Big Idea

The argument in one line.

Cinematic iPhone video comes from locking 24fps and a 1/48 shutter with an ND filter, then recording Apple Log in a manual camera app, not from the phone itself.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…

You own an iPhone 15 Pro or newer and want your travel or vlog footage to look less like phone video and more like a real camera.
You already shoot on a mirrorless camera and want a compact iPhone setup that matches the cinematic look for trips.
You've heard of Apple Log, ProRes and LUTs but don't know which settings to actually turn on in the camera app.

SKIP IF…

You only want casual clips for social and don't plan to color grade, since log footage needs editing to look good.
You have a base iPhone model or older than the 15 Pro, which can't record Apple Log.

TL;DR

The full version, fast.

A cinematic look on iPhone comes from filming at 24 frames per second with a fixed 1/48 shutter, which needs an ND filter in bright light. Miles shoots on an iPhone 17 Pro with a Freewell ND/CPL kit and a MOFT tripod wallet, using the free Blackmagic Camera app. His settings are 24fps, 1/48 shutter, ISO at or below 400, manual white balance, extreme stabilization, ProRes 422 HQ, 4K or open gate, Apple Log to HDR, and a Rec.709 monitoring LUT that is not burned in. Expose for the highlights so they don't clip.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 00:39

01 · Cold open and promise

Why the iPhone is his default recommendation, and Japan footage shot on just the phone.

00:39 – 02:50

02 · The phone

iPhone 17 Pro, its three cameras, and why an iPhone 15 Pro or newer matters for Apple Log.

02:50 – 04:30

03 · Shutter speed and ND filters

Why 24fps and 1/48 shutter look cinematic, and how an ND filter makes that possible in daylight.

04:30 – 05:22

04 · The tripod wallet

The MOFT tripod wallet as a compact stand with a hidden Bluetooth shutter and Find My.

05:22 – 06:40

05 · Choosing a camera app

Native camera vs Final Cut Camera vs Blackmagic Camera, and why manual shutter control matters.

06:40 – 09:40

06 · Frame rate, shutter, ISO, white balance

24fps, 1/48 locked shutter, ISO at or below 400, manual white balance and lock on record.

09:40 – 11:40

07 · Stabilization, codec, resolution

Extreme stabilization, ProRes 422 HQ, and 4K or open gate.

11:40 – 12:55

08 · Apple Log and LUTs

Apple Log to HDR, Rec.709 monitoring LUT, and keeping record LUT to clip off.

12:55 – 13:15

09 · Audio, storage, exposure, focal lengths

Stereo audio, in-app-only storage, expose for highlights, grid, and lens choices.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

A cinematic look is mostly motion: 24 frames per second with a shutter at double the frame rate, so 1/48.
The iPhone camera app auto-adjusts shutter speed, which makes moving footage look choppy and unnatural.
Locking a 1/48 shutter in daylight overexposes the shot, so an ND filter acts as sunglasses for the lens.
Apple Log recording needs an iPhone 15 Pro or newer; the base models can't do it.
Keep ISO at or below 400 when you can, and only push to 800 or 1600 in genuinely dark scenes.
Turn on lock white balance on record, or the color shifts mid-clip and the footage looks unnatural.
Don't turn on record LUT to clip: it burns the LUT into the file and kills your grading flexibility.
Expose for the highlights on log footage, because clipped highlights can't be recovered in post.
Recording audio in four-channel mode produces strange spatial audio; plain stereo sounds normal.
Saving clips in-app only keeps video out of your photo library, so the phone works like an SD card you offload and wipe.
Open gate records the full sensor in 4:3 and gives you cropping room back to 16:9 later.
The 24mm main camera is the sharpest, but 48, 100 and even 200mm are still very usable.

Takeaway

What makes iPhone video look cinematic

WHAT TO LEARN

Cinematic iPhone footage is a motion and color workflow: lock 24fps and 1/48, control light with an ND filter, and record log so you can grade later.

Film at 24 frames per second with a shutter at double that, 1/48, for natural motion blur; auto shutter makes movement look choppy.
Use an ND filter outdoors, since a slow locked shutter lets in too much light and blows out the image in daylight.
Use a manual camera app like Blackmagic Camera or Final Cut Camera, because the native app can't fix the shutter speed.
Keep ISO at or below 400 when possible, set white balance manually, and turn on lock white balance on record.
Record Apple Log with ProRes (iPhone 15 Pro or newer), and monitor with a Rec.709 LUT without burning it into the file.
Expose for the highlights using the histogram, because clipped highlights in log can't be recovered.
Use in-app-only storage, stereo audio and a compact tripod wallet to keep the whole kit small and the workflow clean.

Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

ND filter: A neutral density filter that cuts light entering the lens, like sunglasses, so you can keep a slow shutter speed in bright daylight without overexposing.
Apple Log: A flat, low-contrast video profile on iPhone 15 Pro and newer that keeps extra dynamic range for color grading in post.
Open gate: Recording using the whole sensor, which gives a 4:3 frame instead of the standard 16:9 crop.
ProRes: Apple's high-quality video codec that trades large file sizes for better image quality than H.264 or H.265.
LUT: A color lookup table applied to footage; here a Rec.709 LUT lets you monitor log video with normal-looking colors.
Rec.709: The standard color space for regular HD video, used here so log footage looks normal on the phone screen while recording.
1/48 shutter: A shutter speed of one forty-eighth of a second, double the 24fps frame rate, which gives natural cinematic motion blur.

Resources

Things they pointed at.

04:10productFreewell variable ND and CPL kit

04:40productMOFT tripod wallet (Find My version) ↗

05:30toolBlackmagic Camera app

05:30toolFinal Cut Camera app

10:40toolBlackmagic Rec.709 Neutral LUT

13:10productApple Log LUTs ↗

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

03:35

“An ND filter essentially acts as sunglasses for your lens.”

one-line analogy that explains the gear→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

11:40

“I would make sure not to have record LUT to clip, because this will burn in that LUT.”

common mistake, short and specific→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

The Script

Word for word.

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I often get asked what's the best camera for vlogging, documenting your life, photography, or shooting a cinematic video. And while there's a lot of cameras I could pick, I almost always recommend people start with their iPhone. And not just because it's the camera you always have with you, but because nowadays you can genuinely get excellent looking video with just a phone.

Here's some video footage I took in Japan last month. The crazy thing is that I filmed all of this using just my iPhone with a pretty simple setup. But iPhone footage isn't gonna look like this straight out of the camera In order to get more cinematic looking video out of your iPhone, there are a few special accessories, apps, and settings that I use, all of which I'll talk about in today's video.

Let's get into it. So while I was in Japan last month, I spent an entire day walking around and practicing film photography and I wanted to take some good video footage too, but decided that instead of bringing my normal Sony mirrorless cameras, that I would keep things compact and try only using my iPhone. I'm still editing it, so you'll see that video released on my channel soon, but so far I'm really pleased with the footage that I got.

So the iPhone model I personally use is the iPhone 17 Pro, just the smaller. regular pro model so it would be even more compact pocketable i also got it in the best color blue with one terabyte of storage now you of course don't need the latest and greatest model to get amazing looking video although the newer ones generally do have better cameras on my 17 pro there's three cameras the main 24 millimeter one has the biggest sensor and technically produces the best quality image but i've also found that using the 48 millimeter lens or even zooming it into 100 millimeters or 200 millimeters can also produce very usable footage but if you do have at least an iphone 15 pro model or newer that would be ideal because you'll be able to record an apple log which is a big part of how i get a more cinematic look with my iphone footage and also having more internal storage is definitely helpful because with the video settings and codec i use the files take up a lot of space but i'll talk more about that later

Alright, now let's get into the accessories. This is one of the most important parts of the whole setup, but for this to make sense, first we need a quick explanation of shutter speed and frame rate when it comes to video. A big part of what makes a video look cinematic or movie -like is by filming it at 24 frames per second with a fixed shutter speed of double your frame rate, so either 1 over 48.

or 1 over 50, depending on your camera. When you shoot video normally through the iPhone camera app, the shutter speed will automatically adjust to keep your video properly exposed, which is fine for casual video, but this can often make footage, especially when there's movement, look kind of unnatural and choppy. To fix this, we have to manually set our shutter speed to 1 over 48, which will create a more natural motion blur, but I'll talk more about how to set this up in the next section.

The problem is when we have our shutter speed set that low, the lens will let in a lot more light, so if you're taking video outside it will very easily become overexposed to fix this we need to use something called a neutral density filter or nd filter which essentially acts as sunglasses for your lens and allows you to film at that natural shutter speed frame rate combination even in bright light there are now a bunch of different companies that make nd filter attachments for iphone and they'll generally all get the job done i personally own one from moment and this other one from freewell and so far i do like this freewell one the best because it can came with a variable ND filter and CPL filter attachment where you can also insert mist filters and it magnetically sticks onto the case that comes with it.

So it's a lot easier to quickly put on and off. All right, so before we get into the specific camera settings and app that I use for actually shooting the video, there's one more part of the gear setup, which is the tripod. The iPhone by itself is great for handheld shooting, but there are definitely moments when I'm traveling or just exploring the city where I want to prop my phone up and get shots of myself or just get a steady shot.

shot without any camera shake that's typically where you'd reach for a tripod i've got a lot of tripods and even bought one of those cheap ones specifically for iphone but i honestly never really ended up using them they still take up way too much space and kind of defeat the whole purpose of having a compact discreet iphone video setup and so the best solution that i found for this personally is this tiny tripod wallet from moft if you've watched my channel for a while you know that i've been using their products for years and as the name suggests it's a wallet and a tripod so it can hold my credit cards, my ID, magnetically attaches to the back of my phone and then can quickly unfold into this tripod or phone stand.

There's also a hidden Bluetooth shutter button built into the fold of the wallet so you can easily snap a photo or start recording without even touching the screen. You can also easily flip between horizontal or vertical video depending on the look you're going for. Now I've been using the original version of the tripod wallet for about two years now, but unfortunately last month when I was in a flurry packing for my Japan trip, I completely forgot it at home and just left it in new york and was genuinely missing it the entire trip thankfully moff just sent me their updated version where they somehow managed to squeeze in apple find my with a six month wirelessly chargeable battery while still keeping the tripod wallet super slim so if it's buried in your bag or you leave it somewhere you can now easily find it using the find my app which honestly would have been great to have during my trip i'll link it down below with a discount code for you to check out it's probably the only iphone accessory that i've continued to use for years because it's super compact and it genuinely

makes my life easier. Big thank you to Moff for supporting the channel. Alright, so nowadays there's a bunch of different apps you can use to record video on your iPhone, but I'll focus on the ones that I actually have experience using.

First, the normal camera app is fine and you technically can change the settings to record and log within the app, but you won't be able to manually set the shutter speed. So while I still use it for casual video and taking photos, if I'm trying to get the best quality video out of my iPhone, I'll go for either the Final Cut camera app or the Blackmagic camera app.

Both of these are completely free and will get the job done, so it's really up to you to you which you prefer. I've been leaning more towards the Blackmagic camera app lately just because it is a lot more customizable.

But if you're looking for a frictionless, simpler experience, then you might like the Final Cut camera app a bit better. Alright, so now I'll quickly run through my settings within the Blackmagic camera app. There'll be similar settings within the Final Cut Pro app or whatever video app you want to use for this.

You can look for these similar settings, but I'll try to be fast here because I don't want this video to get too long. All right, so for the basic settings, first, I make sure to have it on 24 frames per second. And then for the shutter speed, I set it to 1 over 48, and then I lock it there.

like that that's to get that most natural cinematic motion blur for iso i've generally tried to keep it at or below 400 to just minimize noise and keep it cleaner as far as i know there isn't an official kind of base iso or cleanest iso level but in my experience the lower the better although you definitely can push it up higher if it's really dark and then just clean up some of the noise and post so sometimes i will go up to even 800 1600 if it's in a really dark setting but generally I try to keep it as low as possible while still being properly exposed.

For white balance, I usually try to set mine manually based on the shooting condition. So there's some presets here. i believe for like daylight or cloudy days so i'll usually keep it you know somewhere around 5500 or 6000 depending on the conditions and then i'll lock it you can also use auto white balance for convenience sake and then just adjust as needed in editing if you do that just make sure that you go to settings and you scroll down and make sure that you have lock white balance on record on this way when you're recording the white balance isn't going to start changing mid clip because that'll immediately make footage look kind of unnatural.

Next, I'd go down here to stabilization and just turn on one of these settings. You just don't want to have it off because it'll be pretty shaky. When you do turn on stabilization, it crops in very slightly, but the stabilization on iPhone is so good.

It's not very noticeable. And I honestly don't really know the difference between these three levels. Like the crop seems the same to me.

So I often just keep it on extreme and it comes out looking fine in my experience. Right then next we can go to settings and I have the codec set to Apple ProRes 422 HQ. You can honestly use whatever you want here.

You're basically just trading some level of quality for file size. And if you're on iPhone 17 Pro or later, you can even use ProRes RAW, which is crazy high quality and allows you to change the ISO and white balance in post as if you were adjusting it in camera, but you do need an external storage attachment. Honestly, this is complete overkill in my opinion.

Maybe if you're trying to film like a proper short film or movie or something, you could go for this. But at that point, why not just use like a regular full frame mirrorless camera or something? So personally, I would go with any of these pro res options here.

I have the higher quality one set, but you can even go down to H265 or H264 if storage is more of an issue. Next for resolution, I'll keep it on either 4K or open gate. Previously, I think you had to use an external storage to film open gate on iPhone, which is basically where it'll use the entire sensor so instead of having that standard sort of 16x9 video you'll have a 4x3 video.

But there must have been some update because now I can film in this even without external storage. And lately, I've really enjoyed using OpenGate since you get this kind of nice four by three nostalgic look. And you also have that extra cropping flexibility if you do want to crop it back down to normal 16 by nine.

And then for color space, I have this set to Apple log to HDR. This is really important because it'll give you some extra dynamic range and allow you to properly color grade your footage and post. So if you have an iPhone 15.

pro model or later so 15 pro 16 pro 17 pro it can't be the base model you'll be able to record and log and so i would definitely use this if you plan to edit your video properly later then if you are filming in log i would scroll down here all the way to lutz lut manager And make sure you just have Blackmagic LUTs enabled.

I usually just use the Rec. 709 Neutral LUT. Basically what this will do is allow you to, while you're recording, monitor the video in that standard Rec.

709 so you can see the colors fairly normally. It won't be nicely color graded or anything yet, but it won't be that washed out. low contrast log profile and i would make sure not to have record lut to clip because this will basically burn in that lut and if you want to color grade and properly edit your footage later you're going to want to have that flexibility in your actual editing program and not burn it in here and then besides that most of these other settings you don't really need to worry about too much you can see what i have selected here one thing that has tripped me up before is for audio just make sure that you have this recording as stereo for some reason mine was set to four channels which records this kind of weird spatial audio thing where the audio is broken into four different tracks and it just sounds kind of funky so i would keep it at the standard stereo recording and then down in the media section i personally have it save the clips to just in -app only

So this way, all the video files that I record won't go to my normal iPhone photo library and clog things up. They'll just be saved to the media section in the app here. And then I'll offload this to my computer.

So I'm just kind of treating this like an SD card. I'll take footage. It'll show up here.

I'll export it to my Mac and then delete it from my phone to save space. But yeah, that's about it as far as the setup. The trickiest thing that I've found with filming on iPhone Apple log is just making sure you get your exposure right in camera.

I found it best to expose for the highlights because it's very easy for them to get clipped at which point you can't really recover much. So I would take a look at like the histogram here and just make sure it's kind of more in the middle. There's nothing like too far all the way hugging the right side clipping.

because there's not gonna be much you can do about that. And then I'll also turn on the grid here, just the normal rule of thirds grid, which will help me get some better, more even compositions. Oh yeah, and you can change your LUT here by clicking LUT and just make sure that this is toggled on so that you're monitoring in that Rec .709.

You can see what the footage looks like. You can also select different focal lengths. here 24 millimeters is going to be the cleanest sharpest highest quality image because that's the biggest sensor on the iphone but you definitely can use 48 100 or even 200 millimeters don't be afraid to zoom in i found the footage to be very usable at even these higher focal lengths if you made it this far in the video thank you so much for watching and definitely click subscribe if you want to see more photography and video content like this while i was in japan i spent an entire day shooting film photos and taking videos with just my iphone using this exact setup so click here to watch the latest video from me i'll see you in the next one

The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

Everyone asks which camera to buy. Miles says start with the iPhone, then shows the accessories, app and settings that make the footage look nothing like default phone video.

Frameworks