How do I shoot better video on my phone?

Phone cameras shoot genuinely good video. What separates a watchable clip from an unwatchable one is almost entirely handling and sound, and neither costs anything to fix.

What you'll need

• A phone
• Something to brace against or a small tripod (optional)
• An external microphone or wired earphones with a mic (optional)

Step by step

1. Decide the orientation before you start.Landscape for anything that will be watched on a television, a laptop or a projector. Vertical only if the destination is a phone-shaped feed. Filming vertical and cropping to landscape later throws away most of the frame.
2. Lock exposure and focus.Press and hold on the subject until it locks. Automatic exposure visibly breathes brighter and darker every time the framing changes, and it is the most obvious tell of an amateur clip.
3. Fix your resolution and frame rate deliberately.For most purposes 1080p at 25 or 30 frames per second is plenty, easier to edit and a third of the storage. Choose 4K when you intend to crop or to stabilise in editing, and 50 or 60 frames per second only when you want smooth slow motion.
4. Hold the phone properly.Both hands, elbows against your ribs, and lean against a wall or door frame if there is one. Phone stabilisation corrects small tremors and cannot correct a walk or a swing.
5. Move the camera as little as possible.Static shots cut together beautifully. Slow pans look considered. Continuous roaming is unwatchable and impossible to edit. If you want to move, walk heel-to-toe with the phone held close to your chest, and keep the shot going for several seconds either side of the movement.
6. Get the microphone close to the sound.The phone's microphone picks up the whole room and heavily favours whatever is nearest — usually your own breathing and your fingers on the case. Two metres from a speaker in a normal room already sounds distant and echoey.
7. Shoot in the best light you can find.Video has no multi-frame merging to lean on, so it is much more sensitive to poor light than stills are. Face people towards a window rather than away from it.
8. Hold each shot longer than feels natural.Start recording three seconds before the action and stop three seconds after. Editing needs handles at both ends, and a clip that starts on the movement cannot be cut cleanly.
9. Check the storage and heat before anything important.4K fills a phone quickly and long recordings in warm conditions can cause the phone to reduce quality or stop. For anything you cannot repeat, clear space first and keep the phone out of direct sun.

Tips

• Wired earphones with an inline microphone, clipped to a collar, transform speech recordings and cost almost nothing.
• Shoot a few seconds of the room tone — the sound of the space with nobody talking. It is invaluable for patching gaps when editing.
• Do not use digital zoom while recording. Move closer, or crop afterwards where you have the resolution to spare.

Common mistakes

• Filming vertically for something that will be watched on a TV — The picture ends up as a narrow strip with black bars, and there is no way to recover the missing sides. Decide the destination first.
• Standing back and relying on the phone microphone — Distance from a microphone increases the proportion of room reflection to direct sound. At two metres in an ordinary room the recording sounds hollow and no amount of editing fixes it.
• Zooming and panning within a shot — It draws attention to the camera, it destabilises the frame and it makes the footage almost impossible to cut. Take two separate shots instead.

Questions people ask