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There are several reasons that droves of creators have adopted the Blackmagic Camera app in place of the iPhone's native camera. For one, it offers options demanded by pros like full manual control, ProRes video capture and scopes for monitoring video. Most importantly though, it's totally free, unlike rival camera apps from VSCO, Adobe and others.
Since iPhone creators don't usually have a camera crew, Blackmagic Design is offering some help with its latest version 3.3 update. You can now control the app from your wrist thanks to a new Apple Watch app that lets you do things like monitor video, start and stop recording and apply LUTs. To check out the new features, I took a fresh look at Blackmagic's app, and it's now incredibly impressive.
Why use the app? The native iPhone camera is powerful enough for most users, but lacks features needed for more creative work. It offers no way to make manual adjustments for shutter speed and white balance, for one, and has limited video format options. Plus, the built-in app lacks scopes, LUTs and other pro-level features.
Blackmagic Camera gives you all of those things and more with a simple and elegant interface. The main camera screen lets you choose key settings like shutter, ISO and white balance. Simply tapping on each one lets you change them manually. You can also easily adjust focal length, fps, exposure compensation, autofocus and LUTs (film looks).
Steve Dent for Engadget
Another key feature is digital stabilization available in three modes: Standard, Cinematic and Extreme. The first two smooth out normal shaking, while the latter corrects extreme shakiness when running, for instance (albeit with a noticeable crop). Note that stabilization is applied to video after it's recorded, so you won't see the results during shooting.
You'll need to dive into another page of settings for things like the video codecs (10-bit ProRes, H.264 or H.265), bitrate, resolution, color space and more. Along with standard 16:9 4K video, the app supports open-gate capture if you want to output both vertical and horizontal video.
It's possible to shoot ProRes RAW video with Blackmagic Camera on an iPhone 17 Pro or Pro Max, but you'll need to connect a fast USB-C external SSD like this MagSafe-compatible model. Fortunately, stabilization is now supported for ProRes RAW capture (iOS 26.1 and above), something that was missing in previous versions of the app.
There's a nice array of scopes for monitoring, including false color, grids, zebras and focus peaking, along with histograms and stereo audio meters. You also get a vertical frame guide that helps when shooting for both vertical and horizontal platforms. "Slate" is another handy feature, letting you note the project name, lens data and other production info.
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