Every year the iPhone camera gets a little better. This year's iPhone 12 is no different. Every year the iPad gets a little faster. The release of the iPad Air 4th Gen is no different. So I put both of these devices to the test. Here's the result.

https://youtu.be/xOm9xyD6eOM

But first, a quick vocab lesson:

FPS or Frames per second is the number of pictures taken each second. If you're shooing in 30fps, then 30 images are captured every second. The higher the FPS, the smoother the video will be. For reference, 24 FPS is the standard for movies.

High Dynamic Range or HDR is how bright a screen or video can be versus how dark the screen or video can be. HDR on its own holds no meaning, all it says is there is a high contrast between the light and dark parts in a scene.

Dolby Vision is an HDR standard that gives HDR meaning. For a video or screen to be in Dolby Vision, it must follow Dolby’s rules that say the video or screen must get this light and this dark and can show these colors.

4K is the video resolution. In a 4K video, there are 4 thousand pixels captured per image. The resolution is one of the pieces of the puzzle that make a clear image.

Those were some quick definitions. If you want to learn more about these subjects, check out the links below.

Recording Settings on an iPhone 12

For this video, my goal was to shoot in 4K, HDR (Dolby Vision). HDR video being the headline addition of the iPhone 12. Unfortunately, I set the camera settings on 4K, 60fps, HDR. Why is this unfortunate you may ask? Well, the standard iPhone 12 only supports 4K, HDR at 30fps. If you want to record at 4K, HDR at 60 fps, you're going to need an iPhone 12 Pro. I didn't realize my mistake until editing. I was shooting in 60 FPS to give myself more flexibility while editing because I would have more frames or images to work with. In the end, I didn't need the 60 FPS while editing, and I exported the video in 30 FPS. It was just an unfortunate mistake.

Even though I missed out on the highlight feature of my new iPhone, it didn't impair the quality. The captured videos are all stunning and really show how far Apple has come with computational videography. Apple undoubtedly has one of the best smartphone video cameras on the market.

My second goal was to put my new iPad Air 4 to the test, and that I did. Since this was a test, I went with iMovie, Apple's free consumer-grade video editing application. Alternatively, I could have used LumaFusion, but it cost $30. I used to use the desktop version of iMovie to edit these videos, but eventually, I grew out of it and upgraded to Apple's pro video editor Final Cut Pro. Since Apple doesn’t make Final Cut for iOS, LumaFusion is the next best thing, more on that later.

In my opinion, iMovie on iOS is trash. It’s way oversimplified and feels like it hasn’t had a real update in years. The iPads we have today are perfectly capable of performing higher-end edits.

To make the music video style, I was aligning clips with portions of the soundtrack. However, this was easier said than done. My main issue with iMovie is what I call the relative timeline. In higher-end video editors, the video clips snuggle up next to each other. In iMovie on iOS, you get this giant gap between each clip to tell you the transition style. Meanwhile, the audio track keeps going right through the break. It’s a little hard to explain, more something you have to try for yourself. That being said, iMovie is clearly for throwing some clips together and exporting them together as one video. For most people, that’s all they're looking for.