Smartphones are awesome for shooting videos on a budget, but the best camera is on the back making it difficult to frame your shot… Here’s how to do it easily!
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How to Film With iPhone and Android Rear Camera: Use Mac or PC as a Viewfinder!
Smartphones are awesome for shooting your regular content videos on a budget. Everyone’s got one, and the quality these days is more than enough to get great results – so there’s no excuse…
As we all know, the rear facing cameras in most smartphones are generally a lot better than the front-facing cameras… BUT! despite the lower quality, the front-facing camera has one MAJOR advantage…
With the screen facing you while you shoot, you can monitor and FRAME your shot LIVE While you shoot, without a second person helping. This is critical, as it helps remove another barrier to shooting and makes getting great results MUCH easier, and the front-facing camera’s on most modern phones these days can produce footage with MORE than enough quality for the vast majority of content producers and videos. (Yep, I use it too!)
Now, we have a bit of an update on this front… With some recent software updates, it’s become MUCH easier to start using the rear-facing camera, and frame your shot LIVE without a second person helping. I’m talking about using your Mac, PC or iPad as a viewfinder for your iphone or Android phone LIVE while you shoot.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for options to do this effectively for a while, but after trying a heap of alternatives I couldn’t find anything that could do what we wanted live, wirelessly and reliably… That is until now.
The latest version of Reflector, from a company called Squirrels, now supports reliable wireless streaming from an iPhone or Android smartphone – LIVE to the screen of your Mac or PC… Meaning – you can use the screen of your Mac or PC as a live viewfinder for the rear camera of your iphone or Android device, and monitor your shot as you shoot!
In this video, we’ll show you how to do it.
Of course, for iPhone and Mac users, before this you could always plug in the iPhone and watch using Quicktime – but I found the wire limiting, and Reflector just makes things easier and much more user friendly.
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