Writings about film making by Jason Hawkins

On Saturday I bought a 16GB iPhone 3GS. On Sunday Meagan and I went to Sail Boston to see the tall ships hanging out in the harbor. I couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity to try out the 3GS’s video mode, the result of which can be found above.

Overall I’m impressed. I was able to achieve a selective focus with a little bit of planning, and the quasi-manual exposure control is handy. I was expecting a frame size larger than 640 by 480, but I suppose that leaves room for the iPhone HD next summer. Even so, I cropped the frame’s ratio from 1:1.33 to 1:1.68 which gave the perception of true widescreen. It sacrifices a little bit of vertical resolution, but most people probably aren’t going to notice.

I spent a few hours doing the editing and color grading, although it should be noted that the raw footage is pretty impressive on its own. Color saturation is fantastic and the auto exposure & white balance worked well in most situations. After importing I had to render the audio before I could play it back in Final Cut, which seemed odd. Sending the project to Color went smoothly, but I must have had some old settings in there because when I sent it back to Final Cut suddenly I was working in ProRes. I went from a data rate of about 3,000 kbps to 64 mbps.

That’s not exactly an efficient use of disk space.

Anyway, I’m excited to see what other people do with the the phone, video wise. I wouldn’t be surprised to see entire filmmaking communities develop around the device. It’s just so much fun to shoot with, and to challenge yourself in spite of the hardware’s limitations.

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