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The Telegraph used an iPhone to film, edit and upload instant video reviews from Glastonbury festival. Chris Stone reviews the accessories he used to do it.
Mention filming on a smartphone in professional video circles and you'll generally be met with a barrage of derision. While camera phone design has come a long way, the limitations are considerable when compared to a professional video camera.
However, a host of companies have developed some innovative solutions to these problems. For The Telegraph's coverage of Glastonbury 2013 I put some of those accessories to the test, to find out if it was possible to turn a smartphone into a professional journalism workhorse. With a few pieces of external hardware, I was able to shoot, edit and deliver instant on-the-ground video reports direct from the festival for immediate inclusion in our live blog and our YouTube channel I've Just Seen. Here's how I did it.
CAMERA – iPhone 5
While there are many excellent, arguably superior, smartphones on the market, most accessory manufacturers have geared their product line towards Apple's iPhone. Our decision was made for us.
LENSES – Olloclip (£59.99)
The Olloclip is a small, simple to use lens attachment which slides onto the corner of the phone. The current model features three lenses in one: a wide angle, a fish-eye and a macro. I found myself using the wide angle on almost every video I made, not just to counter the iPhone's ludicrously narrow image but also to capture the scale of the event – and it worked perfectly. The fish-eye and macro are much more stylistic, and therefore I used them less frequently. The Olloclip fast became one of my favourite pieces of kit, and I would now find it indispensable for iPhone filming and photography.
AUDIO – iRig Pre (£24.99) and iRig Mic (£49.99)
Audio was important because I was recording presenters speaking to camera and wanted to attach professional microphones with a 3-pin XLR connection. The iRig Pre is a handy little preamp which takes takes an XLR input and turns it into a 3.5mm TRRS jack which the iPhone will accept, while the iRig mic is a handheld microphone which plugs directly into the iphone itself. Both have a built in headphone socket allowing users to monitor audio when paired with the iRig Recorder app, which also allows you to control levels. The iRig mic was particularly impressive at eliminating background noise, while the iRig pre was quick and simple to use. I did find it tricky to get the input levels right with no markings on the unit's gain control, but with a bit of practice I was recording perfectly acceptable audio – far better than I would have expected on a phone.
STABILISATION – Steadicam Smoothee (£139)
The Steadicam was first created for the famous tracking shots in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror, “The Shining”. Three decades on and Steadicam have joined the smartphone accessories race with the Smoothee. An ingeniously simple balanced weight system holds the phone steady on a frictionless ball joint, meaning you can achieve wonderfully steady, gliding shots. After a bit of practice the Smoothee is deceptively simple to use, and incredibly effective. The unit relies on weight and balance, so unfortunately by the time I had attached all my other accessories it was impossible to get the steady glide I wanted. Despite this I used the Smoothee on every shot without fail, as even by gripping the base unit with my hand – which you're not supposed to do – I was achieving a much steadier shot than would have been possible by just about any other means.
LIGHTING – Manfrotto KLYP & 24 LED (£79.95)
With the iPhone's notorious inability to deal with low light situations, the KLYP was a piece of kit I was looking to rely heavily on for night-time reports. The LED lamp was certainly effective at delivering a blast of soft, white light where it's needed, and the on-board dimmer switch meant I had direct control of the levels. Sadly the iphone struggled with the contrast between the light from the LED and the dark background. It gave me a functional image, but not a pretty one.
360 STILLS & VIDEOS – Bubblescope (£49.99)
Part of my remit was to deliver “colour” to the Telegraph's Glastonbury live blog. Enter the Bubblescope. Using a clever system of mirrors and lenses, it enabled me to create 360 degree tableaux much like Google's streetview images. This is a wonderful concept which proved popular on the live blog, but the Bubblescope is not without its limitations. The 360 image is extracted from a small doughnut-shaped picture on the iphone camera, so it suffers from pixellation (and, unsurprisingly, warping) when blown up to its full scale. The Bubblescope would also benefit from a tripod attachment and timer function: currently the unit relies on being hand-held which makes it very difficult to frame out the photographer's grinning face. This might be fine for most users but for creative purposes it would be useful to not have to feature in every bubble.
EDIT SUITE – iMovie (£2.99)
After experimenting with a couple of different editing apps, I chose iMovie for its simplicity and ease of use. Of course it is limited, but it proved surprisingly efficient for making very basic cuts and very easy to pick up. I would have liked to be able to add more than one video track, or to make a cut in the middle of a clip rather than importing different parts of a clip then butting them together, but for the purposes of a quick chop job it more than sufficed. I exported my clip to the Photo roll, then uploaded to YouTube via the Capture app. Over a crowded 3G network this would have been intermittent at best, but on 4G I was uploading 90 second videos in approximately real time.
My video colleagues might laugh at me, but I am a convert to the use of smartphones for professional news gathering - under the right circumstances. With a few accessories it is possible to make the iPhone work harder than I thought possible, and the ability to shoot, edit and upload using just one little unit is incredibly beguiling. It will never be a professional camera, and I would always advocate shooting on the best kit available and editing properly when circumstances allow. But when you need to turn around short clips instantly and file from the - or indeed a - field, the technology is finally there to do so.
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