Shooting Smartphone Video: A Great Solution is Available Now
I’ve been shooting iPhone X video with a $15 app called Filmic Pro using my Steadicam Volt (though with Filmic Pro’s stabilization feature, I can capture almost the same quality doing it handheld without the Steadicam). Sure wish I had this set up five years ago!
The video I can shoot with my iPhone X is absolutely stunning but, unfortunately, capturing good audio from any smartphone’s internal microphone alone sounds horrible. I have a cheap lavalier microphone but doing an interview — or setting it up so my wife can easily and quickly do one on her own with her iPhone X at trade shows — is simply too hard. One would need two lavalier mics and the gear needed to have two audio feeds going in to a single iPhone input. This is not something she can do nor I want to do.
There is good news though: Today I found an audio solution — JK Audio’s BlueDrive-F3 — and read a couple of reviews about it. Though it’s a butt-ugly adaptor, the buzz from a videographer buddy of mine is that “it just works”, has great battery life (6 hours) and has no Bluetooth-like latency so lips stay in sync with voice-audio.
I already own the best-selling mic in the world (Shure SM-58) which will work flawlessly with this device. Check out the video below, especially to hear the “with BlueDrive-F3” and “with just the iPhone internal microphone” so you’ll know the impact that good audio will make in your next iPhone video.
The BlueDrive-F3 is essentially the same price everywhere I looked ($236.55). If interested in this kind of a solution, watch the short video on the page to learn more.
- Filmic Pro = $14.99
- Steadicam Volt = $80
- JK Audio’s BlueDrive-F3 = $236.55
- Shure SM58 = $110
- Need your smartphone on a tripod so you can be in front of the camera and do the interview with someone? Joby makes a $20 tripod adapter (as do others) and here is the Joby at Best Buy.
About Steve Borsch
Strategist. Learner. Idea Guy. Salesman. Connector of Dots. Friend. Husband & Dad. CEO. Janitor. More here.
Connecting the Dots Podcast
Podcasting hit the mainstream in July of 2005 when Apple added podcast show support within iTunes. I'd seen this coming so started podcasting in May of 2005 and kept going until August of 2007. Unfortunately was never 'discovered' by national broadcasters, but made a delightfully large number of connections with people all over the world because of these shows. Click here to view the archive of my podcast posts.