FiLMiC Pro has been my go to app for mobile video for the past few years. Whether I want to shoot a quick personal clip or shoot some behind the scenes footage, it mostly works great. There’s one or two issues, like drifting audio and no ability to shoot 23.976fps (it does exactly 24), but it’s still the most useful video app out there. One thing that’s a big problem common to all mobile video apps, though, is the contrast and colour typically provided by most phones sucks. The team behind FiLMiC Pro are getting around this by giving us a Log profile in future update, though. This produces an extremely flat shot out of camera, but allows for capture of more dynamic range. Filmmaker Matteo Bertoli got his hands on it early, and posted up some sample clips to YouTube.
There’s two short films. The first shows the ungraded footage straight out of FiLMiC Pro on the iPhone 7 Plus. Shot at 4K, 24fps, 100mbps with a 2.59 aspect ratio, it doesn’t look immediately impressive as a final result. But, that’s because log footage isn’t intended to be final. It’s designed to retain as much detail as possible so that you can give it the final look in post.
The second video is exactly the same, but shows Matteo’s final correction and grading.
The difference between the two is striking. Although the shadows are a little dark for my tastes, the comparison does show the advantage of shooting flat. It’s a marked improvement over the standard iPhone footage. It’s very easy to add contrast and colour back into a flat shot in post, but an over-saturated clip with blown highlights and shadows often can’t be easily recovered. The log footage isn’t perfect, though. In some shots, you can see a lot of noise in shadows (which is probably why they were crushed so much). That being said, it’s a whole lot better than the default footage that comes out of the iPhone by default, or at least my iPhone SE. With regard to the two issues I mentioned up top, here’s my solutions. I’ve seen others talking about the drifting issue, too on various forums and Facebook groups. But it’s pretty easy to fix. All you need to do is rename your .mov files to .mp4, and you’re done. Premiere Pro has no more problems, the drifting disappears completely and everything works as it should. As for lacking 23.976fps, well, we’ll just have to deal with the hassle of transcoding footage until the guys at FiLMiC Pro give it to us. FiLMiC Pro has come on a lot since those early versions, and it just keeps getting better. This latest update will be a very welcome one for me. There’s no news yet on exactly when the update will be released, but you can keep updated on the FiLMiC Pro website. With the footage now out there, though, I would expect that it’ll probably be quite soon. What do you use for shooting video on your phone? Are you using something other than FiLMiC Pro? Will you switch once the log profile arrives? Let us know in the comments. [via 9to5Mac]
