How to Film YouTube Videos on Your Phone

hey guys welcome back to the channel in this video we're talking about how to get started on YouTube using just your iPhone and so this video is shot entirely on my iPhone 10s Macs and I'm gonna be sharing a few tips and tricks but but hopefully trying to make the point that if you're thinking of starting a YouTube channel or getting into filming and stuff you don't need to wait for you know a fancy camera or save up for this that and the other all you need is your iPhone or you know Android phone if you're one of those heathens and you can just get started pretty much from now on provided you know you keep a few things in mind so yeah in this video we're gonna be talking about five things we're going to be talking about video quality using a certain app audio quality using external microphones lighting framing and additional lenses and kind of the equipment that you might like to add on top of it but really you can just get started using just your iPhone and hopefully I'll be making that point throughout this video so let's start with video quality and that's obviously the most important thing although some people say already quality is more important but let's ignore that video quality you don't really get from the default iPhone camera app and user and from most I don't know much about Android phones but I suspect their default camera apps are not great either the app that you want to use the app that most people recommend that I would recommend is called filmic Pro and the great thing about this app is that you can manually control a lot of the camera settings so there's a few different settings that we want to change when we open up the app and the main one is the frame rate normally with iPhone videos they film in 30 frames per second but it's either 24 or 25 frames per second that look more cinematic like 30 is just a little bit too smooth and look looks kind of like iPhone video which isn't really the vibe that we want to be going for unless you want to go for that 5 in which case you know you do you but at the moment I'm shooting in 25 frames per second and that is the same frame rate that I shoot in mine with my fancy cameras and stuff and hopefully that looks quite reasonable secondly we want to be adjusting the resolution and the bitrate and this sounds complicated but basically we want to film in 4k resolution because we might as well and most modern phones off of that and then we want to crank up the bitrate to as high as it possibly can be on I phones this is called filmic extreme I think on Android it's like a hundred bit megabits per second or something along those lines that basically means there's more information encoded but it takes up a bigger file size high file size better quality that's the way that I would recommend going personally and then just a few other things you want to set your white balance so that it doesn't vary massively and you want to change your shutter speed to 1 over 50 of a second and there's this kind of rule with filmmaking that if your frame rate is 25 you want your shutter to be double that so one over fifty is called the 180 degree rule essentially that gives you the best amount of the most cinematic motion blur like when I'm moving my hands like this I tend to talk a lot with my hands this should hopefully looks semi natural fairly natural whereas if I cranked up the shutter speed really high I like one over 200 it would look a lot more choppy because it's it's not quite what we're used to seeing you know this all sounds complicated but essentially once you've got the settings set once you can just save a preset on filmic Pro then you never have to touch them again and there's tons and tons of tutorials and YouTube where they show you in depth how to get filmic Pro and get the right settings for your liking but yeah most important thing for decent video quality is to not use a default camera app but to use something like filmic Pro instead and hopefully they'll make a big difference to video quality okay now let's talk about audio and arguably audio is even more important than video quality because people were sit through a low quality video if the audio is good but if you have the best quality video in the world but your audio is crap then no one's gonna want to watch your video and I've got to be honest I have kind of been cheating a little bit in this video in that I've been recording with my iPhone but I've actually been externally recording audio using this rode ntg 4 mic connected to an external audio recorder but now I'm gonna show you what it sounds like using just the iPhone just so you know if you don't have this sort of setup you don't really need it so this is what the audio from the iPhone sounds like just on its own hopefully you'll hear the difference between this expensive audio setup and the iPhone recording but hopefully you'll see that actually if you weren't just getting started on YouTube with just your phone this actually wouldn't be too bad it wouldn't be the sort of audio quality that people would be like oh god that's garbage I'm going to turn it off immediately but luckily there is kind of a middle ground between standard iPhone with nothing attached and this kind of fancy audio setup and that is using a small microphone like the rode videomicro and that sets you back by about 30 or $40 so I'm gonna plug that in and will show you what you or what the audio sounds like from the rode videomicro so at the moment I have to stop this recording and unplug my my phone okay so let's get rid of that lighting cable and I'm using the rode videomicro about fifty or forty dollars something like that from Amazon and I've connected it to the iPhone using the lightning to headphone adapter that comes with the phone and this is like this other Road cable that costs about $7 so for about $50 we've got this microphone connected and I've got it mounted to this random phone mount that you can get off Amazon for about 10 quid or $10 or whatever your currency is so now let's hear what it sounds like with this microphone okay so this is a test of the rode videomicro attached to the iPhone and you can hopefully see that this hopefully sounds a little bit better than default iPhone microphone but hopefully it doesn't sound quite as good as the audio coming directly from this audio recorder alright now let's talk about lighting and as you can see I'm sitting next to this massive ass window which is providing some pretty decent natural lighting so even if you don't have the money to spend on a lighting setup or lighting rig or whatever you can just sit next to a window and hopefully this looks pretty reasonable then if I wanted to I could get my kind of fancy aperture 120 D Mach 2 lights I could turn it on using the remote control wherever it is and then yeah if I wanted to I could actually change the ISO setting on filmic Pro so that it dims the lightness a bit but you'll see this doesn't actually make that much difference to the video like lighting is super important but just something like standing next to a big window has has quite a good effect so let's see if I can kind of dim this light so that it looks a bit better something like that so this is with light this is without light honestly I don't know it doesn't really make that much difference so this big window lighting lighting is pretty much sorted and again lighting doesn't need to be one of those things like if you watch for example my behind the scenes video or Peter MacKinnon's video showing how he makes his videos it can look quite intimidating seeing these big pieces of expensive light domes and stuff but really you don't need that to get started and overtime yeah it's definitely worth investing in a light and I'm really glad I spent $1,000 that our cost for this particular light but you know you get pretty decent results just to sitting next to a window so that's absolutely fine ok fourthly let's talk about framing the shot and I don't if you can see but I've got my iPhone connected to my macbook and I'm just using QuickTime Player and QuickTime Player is allowing me to mimic what's on my iPhone screen I think using the selfie camera on the iPhone gives you less good picture quality so I'm using the normal camera but to see what I'm filming I've got it connected to my laptop and therefore I don't need anything fancy like you know a monitor in I've got a small HD monitor that cost 500 pounds that attaches to a camera you know this is basically doing the exact same thing most of us have a laptop most of us have some kind of device we can attach our phones to and so you can mirror the screen and monitor yourself that way and therefore you can get all of the framing that you want you don't have to be kind of off to the side because you couldn't see yourself yeah this is a very easy way to do the framing and then also in terms of extra gear so over here I've got the iPhone sitting on this random no brand phone tripod thing I'll put a few links to Amazon in the video description and the important thing about that is that it's got a cold shoe mount on the top which means this rode videomicro can attach nicely to it so yeah this is the microphone it's tiny and it just screws nicely on to this mount which is a very easy way to attach it to the phone and then if I were to vlog for example I could just take this set up to take it off the tripod and I'd have a vlog setup with a decent audio because I've got the microphone connected to it and then that's just connected to a standard tripod I just happen to have these lying around this is the Joby Gorillapod head again it doesn't really matter what I'm using the point is that you can connect any tripod to your phone provided you have one of these phone mounts and it's a very easy thing to get that you know you can buy for a few dollars off Amazon like if you want you can go really ghetto and end up just kind of propping up your phone on a stack of textbooks or anything like that but you know if you're serious about starting YouTube my recommendation is that you get started with just your phone and over time you can then add stuff to it so that it's never an excuse that oh I can't afford camera gear as an excuse as to why you're not starting a YouTube channel it's just like an internal battle of oh okay I need to get over the fear of looking foolish I need to get over my fear of public speaking I'm just gonna do it because starting a YouTube channel is great and leads to lots of good things happening in life and finally I just want to talk about extra lenses that you can use so this is an extra wide angle lens that I got from sand MOC they very kindly sent it to me it's not sponsored but yeah that it send me the lenses to review and this is quite nice because if you attach it to the iPhone like I'm going to do now then what it does once it's attached is that it makes the angle more wide so if we go back to the iPhone shot you'll see that this is now a much wider shot I look for the back you can now see the microphone and I'm just kind of monitoring this in the laptop behind me so what I would do in this case is I would move the table closer hopefully then you won't see all of the all the crap that's behind we can just see the iPad I move a little closer I move this microphone a bit more up make sure it stays out of the frame but still gets decent audio quality cuz it's close enough to my mouth get this camera out of the way this corporation tax thing out of the way you'll see I have to change up the framing slightly but some people prefer this sort of more wide-angle way of filming and actually you know I'm not a huge fan of being so far away from the cameras and what I normally do is I I use a wide-angle lens even on my normal camera and then I sit quite close to it and that has the benefit that if you're not using an external audio recorder like I am then you're closer to something like the iPhone or the rode videomicro which means you get slightly better audio quality because you're closer to the camera because you're using a wide-angle lens so I mean San Marcos of other lenses as well they also sent me their macro lens and a tele lens and the anamorphic lens which I'm gonna play around with some point but yeah if you want to go for a slightly different look than the standard iPhone framing you can use like an external lens or something just kind of screw it onto your phone and then it works but yeah hopefully the main point I've made on this video is that you don't actually need a lot to start a YouTube channel when to start filming like you can just do everything with just your iPhone yeah the audio is not going to sound that amazing but it's perfect to get started and you can always upgrade later on to the rode videomic pro and you can spend spend an extra twenty dollars getting a tripod then if you really want you can spend $50 on a lighting setup and over time you build up your your YouTube thing and then eventually when if you really want to you can like a graduate to getting a camera but I've spoken to a lot of people concerned people messaging me via Instagram and stuff and asking for advice for things like starting YouTube channels and a distressing amount of them have said stuff like oh I'd love to start a YouTube channel but I I don't have the money for a camera even though they've got like the latest iPhone or like a Google pixel or like a some good Galaxy sa s9 s10 whatever you know all modern phones are capable of filming in very very good quality they all have reasonable audio as well and you can always upgrade audio if you really feel like it but yeah hopefully this video gave you a little bit of a taste a bit of a flavor about how to get started on YouTube using just your iPhone if you liked the video please give it a thumbs up over here we've also got a few videos about you know in this creator Diaries series where I talk about behind the scenes of my own setup including all the camera gear and stuff so have a look at that if you like it but yeah thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video okay

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 482,737

Keywords: iphone filmmaking, how to film professional videos with an iphone, iphone video, how to start a youtube channel, tech talk, how to film on iphone, shoot video with iphone, filming with iphone, youtube video with iphone, professional video with iphone, professional iphone video, iphone video tips, how to film yourself, start a youtube channel, how to film with iphone, shoot video on iphone, video with iphone, film on iphone, how to film with an iphone

Id: JwhsPdN2RNg

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 29 2019