Gig movie capture, take two! (Unfiltered, plus iPhone 6, Windows ten Mobile, Android M)
All About Windows Phone
Gig movie capture, take two! (Unfiltered, plus iPhone 6, Windows ten Mobile, Android M)
Published by Steve Litchfield at 6:15 UTC, June 22nd 2015
In a previous feature, a week or two ago, I took a bunch of smartphones to a local gig and did some direct comparisons – very high volume, low and changeable lighting, challenging environments, all make for an ultimate cameraphone movie capture test. The main Windows Phone I was testing – the Lumia one thousand twenty – fared sub-optimally because of the default audio filtering in Lumia Camera. So I headed out again, with this feature turned tightly off. then threw in the latest iPhone 6, the Lumia nine hundred thirty running Windows ten Mobile and even Android M(!) for good measure.
One of the trickiest bits about testing the movie capture capabilities of smartphones under strong audio explosion, i.e. at a live music event, is that you usually incur the anger of the venue staff or security staff, afraid of copyright issues. Then there’s the quirkiness of people eyeing you pull up to half a dozen smartphones from your pockets one after the other. And the risk of getting mugged on the way out of the building! So you have to pick and choose your events cautiously.
In my case, a local covers band (‘In Too Deep’, gigs page here, if you’re interested), ensured to be very noisy, with space to film without being pestered and not so territorial about material that they forbid filming. And yes, I’d warned them that I was going to be experimenting with a ‘duo’ (ahem) of phones.
I then shot thirty 2nd segments across the set, alternating smartphones and keeping track of which clip was which, of course.
And here’s the result, however as usual bear in mind that the quality here (do max the playback window out and also the quality, to 1080p) is after both iMovie’s and YouTube’s own transcoding, on top of the MP4 encoding used by the phones themselves. But it’s enough that you’ll get the gist. Oh, and USE HEADPHONES for best effect and evaluation!
For interest sake, I also throw in movie from the Nokia 808, which won out last time, plus some from the Google Nexus Five, which I happened to have to forearm (and was running the ‘beta’ preview of Android M!) and which stands in for ‘lesser’ flagships. I did attempt the Lumia nine hundred thirty with Windows ten Mobile, but had the same encoding issues with its MP4 as in the previous tests, so albeit I’ve included its movie below, it stands separate from the main montage as I couldn’t process its movie on my desktop. Breathe.
As an aid, I’ve summarised my conclusions in text form below the movie.
As in the very first feature, lighting was an issue, the band hadn’t set this up ideally (again) the singers’ faces were permanently in deep shadow. As you’ll see above. Tricky for the phone cameras to capture!
Oh, and here’s the bonus nine hundred thirty movie, shot with the Microsoft-recommended Lumia Camera Beta (tho’ I did wish later that I’d used the standard ‘built in’ Camera app instead. ), but incapable to be rendered in the main montage:
The phones used here, then:
Apple iPhone six (2014) – the audio capture is decent, a good quality microphone has been used, however it’s stringently mono – listen on headphones and you can feel the difference inbetween this and that from the two Nokias. Picture quality is pretty good too – a little lacking in saturated colours but the digital stabilisation used is effective and matches the OIS used in the one thousand twenty below.
Nokia eight hundred eight PureView (2012) – mind blowingly good audio. Just stunning, you could film a band with this phone and almost suggest the MP4 audio to them to put out as a live recording. The movie’s pretty good too, in terms of low noise (the hardware oversamples from the 41MP sensor in real time), tho’ there’s no OIS to keep the framework constant.
Nokia Lumia one thousand twenty (2013) – with the ‘bass filter’ set to ‘off’, the audio was certainly better than in my very first comparison, with better EQ and volume all round, however there’s still not the same presence and fidelity as from the 808, which is odd as the microphone components are, I believe, identical. Maybe it’s down to microphone positioning and baffling in the hardware? The movie’s not fairly as good either, at least in terms of noise, with all the advantages of oversampling being lost on this Windows Phone version of the PureView sensor. On the other arm, there’s the super OIS to keep the movie framework stable and this does work well, tho’ not noticeably better than the software version in the iPhone 6, at least when not ‘zoomed’.
LG Google Nexus five (2013) – albeit this has OIS in its camera, it’s not active for movie capture, at least under Android M (still in early beta, toughly the same state of readiness as Windows ten Mobile!), which is a shame. Mind you, as with the LG G4 in the last feature, tho’ here in glorious mono(!), the microphone used just cannot treat high volumes. The distortion fairly horrible – so much so that I only included one Nexus five clip in the montage above, to save both your ears and sanity!
Nokia Lumia nine hundred thirty (2014) – albeit there’s no ‘bass filter’ option in Lumia Camera Beta for Windows ten Mobile, curiously, so there was nothing to turn off(!), audio was excellent, equalling the Lumia one thousand twenty and even getting close to the Nokia eight hundred eight – maybe it truly is about mike positioning! Movie quality was decent, however the OIS didn’t seem to be activated, surely something to do with the immature Windows ten Mobile hosting – maybe this will get re-enabled in a previous build of the OS? Then there’s the nosey lack of compatibility for the MP4 files produced by the ‘Beta’ app.
At the risk of annoying table-haters here, I’ve put (admittedly subjective) scores for all the above into a grid, all initial scores out of Ten: