Porno director Matt Morningwood, who shot the first adult scene on an iPhone 3GS, made the mistake of shooting in portrait mode, or “tallscreen.”
The vertical video format presented Matt with problems when it came to displaying the video at 16:9, but here’s how he figured out how to use iPhone video with Final Cut Pro.
Says Morningwood:
“I decided on ‘portrait’ orientation to maximize the ‘shot on iphone’ effect. However, I had not tried the workflow out yet. I assumed video shot on an iphone could be exported and imported easily. This is not the case.
iPhone video is treated like a photo during the export process. It goes into iPhoto and then can be viewed with QuickTime. The problem arises when you try and put that video (or maybe another video shot on another iPhone) back onto the phone. The native compression of the iPhone video is not the same as the iPhone codec used through iTunes.
In addition, the iTunes sync doesn’t handle the vertical content correctly. I had to rotate the video -90 degrees for playback on the iPhone via iTunes sync.
So, long story short… I learned plenty from it and will be shooting ‘landscape’ mode from now on. It was pretty cool to see the clip vertically though… just probably not worth the hassle.
If anyone is interested on how to use FCP with iPhone footage, I’ve included my workaround.
Here’s the workaround I had to do with the vertical footage:
I created a new project and imported iPhone vids. I dropped first clip into sequence and allowed sequence settings to match clip settings.
Edited as usual.
Exported sequence to QuickTime movie ‘current settings.’
Used resulting .mov file to create new FCP project using my standard sequence settings (16:9).
Rotated clip 90 degrees. (Scale as needed depending upon your sequence settings).
Exported using quicktime conversion for iphone.
Since this is the rotated version for the iPhone, it should only be used to be downloaded to an iPhone. Any other use of the clip should be the first .mov file (use this as a source for other compression schemes) for playback on a computer.
Regards, Matt Morningwood
Director/General Manager
BlueMoon Productions
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
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