Using the MBA, the iPhone 13 PM, & QuickTime to Capture Video

I was recording video footage today and decided to do two things that I hadn't ever done.

I wanted some really good detailed footage, but also wanted to be able to zoom in on my subject.  My GoPro is usually my primary camera, but it doesn't zoom like a smartphone or DSLR camera.  

I tried to use my PC's Logitech C922 streaming camera, but that doesn't zoom either.  It only produces 1080p footage, as well, but it's pretty clear and my M1 Macbook Air (MBA) immediately detects it; I'm able to use that camera's microphone, too.  The C922 works far better than the camera that is integrated into the MBA (that's a 720p camera).

I'd forgotten that I can now use my iPhone 13 Pro Max as a desktop camera with recent versions of iOS but hadn't tried it.  I tried it and it captures extremely nice footage!  Not only that, there's NO latency - the MBA connects to the iPhone wirelessly and you'd never know it wasn't a wired connection.

As well, I'd been using Photobooth to collect footage.  While the footage is OK, it's also somewhat limited.  I also lost footage, several times...the recording session sometimes freezes.  So I did some quick research on any native methods of recording footage on a Mac.  I found that I can use Quicktime to record footage.  Not only that, I can point it toward the iPhone and leverage the phone as a camera.  Also, I can record audio only, if I've the need to.  Additionally, I can record the desktop!  I can choose between different cameras and can rely upon their audio hardware, and I can even mix up cameras and mics across different devices when using QuickTime.

So, what I did was use QuickTime to record, using the iPhone 13 PM and using the Logitech C922's mic.  I was also able to hold up the subjects of the recording session to the 13 PM and it would focus on the items while they were close-up to the camera.  I'm not sure how to manipulate the camera's resolution and other recording options when using QuickTime, though.  By default, it recorded at 1080p, and used ProRES.

The resulting footage was great.  It had good detail and was not blurry, nor did the focus hunt and change...it maintained focus on it's own.  The recorded file was on the MBA, as well, which is pretty wild...the footage didn't glitch out or have any artifacts and the recording session didn't lag or appear that it was under any stress.  I'd saved the files to my SanDisk 2TB drive, so none of it consumed system drivespace.

I should've been using my 13PM a long time ago.  I'd been trying to use it as a standalone camera, but found that the resulting video files were huge and I'd have to transfer them to the MBA, which was a PITA.  As well, the large files consumed my phone's storage space, so I was always at the space limit.

Using the 13PM as a camera when using the MBA is the better way, by far!

I'll be attempting to determine how to up the recording resolution when using the 13PM as a MBA camera.

BTW, the resulting video is here:

iMovie & Mac Mini M1

I've a YouTube channel. Who doesn't, right?

Well, I did something I haven't done in awhile.  I recorded footage using my Logitech C922 Pro Stream, but using Photo Booth on my Mac Mini M1.

I've used Photo Booth in the past to capture footage but it was on my iMac 27" Core 2 Duo system...was decently fast in the day but always generated a bit of lag when recording footage that was long in duration - lag meaning that an audio delay developed.  The audio wasn't matching what was occurring on video.

I also used iMovie for the first time on the Mini M1.  It was super quick in rendering footage as I edited.  I did nothing complicated, though, but there's quite a bit of YT videos showing how well the M1 SoC works when manipulating video, so that's no secret and I won't get into the technicals.  The video footage was recorded as 1620 x 1080 and was 1.65 GB (18 min in duration).  iMovie encodes to YouTube as 1920 x 1080, so it crunched down the resulting YT video a tad.  I cut maybe 10 min of footage off the backend, added a title page, added a transition between that page and the video's beginning, and also added a fade to black at the end of the footage.

The iMovie process was super easy, but no different than that I remember - again, though, what made it a great experience was that there was zero lag when editing or rendering the video.

I will try to work more with iMovie.  I wouldn't mind buying something with more options/frills, but I need to be able to justify buying nice video editing software from Apple, since that software isn't cheap.