The best camera app for video on iPhone, honestly ranked

The six options, ranked

Ranked for people filming things rather than for a specification sheet.

1. Blackmagic Camera. Free, from a company that makes cinema cameras, with an interface borrowed from them. Manual shutter angle, ISO, white balance and focus, Apple Log and ProRes on the Pro models, false colour and focus peaking, LUT preview, and recording straight to an external drive on hardware that supports it. Verdict: the best video app on the platform, and the price is the least interesting thing about it. Weakness: it gives you enough control to ruin a shot, and it does not have the stock app's stabilisation or automatic tone mapping to fall back on.
2. The stock Camera app. Free, already there, and the only app with full access to Action mode stabilisation and Apple's HDR pipeline. Verdict: the right answer for anything you are filming while moving, and for anything you want to look good with no work. Weakness: no manual shutter or ISO, no scopes, and very little control over how it decides to expose.
3. Kino. A paid app from the developers of Halide, built around getting a cinematic result without doing the manual work. Instant Grade looks apply as you film, and the auto-exposure is designed to avoid the stepping you get when a phone re-exposes mid-shot. Verdict: the best middle ground between the stock app and Blackmagic. Weakness: fewer professional tools than Blackmagic, and you are paying for an opinion about colour that you may not share.
4. Final Cut Camera. Apple's own free manual capture app, with focus peaking, manual shutter and ISO, Log and ProRes on supported models, and multicam recording that pairs with Final Cut Pro for iPad. Verdict: worth having free, and the multicam is the genuine reason to choose it. Weakness: thinner than Blackmagic in nearly every other respect, and the multicam only pays off inside Apple's editing ecosystem.
5. Halide. Primarily a stills app with a strong manual interface. Verdict: not the answer for video, and listed because people ask. Weakness: video is not what it is for.
6. Filmic Pro. For years the default recommendation for serious iPhone video. It changed ownership, moved to a subscription, and its update pace and reliability have been widely criticised since. Verdict: no longer the automatic choice, and Blackmagic does most of it free. Weakness: subscription pricing for an app whose reputation has fallen, and reported requirements that make it less dependable in the field than it was.

Compared: best for, and the real weakness

ShutterAI is absent because it is ours and unreleased. Labelled note below.

Why the stock app still wins for most people

Recommending Blackmagic to somebody filming their friend's birthday is bad advice, and it is the most common bad advice in this category. Three things the stock app does that no third-party app fully matches.

Stabilisation. Standard video stabilisation is good and Action mode is genuinely remarkable, and Action mode is not available to third-party apps in the same form. If you are walking, running or filming from a moving vehicle, the stock app will produce a usable clip where a manual app produces a shaky one that no editing fixes.

Automatic exposure that does not step. Phones re-expose constantly as the scene changes. Apple's version of this is smooth and gradual. Several third-party apps visibly jump, which is the single most amateur-looking artefact in phone video.

It is already open. The best camera app for the thing happening right now is the one that launches from the lock screen. A manual app you have to configure has missed the moment.

The honest dividing line: if the footage is going into an edit where you will grade it, use Blackmagic. If the footage is going straight to someone's phone, use the stock app.

The settings that change more than the app

Four decisions affect the result more than the choice of app, and they apply in all of them.

• Frame rate. 24 or 25 frames per second looks like film and 60 looks like television. If you want a cinematic result, the frame rate does more of that work than any colour look. Shoot 60 only when you intend to slow it down.
• Shutter angle or shutter speed. Roughly double the frame rate is the convention: at 25 frames per second, a shutter of about 1/50. Too fast and motion looks stuttery and hyper-real. This is a manual app's main advantage and the reason to open one.
• Lock the exposure and the white balance. Automatic anything will drift mid-shot, and a shot where the colour shifts halfway through is nearly unusable. Lock both before you record, in whichever app you are in.
• Do not film in Log unless you will grade it. Log footage looks flat and grey by design, because it is preserving range for a colourist. Straight out of the camera it looks worse than the stock app, and if you are not going to grade it, it is a downgrade.

Our iPhone camera settings guide covers the stills equivalents of these, several of which apply to video as well.

What no app fixes

Four constraints sit below the software layer, and every app on this page shares them.

Light. A phone sensor is small, and in dim light every app produces noise. Manual control lets you choose which compromise you take, but it cannot add photons. Moving one lamp usually beats changing app.

Audio. The built-in microphones are adequate at close range and poor across a room, and the wind noise on an outdoor clip is the thing viewers notice first. An inexpensive clip-on microphone improves a video more than any camera app on this page.

Storage and heat. ProRes at high resolution fills a phone extraordinarily quickly and warms it up. Long takes in a demanding format will eventually stop recording. Check free space before a shoot rather than during it.

Focus. Continuous autofocus on a phone hunts when something crosses the frame. In any app that allows it, set focus manually and leave it, and move yourself rather than relying on the camera to keep up.

Where ShutterAI fits

Ours, unreleased, and not a professional video tool, so treat this as disclosure. The video-relevant part is that ShutterAI's film and digicam looks render live on video as well as photos, so a clip comes out already carrying the same look as the stills from the same evening, which is otherwise a grading job. Wave to Shoot starts and stops recording with a thumbs up, which is useful when the phone is on a tripod across the room.

It comes to iPhone this autumn and is free to start, which is why it is not in the ranking. For manual video control today, Blackmagic Camera is free and better than anything we would claim. The waitlist is here.