Tuesday I shot a bunch of interviews on a Sony EX1 for a promotional video for the game I'm working on. Not all the interviews turned out to be what we wanted, so, not wanting to spend $300 to rent it for another day, I wound up shooting more interviews today on my iPhone.
The picture quality on the iPhone is pretty good. I had two issues with it. One is that its has an omnidirectional microphone that picks up the person talking and every air conditioner and truck backing up for miles around. The other is that it constantly adjusts its virtual iris to light conditions, so that if you pan past a bright window, it will reduce its light sensitivity over the whole frame ("stopping down"), which makes everything go dark except the window.
There are theoretically external microphones for the iPhone. I'm considering buying the Owle Bubo. This is an aluminum frame for holding the phone or attaching it to a tripod; a wide-angle lens; and an external microphone. I have no idea how you switch inputs so that you're not using the internal microphone.
Somewhere out there, maybe there is an app that records video but allows you to manually adjust the virtual iris and lock it down. At any rate, there ought to be one. Anyone know of one? Anyone want to program one?
The picture quality on the iPhone is pretty good. I had two issues with it. One is that its has an omnidirectional microphone that picks up the person talking and every air conditioner and truck backing up for miles around. The other is that it constantly adjusts its virtual iris to light conditions, so that if you pan past a bright window, it will reduce its light sensitivity over the whole frame ("stopping down"), which makes everything go dark except the window.
Somewhere out there, maybe there is an app that records video but allows you to manually adjust the virtual iris and lock it down. At any rate, there ought to be one. Anyone know of one? Anyone want to program one?
Incidentally, two lessons about promotional videos. They can eat up days of your time. They also eat up quite a lot of the rest of the team's time; you wind up pulling people off their jobs so they can pretend to be working somewhere else in the frame that works better in the shot.
But the upside is they force to think about what you're delivering. It's easy during the creatie process to forget what you're selling to the audience. Shooting a promotional video focuses you on your main selling points. Then as you go back into your creative work, you may be able to spend more time on delivering on your main selling points, and less time on the frills.
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