Record 4 Camera Angles at Once Using Only iPhones and iPads

Dave Lee (aka dave2d) had a YouTube review touching on this feature of using an ipad pro (2024) with final cut pro to record 4 streams of video and replace a streamdeck + mac + OBS setup a month ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bG2N4a0ir3A&t=626

(Just referencing, not really my area of interest)

I have done multiple recordings with this and such a small change has made a massive difference in my workflow.

Even if I am just recording a single angle, just being able to have a portable view of my camera has eliminated something being messed up with the recording like lighting, angle, etc.

Previously I would need to make a recording, send it to my Mac, check it, and hope that I don't mess something up when I record again.

That being said, it's not perfect. I am annoyed that for some reason I can't do 60fps if I am doing 4k, even though natively the Final Cut Camera app can do this.

Also annoyed that from the iPad I can't do an audio only channel with a bluetooth source and instead just have to have my iPad camera turned on and connected to my microphone. Not the end of the world but annoying since Final Cut Pro multicam itself does support audio only tracks.

It would be awesome if in a future update I could preview certain effects in real time, like green screen keying. But that would be a bonus and not a complaint.

I am sure that for more established studios this is not really useful and they already had similar functionality with far more expensive setups, but for someone doing everything just by themselves this is an amazing feature that fixes my single biggest issue with recording videos.

Somewhat related to this topic, Move.AI https://www.move.ai/ does something very similar but specifically for 3D 'markerless' motion-capture (MoCap) data. You can use iPhones, smartphone or recently any inexpensive network-connectable camera to get synchronized video from multiple sources, and then use that sync'd footage and their service to get accurate MoCap animation without needing expensive MoCap suits or hardware.

Plask.ai and Rokoko Vision do something similar, but only support 1 camera afaik, so their camera-based MoCap is less accurate than Move.ai's multi-camera solution.

As someone who uses Apple’s desktop Final Cut Pro app almost daily, I’ve been wondering if they would ever switch to a monthly fee as this pro version phone app does.

I think I paid around $350 eight years ago and get regular updates for free. I also have Adobe’s Premiere on my machine but I gravitate toward FCPX and wonder why I still pay Adobe monthly for that app. I might add syncing multiple cameras in FCPX is pretty easy in post production.

I’m wandering if this is a precursor for the future. Apple charging monthly for desktop apps.

Davinci resolve will quickly align multi camera shots based on audio (or other metadata) and makes it really easy to edit this type of video.

The live remote camera setup seems like the bones of the only killer app idea I've ever had: a two-iPhone camera system for couples who want a stranger to take a picture of them while they're on holiday.

It would work like this:

- hand volunteer a phone and ask them to point it at you

- direct the shot by looking at the second phone ("no, stand further back, not our legs, don't point it directly at the sun")

- put the second phone in your pocket

- have the stranger take the photo you actually want, saving you rounds of back and forth when they say "Is this OK?"

Has anyone ever seen an app like this?

Any camera with an accurate clock can record video timestamped so that the exact time of each frame can be known.

Why do we need proprietary stuff like this when we already have a tried and true method for syncing multicamera shots?

The iPhone and iPad should be perfectly capable of this. Every video you take should be compatible, and pooling videos from multiple people should allow you to sync and sequence the videos properly.

I tried this last weekend and it was anything but smooth. Many discovery/connection issues, and only two of the four devices sent over anything except the highly compressed "preview" stream, and they wouldn't send the final copy no matter what I tried. Had to make do with the lower quality videos to get the edit out quickly.

Bonus: FCP on iPad would keep throwing a blocking error stating it couldn't get the final streams every sixty seconds or so, for the entire duration of my editing and long after the other devices had left the vicinity. It seems the FCP project is somehow tainted by this.

Next time, I'll just record separate videos from all of them and use Resolve to sync via audio analysis to create a new multicam video.

Syncing audio and video timing for multicam is so difficult that it generally requires onsite highly paid camera operators to manage.

I wonder what magic they used (and what underlying data format for the video) to make this sync magic happen.

I wish Resolve could record multiple video/audio input sources at once - like a video DAW.

4K HDMI -> USB capture devices are so cheap these days. Yes you can record on the cameras, transfer and sync but it’s friction

Anyone know similar setup and app for Android device?

Anyone know if you can combine this multi cam feature with an external camera source connected to the iPad? So let’s say you have a canon camera hooked up by usbc to Final Cut and that’s your iPad’s camera, and then you have an iPhone as your second camera? If so, this can really be quite the portable high end recording solution for podcasters and YouTubers…

Is there a streaming-native way of encoding multiple camera angles simultaneously in a video? The ability to toggle between different angles is a feature on DVDs and Blu-rays that IMO is underused but awesome for educational videos where different aspects or angles of a demonstration might be useful.

iPhones record videos with variable frame rate, which makes them unsuitable for syncing the video with a separate recorded audio track (e.g. when recording guitars). The video and audio would ever so slightly go our of sync. I wish there was a way to use fixed frame rate when recording.

Why can't this work with Final Cut Pro on a Mac?

possibly if you are interested in doing this sort of thing, you will be interested in doing it with free software. in that case:

the debian debconf video team has been doing this for something like 15 years without the iphones and ipads, and without a limit of 4 camera angles, with 100% free software, and supporting live streaming (with simultaneous recoding to various bit rates) as well as just recording. they can fix unfortunate choices of camera stream after the fact for the final archived videos, too

they document their setup at https://debconf-video-team.pages.debian.net/docs/index.html. the live video mixing software (to choose which camera angle to stream at any given time) is voctomix https://github.com/voc/voctomix which belongs to the ccc video operation center https://c3voc.de/

i don't actually know what they use to push the rtmp video streams to the streaming server, but rtmp is very widely supported, since it's what twitch and youtube use for streaming video. obs studio can do this and is probably the most popular software for doing it; it's also 100% free software. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-... says that you can also use ffmpeg directly

    ffmpeg -re -i "Introducing App Platform by DigitalOcean-iom_nhYQIYk.mp4" -c:v copy -c:a aac -ar 44100 -ac 1 -f flv rtmp://localhost/live/stream

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Webcam#Encodingexample1 suggests getting ffmpeg input from your webcam with

    ffmpeg -f v4l2 -framerate 25 -video_size 640x480 -i /dev/video0

and i can successfully test my webcam with just

    ffmpeg -i /dev/video0 -pix_fmt yuv420p -f sdl 'hi'

but i think that integrating an audio stream is a little more hassle if you want to try doing it manually with ffmpeg command lines (details in https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/StreamingGuide and https://www.baeldung.com/linux/ffmpeg-webcam-stream-video). if you want a gui just use obs studio

do you think final cut camera will support pro photography or will there be a pro camera app?