March 30, 2024
Yesterday I found out something interesting and today I tested it, liked what it was, so I made a small video about it. I’ve recently made a video using the iPad, but the output was your standard fully processed .MOV file that looked ok.
While using the Blackmagic Design Camera app (which is 100% free, by the way), I noticed it had a “clean feed” output in the monitor section, so I wanted to test it out and see what came out, if anything. Well, after connecting my Blackmagic Design Video Assist recorder to it, I found that it worked!
A fast test was made and I noticed something odd right off the bat… the file that was captured to the external 1TB SSD on the Video Assist was bland looking, low contrast, no no saturation, it looked horrible… and that was beautiful! Was I looking at a LOG file?
Wait, what’s a LOG file? It is a file that is created using the full raw output of a camera’s sensor, very low contrast, no sharpening, low saturation, all with the goal of preserving the greatest dynamic range so that when you processed it in your video editor of choice, it looked better… and I was pretty sure that what I was looking at from the Video Assist was just that, a LOG file!
But, I couldn’t process it as an Apple log file as it used a .MOV extension, also not as a .BRAW file (Blackmagic RAW file), for the same reason, so I could not easily choose one Color Transform in Davinci Resolve and go from LOG to 95% processed video in 10 seconds, no… but I did use a Color Transform and after a good amount of playing, set it to a Blackmagic Gen 5 file and do some small touchups and the results were really nice considering it was an iPad!
That along with some additional contrast, gain, saturation and a touch of sharpening was all that was needed to give me the video below.
Check out the video I made:
I made the video to see what the public would generally think about it… but its a very cool new way to use my iPad, and you all know how I like using all these new little technical tricks.
Addendum April 18, 2024
I heard that Blackmagic Design is working on making a version of this software for Android… I hope they will support my S21 Ultra, I’d love to try some 4k or 8K files out from this software. When it comes out I will definitely test things out!
Enjoy!