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.