How We Filmed a Professional Multi-Cam Shoot with Final Cut Camera!

Welcome to part two of a completely new form of workflow. If you didn't hear, Apple just released a new app called Final Cut Camera, and you can now shoot with four iPhone cameras at the same time in 4K and automatically deliver the recordings wirelessly to an iPad running Final Cut Pro. In this episode, we're going to share some powerful tips and tricks on how to get your iPhone to look like a camera that's at least twice as expensive. Now, to learn how to set up Final Cut Camera, you need to go back and watch episode 32, where we outline every step and every tool that you'll need to make it work. But in this episode, we're going to address how to get the best quality out of Final Cut Camera, as well as highlight some gotchas that you'll definitely want to avoid on your productions. To do this, we're going to take you behind the scenes of our first Final Cut Camera Multicam shoot. So we're back on set again. Today, we have an influencer named Mia. She's also a cook. She does a lot of these cooking stories. And so she's actually going to be the camera operator of a camera setup. We want to capture whether or not it's even possible. And the best way to do that is to try it in real life. Hey guys, welcome back. And if you're new here, welcome. My name is Mia. We'll start with what I think is the biggest downside to using an iPhone as a primary camera, iPhone exposure. iPhone doesn't have an iris, which is arguably the most critical element in fine tuning exposure. One of the challenges with iPhone is they don't have irises that you can control. And so when you want to have a fixed shutter speed and you have limited ISO control, and you can't adjust that with a f-stop, you have to use an ND. So we're using a Tiffin Variable ND here on the B-Script adapter. It works pretty well, gives us that fine control we're looking for. And that way we can let our key light do the work that we want and not have the shutter to be too narrow. Now I know that an ND filter is not the same as an iris. I know that. But it's the closest solution that solves our iPhone exposure problems. B-Script makes the Beast Cage, which I think is the best smartphone cage on the market and retails for $150 US. I use Beast Cage not only because it's super rigid, but it has 10 quarter 20 mounts, a cold shoe mount, and a bracket mount for additional accessories. Most importantly, Beast Cage has a locking mechanism for external lens attachments, which can be rigged with a variable neutral density filter. B-Script makes the Pro Series Variable ND, which retails for $80 US. This comes in a 58 millimeter and 77 millimeter. We use the 77. But B-Script paired with an iPhone have another advantage in that they're so small and light, they're really easy to rig in tricky places. For this production, we wanted a camera angle above Mia's head so we could capture everything she's doing with her hands. I've rigged lots of overhead cameras in my career, but this was undoubtedly the easiest. Since the Beast Cage has quarter 20 mounts built in, we connected it to a standard quarter 20 threaded screw. We took a standard c-stand, a cardi clamp, a gobo head, and rigged it to a Matthews mini boom. I love the mini booms. Those things give us up to 80 inches of reach. Now critics of using iPhone as a primary camera need to consider the ease of use in configuring cameras in difficult places. Similarly, the Beast Cage has a cold shoe, so mounting hard drives and wireless microphones is also easy. We used a B-Script SSD clamp mount, which is only $34 to hold our large external USB-C drives to record the media. All of these tools make an iPhone really powerful, really accessible as a primary camera. Well, online influencers are usually on the move, so you need something compact, you need something small, and you need to get it turned in by the end of the day. Strada is all about accessibility, so what I hope the ultimate goal is today is that we can actually show that a four-camera shoot can be achieved by an extremely small crew, maybe a crew of one. That leads us to our next big issue. How do we get the best images out of an iPhone? Well, the answer to that should be super obvious. Good lighting. Good lighting is fundamental in making any camera look good. Using an iPhone's different. So cinematographer Shannon Stutenroth took some videos on her Location Scout since she knew the room was going to be bright, and she wants to be in control of the windows, which is a real concern when using phones as primary cameras. My approach to the lighting is very simple, frequent lighting, very natural, very bright, going off the style of what an influencer would use, like the natural daylight in their windows, in their kitchen. If I'm cooking something, I have to stop. The daylight changes, so automatically the lighting changes. For this, it's going to look seamless. We use the Aputure Nova as a key light to match the ambient brightness of the room. Then we shape that by adding a fill with the Amaran 300 into a bounce. Then we used InfiniBars to brighten the corner a bit and put a 300 outside for a hint of a backlight. For additional texture, we added shadows on the right with an Aputure 600 and added a leaf gobo, which projected onto the rear wall. You can get an array of Aputure Spotlight Gobos for $60. Since Aputure lights are lightweight and draw so little power, they're a perfect fit for multi-cam shoots and can be mounted on lightweight C-stands to give us what we need to control dynamic range. Speaking of dynamic range, what settings do we need to retain the most dynamic range out of an iPhone? Well, Final Cut Camera gives us two main options to shoot, ProRes or HEVC. ProRes is an intra-frame codec and HEVC is an inter-frame codec. This basically means HEVC groups frames together in effort to massively reduce file sizes. When I'm shooting on iPhone for its convenience, many times I would prefer to capture in HEVC to save on storage costs and download times. But there are two big problems with HEVC. First, Final Cut Camera does not allow you to shoot in log when capturing in HEVC. This means you have to shoot gamma corrected in SDR or HDR, which bakes in a pretty aggressive tone map onto your recordings. This dramatically reduces overall control of color and contrast manipulation in post. Apple's standard gamma corrected look, in my opinion, is just too strong. I find it to be too bright, too saturated, and too contrasty as a starting point. But there's even a bigger issue that you need to be aware of. The texture of an image is very different between HEVC and ProRes log. I first talked about this way back in episode 11, but it appears as though HEVC recordings have additional image processing applied. There's edge sharpening, increased contrast, and even some visible noise that isn't as prominent in ProRes. The ProRes log recordings seem to bypass most of the additional image processing. Look at this comparison. In HEVC, Mia's skin tone appears less smooth, the detail in her hair is over-sharpened, and the contrast curves appear a little artificial, and the noise floor is a little higher. Shooting ProRes log is not just about having more dynamic range or less compression, it's about the image texture. So if I had my way, Final Cut Camera would bypass image processing regardless of the gamma setting. If you use Blackmagic's camera app, they allow you to capture HEVC and log at the same time without image processing, so we know it's possible. And since Final Cut Camera is designed for more professional use, I find the additional image processing in HEVC mode, it's in my way. Therefore, I'm locked into shooting ProRes. But being locked into ProRes creates a second issue, file sizes. Remember, HEVC is an inter-frame compression codec, so it's really small. Our recordings were about a half hour long. And the girls are almost here, so I'm gonna go ahead and set up outside. I hope you enjoy. All right, we're gonna transfer now. That was 12 gigs. Once it's transferred, then you're gonna be able to edit everything onto your iPad, and it just does it over Wi-Fi. A half hour long HEVC file was only a little more than 4 gigabytes, but the same take in ProRes was over 125 gigabytes. That's way too big to move wirelessly, so when shooting ProRes, you have to deploy a manual download and copy process if you want to be able to shoot cleanly in log. So this is an area in which Apple has a lot of opportunity to improve, which leads us to our next problem, color. Take a look at all four cameras before any color correction is applied. You can see that the white point of the phones don't match, and this doesn't matter if you shoot in gamma corrected or in log. I went over how to set your white balance in episode 32, but even with your white balance matching, Final Cut Camera doesn't have any tint offset. So you can see the two shots of the food plates, they're fairly neutral, but the center camera is much greener, and our medium shot is somewhere in the middle. The truth is, when manufacturing millions of sensors, there's going to be variations of white points between them. Even the best cinema cameras in the world have this issue. But to get around this, you typically color correct for it using a red-green tint offset. But since Final Cut Camera only has access to Kelvin color temperature, you can't fine tune the white point. So this is something that you'll have to correct for in post, which is yet another reason not to shoot HEVC. The next issue is iPhone lenses. Back in episode 11, we did some great evaluations that you definitely should check out. Turns out, not all lenses on iPhone are equal in video quality. Let's look at this angle of Mia's table. Here in the HEVC, we wanted the focal length to be closer to the food, so we set the lens to 77mm. If we zoom in, we can see even more image processing on the telephoto lens. It's also got a higher signal-to-noise ratio, more edge sharpening, and overall less smoothness in high-frequency details. With all that video enhancement going on, the food looks synthetic and not all that appetizing. But these artifacts aren't as prominent when shooting on the 24mm stock lens. So why not use a 24 all the time? Well, first, it's so wide that it has more depth of field, so there's less separation between foreground and background. Second, a 24mm is just not a flattering focal length for a close-up. So to improve the look here, we switched to ProRes Log and added a B-Script Pro Series 1.7 telephoto lens, which retails for $209 US. This external lens uses the high-quality iPhone 24mm lens and gives us a nice close-up with shallower depth of field. Actually, a pretty nice bokeh too. The image is a lot less sharp, and it makes the food look a lot more enticing. Now, back in episode 32, we go over all the procedures on how to connect 4 iPhones to an iPad as multi-cams. Most of the time, this works, but not always. The truth is, this technology is barely a month old, so by the time you watch this video, I'm hopeful that connection improvements are in the works, maybe even deployed. But over the course of several weeks of testing, we connected half a dozen iPhones to Final Cut Pro, and we noticed that some of the phones connected instantly, every time. Other phones did not. Now, we could not discern a pattern since they were all on the same OS, the same network, and the same model, but each phone belongs to a different user, and therefore has different apps and different settings, and it's possible that somewhere deep in the iPhone lies an issue that makes it difficult to connect. On your iPhone, go to Settings, Apple ID, iCloud, Password and Keychain. Enabling this may help the reliability of connections between Final Cut Camera on iPhone and Final Cut Pro on iPad. If for some reason that doesn't work, start with forgetting the device from Final Cut Pro on the iPad and establish a new connection. And if that doesn't work, delete the Final Cut Camera app from the phone and start over from there. Today is absolutely the most complicated way to use an iPhone. Multi-cam, 4K, log files, sound syncing, and transferring files and editing on an iPad. But on the other hand, it's also really easy. It's really accessible. And as the bugs get worked out and the reliability gets to be improved, that is totally how I would want to work with any camera. It's straight from the cameras to the iPad. There's no exporting, importing. It's almost like a motherboard. You control everything from one screen. It's nice because I still kind of get to do my job as a cinematographer with the iPhone. I'm still lighting the same. I'm still using kind of all the same tricks to make it look the way that it does. As usual, I expect criticisms of shooting on an iPhone on this project. But what drives me at Strata is to remain curious, to be willing to try new things, and to broaden my knowledge with emerging technology. I think it boils down to this. If you want the most advanced iPhone cinematography control, use the Blackmagic Camera app, which is the most complex. If you want the easiest solution, use the built-in Apple Camera app, which provides the least control. And if you want to be in the middle, try Final Cut Camera, which unlocks a new and unique multi-cam post-production workflow. At Strata, we aim to constantly explore ways to improve accessibility for storytellers of every kind. And our product is now in beta, and we invite you to sign up and send us an email at beta at strata.tech and tell us a little bit about yourself. We would love to get you on the beta wait list so you can help us build a tool that makes workflows like Final Cut Camera even better.