The Apple article, Exposure to vibrations, like those generated by high-powered motorcycle engines, might impact iPhone cameras includes this hint “…some iPhone models have optical image stabilization (OIS). OIS lets you take sharp photos even if you accidentally move the camera. With OIS, a gyroscope senses that the camera moved. To reduce image motion, and the resulting blur, the lens moves according to the angle of the gyroscope.” 6/27/2022
Ben Lovejoy includes a video showcasing image stabilization in the 9to5 Mac article iPhone 13 Diary: The video stabilization performance is incredibly impressive that gives viewers hints on creating your own test shots. What I noticed, and will try to remember, is to move slowly through a pan or tilt while recording video. Slowing down also allows the camera to acquire a new subject to focus on and on and on as the camera/phone moves.
SlashDigit covers iPhone 14 in How to Enable and Use Action Mode on iPhone 14/14 Plus/14 Pro/14 Pro Max where “action mode” is Apple Speak for “image stabilization” and “with this mode, your iPhone will default to its Ultrawide camera. This allows the camera to capture as much footage as possible. The phone then takes the ultrawide footage and crops out the video edges to eliminate the areas where there is maximum shakiness and vibrations. Then a series of advanced algorithms kick in to stabilize the footage digitally resulting in gimbal-like stabilized video footage.” The magic of computational photography.
To preview this crop-to-stabilize effect, go to Photos > Media Types > Live and touch and hold on a Live thumbnail image. It pops to a new crop. Image stabilization often is noticeable on the edges and this crop magically adjusts and aligns each frame in the image.
Read Kayla Collins’ VideoProc article What's the Size of an iPhone Video and How to Resize It for space-saving tips. This is geek-talk and will take me several re-readings to digest shooting setting suggestions. (The table of iPhone models and video settings revealed that an iPhone 6 Plus could shoot in 4K@30fps! Who knew?) The article acknowledges the trade-off between image capture quality and file size, “when it comes to shoot iPhone video, there is a strong likelihood that we prefer 4K recording. Yet, you can't have your cake and eat it. There is always a downsize that you need to accept. As for iPhone 4K video recording, it comes at the price of large-sized file. So to help you avoid the embarrassing choice, here we suggest you to properly resize your iPhone 4K 60/30/24FPS footages, as well as slo-mo 1080p 120FPS /240FPS video to keep a good balance between quality and file size.” In the beginning, we will be shooting short video clips for a final project of under 5 minutes in length. But after you catch the video bug, your projects could easily grow longer. Size matters. Quality matters.
