Our go-to workflow for mobile videography work or a mobile vlogging set up has been to use a combination of FiLMiC Pro and LumaFusion to capture footage on your phone with accessibility to extended shooting tools and then edit on the fly on your phone or tablet.
However, the above video by YouTuber Arthur Moore demonstrates how those in the Apple iPhone and FinalCut Pro ecosystem may have an upper-hand.
The iPhone 11 range of phones have 3 cameras, a super-wide, a wide and telephoto lens. The combination of these lenses equips videographers with more than enough options to capture some stunning B-roll and dynamic shots that could be hard to capture with conventional cameras.
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Editing this footage into a simple timeline in iMovie then means you can simply airdrop the project to your Mac and carry on editing in Final Cut Pro X or if you wish you can finish the whole video in iMovie.
iMovie Though…!
Yep, we hear ya.
iMovie certainly is no substitute for LumaFusion. It’s simply not as robust or functional as Luma.
But what it does have going for it is its integration with FCPX and how easy it is to handoff between the two applications. It is also overly simplified so even newcomers can get to grips with it.
For anyone who wants to complete a full edit on their phone or tablet we would still choose Luma over iMovie and the newest release of LumaFusion actually includes XML export capabilities to FCPX. Making the iMovie crossover almost obsolete.
iPhone Camera App Over FiLMiC Pro?
This is a little tougher to decide on but we’re still going to give the win to FiLMiC Pro purely because of its ability to control the camera settings and really fine tune the way you would with a conventional camera.
The only stumbling block here is that FiLMiC doesn’t support all of the cameras in the iPhone 11 just yet. The super-wide isn’t available and the 4K selfie camera is confusingly only available in 1080p.
We’re pretty sure this will be updated by FiLMic soon as the iPhone’s new camera capabilities are still fairly new to the market.
Final Thoughts
We think that if you have an iPhone 11 then it is still worth investing in LumaFusion to edit with on your phone. Whether you need the extra camera control features of FiLMiC Pro is up to you. One thing we would say is that it does allow you to shoot in LOG (via the in-app add-on) and Luma can take advantage of that too now.
However, you could still create stunning videos using the standard camera and LumaFusion. We just can’t get onboard with iMovie as professional editors.
Check out our latest guide to Mobile Vlogging Equipment for 2020:
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