Tablet and Mobile

Posts Tagged ‘peter scargill’

Unlike previous models, iPhone 4 has a reasonable camera on it – and iPhone 4s even better. Yet time and time again I see people churning our terrible photos and videos using these devices.

The following are just a few tips to ensure you get the best from your iPhone.

Firstly – the deal-breakers:

Lighting – if you know the lighting will be poor, forget it. The iPhones are awful at handling low light, often resulting in blurring and grainy images.

Sound – ever stood in a church or large school hall – that kind of hollow sound (which is related to echo but faster) – the internal microphone in the iPhone suffers from such effects at just a few feet from the mic (like most phones). Get a plug-in external mic – preferably with a long lead. Maplins do a great lapel-mic (though I had to change the plug to make it fit the iPhone  – I’m sure an adaptor is available).

Tripod – no matter how hard you try, holding iPhone by hand is not going to work well – you can remove shake in software but it doesn’t hold a candle to starting off with the phone mounted on a rock-solid surface such as a decent tripod. Look up eBay for suitable clamps. There’s a tripod here but I would not recommend sticking the zoom lens on – pictures look awful..

Dirt and Grease – the big let-down here is the lens – the slightest bit of grease, finger-print, dirt on the lens will ruin the quality because of its tiny size. Don’t even consider taking a video or pictures unless the lens is spotlessly cleaned with a soft, dry cloth (commonly known as an unused handkerchief).

Duration – you should always use the best quality settings to get high quality you need lots of memory – stick with videos segments of a few minutes each if possible or you’re going to spend all day getting the material onto your PC.

Here then is how I have managed to produce half-decent quality video, given decent lighting. I use an iPhone 4.

I purchased a tie-clip microphone from Maplins for under £20 – and this plugs into the iPhone (effectively preventing the speaker working while it is plugged in). The lead is 3 metres long, suitable for interviews. I had to change the plug for the iPhone).

The App I use is called Filmic Pro and It will take video at the highest quality (1280px * 720px, 24 frames/second) at 16:9 format – this ensures a quite reasonable image with no unpredictable changes occurring. Automatic sound level control is turned off.

The image below shows the controls – the one below that shows what they are for. Essentially you make sure the brilliance and focus are right, start the recording, set all 3 controls to ON… and start your video.

And below, the help screen.

The controls are easy – “focus lock” will stop the focus changing if someone walks past the camera. Modern low-cost autofocus systems work the wrong way – if they are just out of focus they go WAY out of focus – then work their way back toward sharp focus. “Exposure lock” stops the camera dimming if light levels change which they do all the time in any moving scene. “White balance” takes a little more thought – the camera wants to compensate for too much of any one colour – to get professional results you have to make sure the imagery looks right at the start – then use the control to LEAVE It that way.

Essentially you then make your recording – then using the normal iPhone lead to your PC, offload the file to the PC – doing this wirelessly might not be a good idea when the file is large. Incidentally the iPhone is probably not your best choice for long meetings or interviews – you will run out of memory – don’t be tempted to chose a lower quality setting. In a test I took a 2 minute video and the file was over 200MB long. So this approach is best for short interviews of a few minutes – or multiple scenes take at different locations.

The App is set to record at the highest setting, 24fps, 16:9 format.. and it outputs MOV files which you can then import into an editor.

Some more setting screenshots..

That’s it, if you want more information, let me know.

Recently made available (Wednesday 8th Sept) the new iPhone operating system upgrade IOS4.1 has something for everyone, apparently. For those souls unfortunate enough to have the new iPhone 4, the operating system will bring new HDR features but you’ll still need that band around your phone – not that most people know what HDR means (but will by the end of this blog)… fear not, there’s “an app for that” for the rest of us.

The operating system upgrade to IOS4.1 also features various fixes and speed improvements.  See the Apple store if you want more info – no point in me repeating it here…  though the details on the site are a bit vague at the time of writing, strange considering they’ve now released the upgrade.

Apple won’t make a big deal about the fact that they’ve also taken the opportunity to plug another hole which up to now allowed jailbreaking of the phone – which you may recall was recently made legitimate! However if you’re not planning on jailbreaking the iPhone, that won’t bother you. I could not see sufficient justification given the rather motley selection of apps in the CYDIA store, so I went for the upgrade.

For those of you who’ve never updated their iPhone – it’s a doodle, just make sure the phone is charged, follow the instructions, be patient and you’ll soon be in new operating system heaven – OR you’ll own a BRICK if it doesn’t work. In my case I plugged my iPhone into the PC, ignored the message about backing up etc… and pressed the update button…  I got a notice on the screen….

and 11 minutes later… and another glass of wine down the hatch… the iPhone insisted on doing a backup which I was convinced was going to take weeks given that I have hundreds of Apps on there – but no, it took only a few minutes. As I was sitting praying for no power cuts, the software effortlessly backed up everything, then upgraded the phone with a few beeps here and there but very little else to indicate that the phone was having a lobotomy.

As I watched, the phone reset (always a worry) and a minute later the PC said “updating the phone software” as a little progress bar on the iPhone moved slowly from left to right assuring me I hadn’t converted my phone into a brick…I’m guessing 5 minutes in total during which I was more tense than during an episode of “24”.

At the end of the upgrade my heart almost stopped when I heard the cheersome “beepBEEP” which indicated that the iPhone was ALIVE AND WELL.

Oh, I should say I was updating from 4.01 to 4.1 – I missed out the intermediate update as it really didn’t offer much except plugging another leak.  You have to hand it to Apple, they do make the updates rather easy and seamless.

I checked the phone – and iTunes to ensure everything was ok. I’m still working on this one…

This is a worry, as it’s a 16Gig phone – on the other hand it says I’ve only used a couple of hundred meg which is rubbish – TomTom uses more than that… so I’m not particularly worried that I have nearly 7 gig left… here’s the important bit…

and on power-up the only thing that’s immediately obvious is… the new GAME CENTRE (or CENTER as some might say).

Other than that, things look pretty much like normal – it would be nice if they’d introduce a little pop-up guide to what’s new. Anyway… that’s it – job done! Rumour has it that 4.2 will be available on the IPAD in November! Maybe they’ll fix the naff WIFI locating software.

Ok, so what about the 3GS users left with no HDR and what on EARTH is HDR anyway?

HDR is not hi-definition as someone suggested today but high dynamic range.

Those of you with long memories may remember cassette tapes – which had low dynamic range (bear with me on this).  At one end of the range, quiet sounds could be drowned out by hiss – at the other end if you recorded too loudly, the sound would distort. Along came CDs and all of that became history, you could now have from the quietest whisper to the loudest bang. Problem solved, no-one even thinks about it any more (except that lots of people still use such rubbishy loudspeakers that it’s all fairly academic and those of us over 50 can only hear half of the notes anyway – my hearing USED to go to around 19Kz, it’s now stone dead above 12Khz).

But we’re still there with cameras – the dynamic range of many phones is TERRIBLE…  so – what does this mean? Look at any scene say with buildings and the sun behind them… your eyes can see all the building details – and with a little effort, the sun. Point your camera at the same scene… you will have an exposure choice of getting the SKY detail with the buildings too dark – or the buildings with a whitened-out sky…  this is one example, there are many.. the fact is the camera just can’t handle the RANGE of brilliance.

So how to get around that… well, the BEST answer would be to have sensors that can handle everything from the dimmest light output to the brightest star – sadly the only ones which do that cost obscene amounts of money and usually sit in space telescopes… getting this on our mobiles phones? Not a chance, for now.

Another way (though it has it’s issues) is to take TWO or more shots at different exposures, one set for the sky, the other set for the buildings in this case, then somehow MERGE the two images taking the best of both. USELESS for fast moving scenes but EXCELLENT for your static shots – not entirely AUTHENTIC but really good looking.

THAT is what the new iPhone will do – and you can get a PRETTY close approximation on the 3GS for the staggering price of under 2 QUID. The APP is called PRO HDR, it does the lot automatically, I don’t work for them, I’ve tried the rest and they don’t do the job well  -this does… so if you want HDR pics on your “old” 3GS phone – there’s your answer.

So on the left, what you’re looking at is a pair of photos the software took automatically at Kings Cross in London… the TOP photo shows the rather grim skyline in September… with some detail in the clouds – but the building – well, nothing. The SECOND photo shows the building – but the sky is totally whitened out. I should say I did NOT do this manually, the PRO HDR software did this totally automatically.

The result, well judge for yourself… personally I’m WELL impressed. Not that sharp as my hand was shaking like a food mixer in the crowd when I took the shot – but notice  – full detail in the building – full detail in the clouds… that’s what you can look forward to with your iPhone be it the new or the old!

 

Update: 11/09/2010

Just as I was about to scrap the older TrueHDR on my iPhone in favour of ProHDR, along came an UPDATE – and guess what – they now automatically take THREE pictures in a row-  the ONE thing that was wrong with that package. So now there are TWO options for HDR lovers.

If you take a look at the photo on the right, normally with two bright screens the background would be utterly black… and without the screens you’d have a choice of seeing the inside or some detail outside. In this shot, you see all three together, just as your eyes would have it. This was taken using the TrueHDR package.

I hope this is helpful, if you find anything better do let me know. If you want to follow my interest, you could do worse than follow @scargill

 

Regards

 

Peter Scargill