morning, when we got there at like 8 a.m., 9 a.m., I shot a few clips because the sun was lower. The lighting was just a lot more pleasing. But once it got midday, the sun was directly overhead. The lighting just didn't look very good.
So I put the phone down. I actually enjoyed the rides and everything we were doing. And then once we got into the late afternoon, evening, it was about 6, 6.30 PM.
The lighting was a lot lower once again. And that's a big thing you're going to see in a lot of different iPhone commercials shot on iPhone campaigns is that the lighting is probably the most important element actually. and making those cameras look good.
And not only that, but actually putting the light on the opposite side of your subject, or at least add an angle to your subject. If you're shooting in the same direction that the light is coming from, it's gonna make your image look pretty flat. But if you hit it at a slightly different angle, especially if you're shooting on the shadow side of a person's face, it's gonna look just a lot more cinematic, really, really easy hack.
So wherever the light is coming from, hop onto the opposite side and shoot against the lighting. Another thing you can do here is actually with your composition, turning on the grid in your settings. The key to a cinematic image isn't always about resolution. It's not always about sensor size or focal length. To me, honestly, more than anything, it's about your composition.
Creating a composition that is just really, really engaging and cool. Your main subject is centered, or it's on one of the thirds. You have good leading lines. There's a lot of different elements that go into that. But if you take the time to really find just interesting Composition, it's going to make your image look so much better.
Even if you didn't change any of the settings that I talked about, focusing on composition will completely transform all your iPhone clips. And then the last thing in this step is your movement. If you have good composition, first off, you don't necessarily need movement.
You can have a nice clean static shot. If you are going to add movement, I love just a simple push in, pull out, tracking my subject a little bit, tracking the movement so it's motivated. with whatever subject is in my scene.
Those are the types of shots that I really like. Just panning or tilting or whatever, unless it's telling a story or it's following the subject, in my opinion, it's not worth doing. But I think the default for a lot of people when you pull out your phone is to pan like this and get a shot.
From a cinematic standpoint, most of the time, it just doesn't make sense. So if it adds to your story, if it's a motivated movement, by all means do it. But I think most of the time, there's probably a better way.
All right, the third and final step to transforming your iPhone footage actually happens in the editing room. And one of the first things you can do when you're in the editing room is use some inspirational music like this one that I found on Musicbed. Now music is a huge part of every edit because it's kind of like the glue that holds it all together.
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But for every one song that I find and I like, Musicbed suggests a dozen more that are even better. And right now for a limited time you can actually get a 14-day free trial to Musicbed. So you can switch and see the difference yourself.
Personally I'm more inspired to create when I have good music and I think you will too. So just hit the link in the description box to switch to Musicbed today. Okay now this last step involving the editing really applies to any camera. If you look back and watch some of our beginner versus pro videos, for example, the pocket three video, it's a great little camera, but a lot of the work actually happens when you're editing.
There's a few tricks that can actually make pretty much any camera, no matter how crappy it is, look semi-decent. And don't get me wrong, the iPhone 15, especially Apple log, ProRes log, like it looks good, but it does have its shortcomings. It's not perfect.
It's not quite cinema grade, but if you know how to edit it right, you can get pretty close. So Apple Log, just like any other log, is really flat, which is actually a really, really good thing. Because if you look at your just standard iPhone footage, all the saturation is there, all the contrast and the sharpness and everything is just baked in. But if you shoot in Log, then suddenly you have all this flexibility to make those colors look however you want them to look. Plus, you can completely control your contrast, you can control the sharpness.
So my preferred way to actually take Apple Log, convert it into something just really, really... vibrant and cinematic is through DaVinci Resolve. So the first thing you need to do to actually get that log footage to where you want it to be is to either do a color space transform. So converting that log into a Rec. 709 image, pumping all that contrast, that saturation, everything back in there, or just manually doing it, which frankly, that's how I prefer to do it.
I find when you do a conversion LUT or the color space transform, it'll often bring that exposure down way lower than you actually want it. So if you manually change it. you have a lot more control. So right here in this node, I've added that in, just bringing those levels a bit closer to where we want them.
So this is done here in the primary wheels. I'm basically just adjusting that lift gamma and gain. So pulling that lift down so that the waveform is sitting right on that zero line, pulling up the gain so it's peaking around here, which in my opinion is just a bit more of a cinematic exposure, and also then adjusting that gamma, those mid-tones.
and then over in the saturation just pumping that up. I know if you're a colorist you're probably watching this and being like, why are you doing it like that? But it works.
It looks good. It's not introducing any more noise into my image and it's quick. After that what I like to do is actually throw in a little bit of HDR. I throw that in the node before I do that little conversion and that just brings down the highlights a little bit.
It brings up the shadows a little bit as well. So it kind of adds a little bit more dynamic range in a way to your image. After that, I like to actually throw on my look, the LUT that I want to be using.
This one is actually my own personal LUT if you want to download it for free. There should be a little link up here in the top right, or I put a link in the description. But this is my Kodak LUT, so I'll throw that on there.
Then I pump in a little bit of warmness into that image. Just bring up the temperature. I'll go in and add just a very subtle curve down here.
And then the last thing, and frankly, I think this is kind of the secret sauce in making your iPhone footage look... cinematic, especially if you don't have accessories like a mist filter on your phone, is using halation. So halation right here, if you can see that it does a few different things.
It's going to bloom your highlights without needing a mist filter, by the way. And it actually pumps just a little bit more like saturation and color into the image as well. So with halation, you can adjust all these things as much as you want, but I tend to just go for the default and it looks pretty good.
So real quick before. And after not bad for an iPhone. And then the last thing here, and frankly, I'm going to admit something.
I've kind of been gatekeeping this effect. I do tell people about it when they ask, but I don't like publicly really talk about it. This is the first time I'm going to actually show it in a video.
There's a plugin called RSMB. I think it just means like real smooth motion blur or something like that. Now, basically what this does is you drag and drop it onto your footage. and it'll automatically generate motion blur.
So when you're shooting in bright light, especially on an iPhone, you don't have an ND or anything, by default your iPhone is actually going to be cranking that shutter speed. Same thing happens when you shoot on an action camera in auto mode and a variety of other cameras, like they'll just automatically crank that shutter speed, which makes your image look too crisp, like the motion blur is almost non-existent. So again, when I'm doing those beginner versus pro series, A lot of the time I can't get my shutter speed where I need it, but I'm not too worried about it because I know when I'm editing, I can just pop on some RSMB and it's all good. So here's what it looks like without RSMB. It looks good, but you can tell that it's kind of a high shutter speed.
Like there's a lot of movement happening, but every person on the swing thingy, there's no, there's not really a good amount of motion blur. Then we turn on RSMB immediately. Look at the difference in that frame right there. Just look right here.
Look at the difference already. So if we play that. Suddenly it just it feels more Cinematic like there's actual motion blur in an image that should frankly have motion blur And so when I'm editing videos, especially videos that have a lot of movement Like we just did a mountain biking one not that long ago that bugatti body video.
I always use RSMB because it just makes that movement feel even more dramatic. And in the context of creating a good cinematic video, you want that motion blur. So go check it out.
I think it's like a hundred bucks maybe, but I use it all the time. worth every penny. Again, if you want to get that LUT that I used and actually some of my other digital assets, I'm giving them away for free.
So just hit the link up here in the top right, top right, or hit the link in the description. And if you're new to content creation, you're trying to wrap your head around the basics like aperture, shutter speed, lighting, composition, go check out our $27 starter course. It basically takes the 10 most important topics from our full course and condenses them down into a crash course for a fraction of the price.
But either way, Thanks for watching and as always if you have any further questions, please let me know.