The Best Pro Camera App for iPhone Filmmakers

Jámm Hostetler @joooomphotography

March 29, 2024

The Moment Pro Camera app stands out as an excellent option for mobile photographers and filmmakers aiming to maximize the capabilities of their iOS camera. It offers advanced manual controls like ISO, shutter speed, focus, and additional functionalities such as slow shutter and timelapse. Our development team has re-engineered the app’s core to enhance filmmaker control, ensuring it is fully optimized for the latest iOS devices, including the iPhone 15 Pro. This update introduces support for ProRes footage, Apple Log, 48MP images, and more.

To deepen your understanding of the app and learn how to leverage its features effectively, we encourage you to read on. For existing users seeking a quick guide to getting started or refreshing their knowledge, our comprehensive tutorial article is available here.

ProRes

Our latest update adds support for four ProRes flavors: ProRes 422 HQ, ProRes 422, ProRes 422 LT, and ProRes 422 Proxy. For dedicated filmmakers and editors, these codecs offer high-quality video files without inter-frame compression*, allowing for a better editing experience and final cut. They also provide higher spatial color resolution than the usual HEVC formats on iOS**. See this Apple support link for more details about choosing the four ProRes options.

*Rather than compressing data across frames, each frame in a ProRes video is its standalone image.
** Luminance (”brightness”) and chrominance (”color”) data are stored separately in many video formats. ProRes 422 files store twice as much color information per pixel block than comparable HEVC files, which generally use 420 subsampling on iOS.

Apple Log

On the iPhone 15 Pro Models, our Pro Camera app now supports shooting in Apple log. This color profile allows a more extensive dynamic range to be packed into 10-bit data, giving you access to more stops without clipping. In addition to providing more latitude later in the color grading process, the resulting video can be rendered to HDR displays if desired. Apple Log is currently only supported with ProRes codecs.

Dolby Vision (10-Bit HDR)

If you’d like to capture a more comprehensive dynamic range but aren’t interested in color grading in post, you can also use our new HDR option. You’ll notice that the viewfinder becomes brighter, and that highlights really “pop.” Videos recorded with this setting will appear with the same extended brightness range when played back on a compatible device, including most iPhones and newer Macs. This setting also uses a wider color gamut, meaning it can capture more distinct colors than standard video formats. 10-bit HDR is available for both ProRes and HEVC files.

Display P3

If you’re interested in a wide color gamut but don’t like the brightness of full HDR (or don’t have a compatible device), we’ve still got you covered! The new Wide (P3) option allows you to capture more colors than standard Rec.709 but remains in an 8-bit format without the dramatic highlights produced by HDR.

48 Megapixel Photos

We’ve also added support for 48MP HEIF, JPG, and TIFF files on compatible Apple devices, allowing you to capture finer details and create larger prints. Note that several factors must be met to capture 48 MP images: