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herunan
sneak
Free or not free, I am surprised to see that this includes absolutely no phone-home of any kind. “Data not collected.”
Kudos to Blackmagic.
(Resolve can also work 100% offline, with the license dongle, and is buy-once, not subscriptionware like Premiere. I am a very happy Blackmagic customer.)
pdpi
The thing that most impresses me about Blackmagick is how they seem to scale with you from tiny projects to pretty big stuff. From the ATEM Mini all the way to big consoles, from the pocket cameras up to the Ursa etc.
This just looks like it’ll drop the low end of that range even lower.
user3939382
“No data collected” is the tag I want to see on the app store next to the one that tells you if there are in-app purchases.
Willamin
This is present in the App Store. It's not a short line-item similar to in-app puchase presence, instead it's a full-width card that indicates details on what information is collected.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/app-privacy-details/
The only caveat is that it's developer-published information that Apple doesn't verify.
dylan604
If you buy a BMD camera, you get a free license for the full version of Resolve.
silent_cal
Hope they get compensated for their generosity
strogonoff
Blackmagic’s reputation took a major hit after their infamous CinemaDNG bait-and-switch.
They made true interoperable raw video format a selling point of their BMPCC lineup, only to irreversibly cripple units later by removing CinemaDNG support after the fact. This dramatically narrowed toolchain options (mostly to Blackmagic’s own software suite), effectively making cameras useless for enthusiast FOSS videographers. Furthermore, the hush-hush way they pulled it off using a firmware update says something about their ethical standards, so as a rule I’m not using their products anymore.
The fact that they offer a cheap software product of their own (even with a free version) in no way justifies removing features (especially support for an open format with a thriving FOSS ecosystem) in a camera that they already sold.
dannyw
Edit: The CEO confirmed it was due to patent infringement claims by Nikon: https://ymcinema.com/2019/03/19/the-obsolescence-of-cinemadn...
It's not clear if this was a choice. RED has a patent on in-camera loseless RAW that is compressed, and have been aggressively going after other camera makers (including Nikon) for offering the feature.
To my knowledge, Nikon and RED are the only brands that offer in-camera compressed loseless RAW, and Nikon settled with RED [1].
BRAW is okay as it is lossy (not loseless).
Other RAW formats from brands in video are not compressed in-camera.
[1]: https://www.newsshooter.com/2023/04/28/red-patent-lawsuit-ag...
dharma1
I have both the original BMPCC and the 4k Pocket. When the BRAW firmware came out (forced by RED patents - they for some obscure reason have been able to patent compressed raw video) I did extensive tests - there is no discernible difference at the higher BRAW settings. And you can always keep your old firmware or downgrade to it later - there was no crippling of units.
While I wish they would have been able to keep the compressed CDNG, BRAW is great to work with. Sigma FP (great camera too), as you mentioned elsewhere, does uncompressed CDNG. The data rates fo 4k 12bit uncompressed CDNG are pretty shocking - 2400Mbit/s. At that point you can't record it internally anymore and can only record on a fast SSD. It could be nice to have that as an option on Blackmagic cameras too, but to be honest I don't miss it since BRAW arrived - the files get huge.
It's a shame RED was awarded a patent for in-camera lossless compressed RAW video. Even Apple tried to sue them and lost.
dharma1
Blackmagic are awesome, run by a fantastic founder-CEO. They give a bunch of software away for free (Resolve basic version) - I guess enough of it converts to users of their paid stuff like the hardware and Blackmagic Cloud and Resolve Studio.
Been a user of their hardware and software for years, nothing but good things to say about it.
jorvi
It’s not just the direct conversion.
If every little kid trying to edit game clips or home movies does so in Davinci Resolve because it’s easier and safer than cracking Premiere or Final Cut, it eventually becomes cheaper for companies to also use Resolve, rather than retrain people.
For the same reason, Microsoft never really aggressively curtailed Windows piracy. Better to have a pirated user demanding Windows at the workplace than a user demanding macOS.
internetter
My take as well. Why not make windows free if it’s trivial to pirate already? Well, because you aren’t the target consumer.. not yet, anyway
_joel
Same, it's even used in large public UK broadcasters as it's good gear.
meatjuice
It's not just free to install, basically everything is free except for cloud service they provide.
qingcharles
It's designed as a loss leader for their other products. Most notably their cloud storage.
javchz
You're right. And I think a side effect it's being gateway product for their hardware software ecosystem like their PCI cards, color correction surfaces and cameras.
supernova87a
Maybe I missed it, but is there maybe a side-by-side comparison of the footage that usually comes out of an iPhone camera versus how it can look (with light, simple controls) out of this Blackmagic app?
And question for others, while I'm at it. What was it about Blackmagic cameras or software (or company) that "broke the curve of what you could get for the same $" versus like RED or whoever expensive studio cameras? Did they do something clever with the hardware and controls to get much more out of consumer grade sensors? Or did they make tradeoffs that you eventually hit against when you try to use their cameras for real professional high-duty purposes?
dylan604
Blackmagic was essentially started by a hacker in Grant Petty, and you can tell. RED took the existing ethos of the industry that says everything must be expensive and reserved for the elites. Sony is just Sony, and Alexa came from Arri which doubles the price of anything to put its name on it. BMD is the ultimate in "disruptor" category to me. Fuck your Uber or Musk examples, Grant Petty is a gawd! /s Really, though, he's pretty damn cool. Urban legend says that he even wrote the first drivers of his competitor AJA boards.
When BMD bought Da Vinci, they got a huge acquihire leg up on color science. Recording RAW at the sizes cinema cameras do requires fast storage that just wasn't cheap when RED/Alexa came about. Even with cheap storage, neither of those companies are going to debase themselves by lowering prices. There's a lot of technical reasons why BMD cameras can be cheaper, but the main reason is corporate ethos at BMD is totally different than other players.
ancientworldnow
BMD does amazing work for the price, but it's decidedly still not Arri quality and only Sony is competitive there. I work with footage from all these cameras as well as celluloid etc and have for over a decade. While BMD absolutely can look fantastic, it's typically much more work to get it there. If you're in a difficult situation, then it's not even close to how superior Venice or Alexa are.
I mostly work in Resolve so I'm partial to BM and appreciative of their work if it helps to establish neutrality (though I'm also experienced in baselight, flame, etc).
Reach for the tools you can! BMD can create great looking imagery when treated properly.
wmf
RED took the existing ethos of the industry that says everything must be expensive
It's hilarious to read this since the opposite was true in the beginning; Red was the one cutting corners to reach really low prices.
dylan604
>to reach really low prices.
really low when compared to what? $50k USD for a camera body is not really low prices. $1500 USD for a memory card is not really low.
grouchomarx
>Sony is just Sony
They make the sensors found in nearly every Blackmagic camera and are now taking a large part of the market with Venice and the FX9. No one has ever accused Arri of being arbitrarily expensive because their product is simply the best, perfectly manufactured, and totally reliable
Blackmagic is excellent for the industry and I use Resolve professionally
oktoberpaard
The app gives you control over things like the color space, codecs, lens correction, LUT, etc., as well as better monitoring and manual adjustments. For that reason I think it’s not really useful to show a straight out of camera comparison, as the results very much depend on how you use these options and whether or not you intend to do color grading. Without adjusting the defaults, you’ll get a 4K h256 rec.709 video, whereas the default app will give you an HDR video, which might look better straight out of the camera, provided that the exposure and camera work are equally good.
nvahalik
The iPhone's AVAsset* framework system is... intense. For "simple" stuff nowadays it seems like the amount of work you have to do just to get bootstrapped is a lot. But it also seems insanely powerful for all kinds of stuff and would make it possible to do a whole heck of a lot without having to hardware hack.
avtar
> What was it about Blackmagic cameras or software (or company) that "broke the curve of what you could get for the same $" versus like RED or whoever expensive studio cameras?
They pack a lot of features for cheap that usually are found in more expensive cameras. Check feature comparisons for the Pocket 4K or 6K with pricier cameras like the A7S III or later. Their camera UI is by far one of the best designed ones compared to Sony or Panasonic. You get to use their efficient BRAW codec. And they include a copy of the Studio version of DaVinci Resolve.
dmbche
Resolve is free, which is a massive deal to amateur filmmakers.
The BMPCC4k prioritised having RAW, 4k, and being affordable. They cost 2-3k new at the time, competing with cameras that cost 15k and up. Raw is a massive, massive deal, and I argue is the thing separating pro gear from amateur.
Their image quality and color science is arguably "less good" than Arri or RED, but the difference is imperceptible for 99% of people.
Unless you're shooting someone juggling fire in a pitch black room, the images coming out of their cameras are as good as you can hope for.
I shoot documentary, and I just do not see a reason to buy another camera. It's just "chefs kiss"
CharlesW
> Resolve is free, which is a massive deal to amateur filmmakers.
Also, Resolve Studio¹ is just a $300 one-time payment. So far, updates have always been free.
¹ https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/stu...
gizajob
They’re an order or magnitude two cheaper thanks to innovative and cost-effective engineering solutions from Melbourne, and offer professional connectivity alongside the ability to work with uncompressed or lightly-compressed codecs. Repurposing Off-the-shelf parts too, such as image sensors designed for other uses (such as smartbombs and guided missiles) rather than developing everything in-house. Their FPGA and high-speed dsp engineering is first-class too, and they seem to get this done with fewer,smarter people than say Sony, who have buildings full of engineers spending much of their lives writing design documents and then specifying things correctly at length before building - Blackmagic just hack it together and make it work.
FirmwareBurner
> Repurposing Off-the-shelf parts too, such as image sensors designed for other uses (such as smartbombs and guided missiles)
Interesting. Do you have any sources on this? Afaik smart bombs don't use cutting edge professional cinema camera class sensors but aerospace ones which are much older, lower-res and rudimentary but well tested over the years.
robomartin
> Blackmagic just hack it together and make it work.
This isn't even remotely true. Nobody at that scale just hacks it together. That sort of approach works for articles on various hardware hacking websites, not for real-life design and manufacturing of products.
gizajob
You'd be amazed...
They're hacking together extremely professionally, but I'd imagine many engineers at BMD consider themselves hacking and what they do to be hacking, but I don't have access to any. I'd say my general premise is true though.
ilyt
given that line
> such as image sensors designed for other uses (such as smartbombs and guided missiles)
I'd assume comment above was satire
dcow
As a non-film person, can someone explain what it means to create the same cinematic ‘look’ as Hollywood feature films? What is Blackmagic doing when recording video to make the video feel more professional?
javchz
Marketing aside, cinematic in this context means more or less "manual control".
Something that makes a video look amateurish, it's the phone trying its best to prioritise a 'clear image', but that means changing parameters mid-recording.
Now, this isn't bad, it's ideal for someone who doesn't want to lose the moment without worrying about choosing the right setting (imagine a parent recording their child's recital or soccer game). But the trade-off is that it looks choppy.
But if you're in a controlled environment, you can set a fixed exposure (balance between ISO, shutter speed and aperture), framerate, bit-depth, focus distance, colour temperature and microphone gain depending on your intent.
As an example, image you want to have a high-contrast image with a dark silluette of someone and a bright background like a sunset, the default phone camera app will try to guess whether you want to focus on the subject or the background, and will switching between the two randomly. With manual control, you can chose, whatch you want.
zimpenfish
> Something that makes a video look amateurish [...] changing parameters mid-recording
A prime example of this is leaving autofocus on when you're moving about. There's many YouTubers who haven't yet learnt this lesson and it can make the video unwatchable.
KineticLensman
Yes. It’s very rare to see the focus change during a movie or TV show. The main exception is when the focus switches between two people talking, when their positions are known in advance and dialled in so there isn’t any visible hunting
abm53
I’ve seen enough videos with otherwise high production values to make me suspect there is a valid trade-off to keeping autofocus on.
londons_explore
If Apple wanted to put an engineering team on solving this problem, they could record all the raw sensor data for the video, with the regular 'auto' settings, then, after the clip is recorded, decide what shutter speed, iso, etc to use, and then reprocess that raw data to simulate what that moment in time would have looked like with a different shutter speed.
I''m sure modern neural nets would do a decent job of simulating what a frame taken with one iso/shutter/focus would look like with a slightly different iso/shutter/focus.
dannyw
First, I doubt users ask for this though. Those who want it, are going to use a manual videography app like OP. The 99.9% wants a camera that just works.
Second, modern neural nets are good, but not perfect. I can reliably tell if something was shot with real bokeh, or simulated via software. For serious productions like a commercial shoot, nobody wants to change the shutter speed, aperture, etc in shoot: the DP already knows what look they want before they start filming.
readbeard
How could you change the shutter speed in post?
2143
Tangent that kind of seems relevant here¹:
Read the Foreword written by Gerald Sussman (SICP author) of the book The Little Schemer.
The most beautiful Foreword I have ever read so far.
¹(The Foreword talks about photography a little bit).
AdamN
The TLDR; version of this is the progression from amateur to expert: 1/ controls are set wrong in the first place, 2/ computer changes controls during the shot but it's distracting and obvious, 3/ controls are set right in the first place and everything looks good and consistent, 4/ expert modifies the controls mid-shot (and the shot requires this) and it looks awesome because everything is changing which allows the shooter's expertise to shine through.
undefined
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pen2l
More than anything it's about color correction and color grading.
This video explains it nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAh83khT1no
If you are starting out with good data (e.g. 32bit exr workflow), you would be amazed how powerfully and easily you can control what you want and what the possibilities are, with tools like MagicBullet (which offer presets to get you the cinema look with just a mouse click). But if you work long enough in this area you can discover your own workflow and pull it off without these tools, e.g. play with hue&sat, white balance adjustments, the curves, introducing an S-curve for example, color wheels, etc.
Eduard
> More than anything it's about color correction and color grading.
to my (literal) perception, using a framerate of 24 frames per second is an even more significant requirement to get the "cinematic Hollywood look".
maven29
Isn't the 180 degree shutter angle more crucial than the distinction between 24 and 30?
varispeed
Why 24 fps format is still being used? I personally can't stand it. It's like watching a slide show.
I can't wait when Hollywood moves to 120fps or better.
goosinmouse
In this case its software that treats the iphone as a camera of their own. Looking at the screenshots, the UI/UX is extremely similar to current blackmagic cinema cameras. So you can have two camera operators, or the iphone on a tripod or whatever, and each camera operator will know which settings their camera has and to typically match both the film cameras. Like a quick visual check that both cameras are at the same shutter speed or shutter angle, resolution, white balance and tint, and having the same style of histogram so they can match exposure on both cameras.
Its actually fairly neat and cool that they put time and money into this app to further their ecosystem. I guess theres a large overlap of people that film with iphones and also want to buy a legitimately good, budget cinema camera in the pocket 4k/6k.
I don't know HN's opinion of blackmagic, but they do some pretty cool stuff. With the purchase of a camera they include Davinci Resolve which is a fully featured Adobe Premier Pro rival. For reference premier pro is $21 a month, and the cheapest blackmagic cinema cam is the pocket 4k which comes in at $1200, after 5 years you have a free camera (thats still actively updated) if you consider Resolve to be equivalent to Premier Pro. Also they've constantly pushed the industry to be more affordable. They were pretty much the first that let you use a consumer usb c SSD to record raw formats. When the camera released, you could get 1tb samsung T5's for around $100, while one of their rivals RED cameras made you purchase a proprietary SSD that still costs $1500 for 480GB. Also in terms of affordability, it wasn't unheard of for a cinema camera to charge thousands of dollars to be able to use a cinemaDNG raw or ProRes, yet blackmagic cameras came with multiple raw recording options for free.
KineticLensman
I’ve been using the free version of Resolve for about a year now. It’s absolutely outstanding and well worth the steep learning curve (cos of the massive functionality). Don’t buy a Premiere Pro subscription until you’ve tried it out. Apart from its technical excellence there are zero dark patterns associated with free sign up and use.
kuschku
> With the purchase of a camera they include Davinci Resolve
That's also included with the speed editor, which is ~$400 and provides an awesome input device for Resolve.
tern
1. They are giving you all the tools needed to work in a professional way in a professional setting. This includes many things like being able to set all the camera settings manually, good metering to avoid clipping the sensor, audio metering to avoid clipping the recorder, timecode synchronization with other cameras & audio recorders, LUT preview, etc.
2. The "cinematic look" comes from a combination of things:
- good lighting (using professional lights in most situations)
- 180 degree shutter angle (aka "24fps"), or slow motion where appropriate
- careful and artistic color grading
- taking time to set up the scene in advance & good framing
- good lenses
- good camera sensors (mainly, high dynamic range)
- holding the camera still or moving it smoothly through the scene (except when deliberately not, as in for instance The Office)
- music
- and, more important than you'd think: very high quality audio (good mics, appropriately mic'd, low noise, dubbed in post if needed, SFX added)
3. In short, what creates the "cinematic look" is many factors (and, usually, people) coming together as a system. This app lets your phone be part of that system.
4. What makes this app unique: (1) it integrates directly with Davinci Resolve in a way that's probably more convenient than Filmic Pro for that workflow and (2) it's free.
People have been making films and TV shows on iPhones for years, so this is more of an incremental event in the industry.
eurekin
No attempt at real answer, but some hints from watching youtube videos on the topic:
Lightning:
- Edge or back lightning, if dramatic
- Wraparaound (cradle) lighting, if for pleasantness
- Low key look for interiors (no white walls)
- Artificial light needs to be motivated as much as possible
Set design
- Add bankers light for any money related film, normal table light for anything else
Lens
- Anamorphics to avoid perspective distortion typical to spherical lenses, also for the "rich depth of field" effect
- Surprisingly the best lens technically don't give the most "pleasing" (at least in "hollywood" terms) image. They are even called "clinical" or too sharp. A lot of DP's like lens with a "character", altough some artifacts are regarded universally ugly (like the longitudinal chromatic aberration, which pukes green and cyan fringes around the image)
Camera
- High dynamic range camera, no clipping of highlights or blacks (add light, if necessary)
- Must be able to retain true image details, any digital sharpening in the source footage immediately puts things off
Color grading:
- Good tone mapping: should look "good" in black and white, mostly solved with lighting
- Pleasing color palette: color harmonies, gradients in good perceptual color space, like okmap. Mostly solved by set design, character and dress design
- Even saturation: previous point should cover "nice colors", but the saturation is one of the most overlooked aspects. It can be highly or sparingly saturated, but too much variation in a single frame quickly makes for a garbage image. Also, one has to fight most software color manipulation tools, which tends to brighten up highly saturated parts, where in reality, they should go darker
That's a whole package of things, for a camera control specifically, typical operator or AC wants:
- Manual focus pull
- Way to judge "exposure", measured in IRE
- Some way to approximate highlight to shadow exposure ratio; 2:1 for "happy" look, 4:1 for dark, 5:1 or more for Batman
- Highlight clipping warning (especially important on talent's skin)
- Shutter angle control (typically 180 or 90 degrees), instead of the shutter time used in photography
scrollop
How do you reduce the severe oversharpening with iphones?
Is there an app that can take footage without oversharpening?
eurekin
I really don't know, if that even is possible.
That's main reason, why cinema cameras are picked.
I suspect that it could be possible now, to an extent. We have quite good image restoration tools, some based on neural networks. Maybe one could be trained for iPhone specifically.
ngrilly
I'm a non-film person as well, but I've been playing with this a bit. One key ingredient of the cinema look is the shutter speed. The iPhone standard camera app is constantly adjusting the shutter speed and the ISO depending on how much light the camera is getting.
Movie cameras work differently with a shutter speed fixed at 24 fps, except for some scenes with specific requirements (for example slow motion). The light is controlled using the ISO, the aperture, the lighting, and ND filters.
A nice trick people are using with smartphones to get the cinema look is to use an app like Blackmagic Camera, lock the shutter speed at 24 fps, and mount a variable ND filter on the smartphone to control how much light is received by the sensor, since we can't control with the aperture.
Neil44
Imagine the difference between say a sit-com and a movie with the sound off. The movie will have range and intentionality to the scenes. Light, dark, vibrant, dull, perciptible and intentional changes from one to another to match the story. The sitcom is just clear and bright. The camera phone on auto is just going to aim for sitcom all the time wheras this app allows you to be intentional in order to look cool and tell a story.
nikanj
Tweak the color scale to be all blue/orange
fodkodrasz
Why do project managers always insist adding chat to the app? I wonder if anybody uses the chat feature at all. Personally I find the integrated chat in every util useless waste of resources.
Also a further fragmentation of communication platforms for any collaboration simply makes me not want to collaborate unless I'm paid handsomely to use the yetannotherchatplatform. (just finishing some project and getting rid of several chat platforms i was forced to use because of them)
have_faith
This one might make sense for production crew. Easy reference of specific clips/shots, maybe lossless video clip transfers, things like that
dannyw
It's common to have external crew, who might not be on your team's Teams/Slack.
fodkodrasz
or who might not have access to the video cuts at all. Maybe a costume artist or a person organizing the catering does not need (or should not have at all, from an IP protection standpoint) access to the video clips, cuts. And you are back to the multiple chat apps (at least the producers/managers/organizers however they are called in that industry), or the limited access service accounts to the team's Teams/Slack with dedicated channels.
Though I guess the productions recorded with an iPhone might not have so big and logistically complicated crew. But back to my original point: I think these small projects are organized on other, more personal channels already, so the in-app chat is redundant. For larger projects, like those I was pondering in the previous paragraph: they are already beyond this in-app chat, so the in-app chat is redundant.
I think these in-app chats are very rarely used, and are generally not worth the effort to develop, or from a user/organization standpoint to learn and adopt. (Not to mention the closed nature of them).
And this does not want to belittle this app and its chat feature, I'm just generally wondering about the phenomenon this app has particularly made me think about.
Brajeshwar
Can someone please ask Blackmagic to have the app rotate and shoot landscape by default even if I have set my phone to never auto-rotate its orientation? I never needed to use my phone in Landscape except for shooting photos and videos. I can orient my phone landscape to shoot photos and videos but not with this App!
petesivak
You can go into Shortcuts and set up an Automation to automatically lock/unlock orientation when you open/close any app (including this one).
andy_ppp
Oh that's really nice, there are certain apps where this is very useful and I would prefer it but definitely it's off for me globally.
acarabott
This doesn't totally solve the issue, but if you unlock your phone's orientation, rotate to landscape, then go to settings, you'll find a "lock current orientation" setting.
leokennis
If your video demands are not complex, this app should work for you:
jacktribe
This is a forward thinking strategy for a camera maker. Instead of trying to fight the iPhone, they realized that this is a segment of the market they wouldn't capture regardless of the form factor they would adopt for Blackmagic cameras.
We have 4 Blackmagic cameras at xTribe studios and they are great, but when Gen-Z podcasters come in, they'll often just put an iPhone and a Rode shotgun mic on a SmallRig cage.
londons_explore
The iOS camera API is pretty limited in terms of giving you raw access to everything the built in camera has access to.
Things like the parameters for the optical image stabilization algorithm aren't settable.
I'm therefore surprised a 3rd party can make a camera app that 'beats' the built in one.
dannyw
First, the APIs don't expose raw controls for everything, but it exposes a heck a lot more than the stock camera app.
Second, for high-value developers like Blackmagic, Adobe, etc, there are very regular communication between engineers and product managers in both respective companies. I wouldn't expect private APIs (although they have certainly happened in 3P apps over the years; just check undocumented entitlements of IPAs from major developers), but these apps can be years / iOS releases in a making with a lot of Apple support.
alephnan
> Cell phones often have 3 rear lenses ranging from 13mm, 24mm and 77mm telephoto, plus a front lens.
I’m wondering if this was done by the copywriter or the UI person who needed to add more text so that every section has the same amount of “content”. Node.js/NPM devs do this too
paweladamczuk
I recorded two takes with exact same settings except one was ISO ~1500 and the other ISO ~3000. Shouldn't the second take be around twice as bright as the first one? The change in brightness is hardly noticeable.
I suppose this is the same case as every other camera app I've ever tested on Android and iOS, such granular settings like ISO are just not accessible by the system APIs available to the app. In that case though, I'd expect the app to at least not lie to me.
Can someone confirm or deny this? I don't know much about photography nor iOS so I might just be confused.
fragmede
You can see the brightness change when you fiddle with the ISO, so I'm not sure where you'd draw the conclusion that the system APIs don't give apps access to that.
Moving from ISO 1500 to ISO 3000 doubles the sensor's sensitivity to light, but doesn’t inherently make the scene appear twice as bright.
inductive_magic
To add to the other commenters: when you tweak the sensors sensitivity for light, the aperture will compensate by letting less light in – unless it is fixed. So there should be no noticeable difference in brightness unless you set a fixed aperture.
foldr
This is a smartphone camera, so of course the aperture is fixed. Playing around with the app, it does not seem to automatically adjust shutter speed to match changes in ISO. Reducing the ISO does make the image darker – presumably just not as much as OP expected.
foldr
ISO is linear scale and perception is log scale. Doubling the ISO (while keeping the shutter speed the same) increases the exposure by only one stop, which won’t seem twice as bright.
coldtea
Isn't "one stop" defined log-wise to be "twice as bright" perceptually?
foldr
No, it's twice as bright physically (in the sense that the lux value doubles). For example, doubling the shutter speed increases the exposure by one stop. Similarly, increasing the diameter of the aperture by a factor of √2 (thus doubling the area of the aperture and letting twice as much light in) increases the exposure by one stop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law#:~:t....
Ballas
If all else is kept the same. Usually with auto exposure, it will compensate by changing the integration time ("shutter speed") or aperture in order to try and keep the exposure to the same level.
justsomehnguy
> such granular settings like ISO are just not accessible by the system APIs available to the app
...what? Every non dumbified enough app has ISO and shutter controls in the manual mode since forever.
Eg:
kuschku
Remember, this is iOS. A system where apps can't even record continuous framerate footage.
justsomehnguy
>> as every other camera app I've ever tested on Android and iOS
So I assumed...
> this is iOS. A system where apps can't
picard.jpg
jemmyw
ISO is supposed to be the sensitivity of the film to light, and the numbers were set by a standards organisation so I'm not sure you can double the number to double the effect.
Also, how does this even work on a digital camera? Surely we can't actually adjust how sensitive the sensor is to light, so is it just a simulation?
frostburg
It's complex. Many modern cameras have dual or triple gain amplifiers, with various range setups. Some ISO settings might be just a digital multiplier on the highest setting of the lower gain stage before switching to the higher gain (which may result in having better snr at higher iso for some settings).
Remember that "digital" sensors are mostly analog devices (dealing in continuous voltages).
thih9
> Also, how does this even work on a digital camera?
It’s signal gain of the sensor.
“In digital camera systems, an arbitrary relationship between exposure and sensor data values can be achieved by setting the signal gain of the sensor. (…) For digital photo cameras ("digital still cameras"), an exposure index (EI) rating—commonly called ISO setting—is specified by the manufacturer such that the sRGB image files produced by the camera will have a lightness similar to what would be obtained with film of the same EI rating at the same exposure.”
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_speed#Digital_camera_IS...
coldtea
Kind of the same it works on film cameras: you change the sensitivity of the emulsion on them, you change the sensitivity of the sensor by raising the gain on the others.
Or think of it like changing the gain on an microphone pre-amp before going into a Analog-to-Digital convertor.
CorrectHorseBat
We can configure the gain of the analog amplifiers
eurekin
Probably auto-exposure adjusted the shutter speed to compensate
madwolf
[dead]
zx10rse
Insta download. Kudos to the developers who made it to not collect any data from the app, you deserve a raise.
prithsr
Maybe a silly question - but on the app itself, is there some sort of... tutorial of sorts? Really curious to learn how this world works but unsure where exactly to start on this app.
hnburnsy
I am surprised that Apple allows such control of the camera (or anything). Is this all exposed via APIs or do developers of camera apps have direct access to the hardware?
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I was surprised to see this was free. On top of that, with an impressive feature set for an initial release. Considering Blackmagic’s reputation, this will easily beat any other half-baked camera apps or paid apps in no time. This is awesome for film school students. Already recommended it to a few of my friends who are into film.