Retro-look for movies
There’s a ton and a half of apps to spice up your iPhone made pictures. Now we see the next wave of filter apps: vintage movies. Since December last year users can download the 8mm Vintage Camera app from the Appstore to give your videos a nice retro look in realtime.
Why would we do this when we just recently raised our voice to hail the quality improvements of smartphone cameras? Well, it’s your choice in the end but we assume it’s the charme of the past. Remember those amazing silent movies from the 20’s?
The app is fairly simpel to handle. You can change film type and lens on the fly. Every combination of both gives a different overall effect, featuring stuff like colour tint, scratches, dust and scintillation to achieve perfect retro style. This happens while you film, so what you see is what you get.
A fun little tool is the Jitter button. When you press it, the app lets the film “jump” a little to copy the effect you get when you watch an old film on an equally old projector. Gotta love that one!
The videos can be easily exported to your camera roll, sent via Email or uploaded to Youtube. What’s missing, however, are the common sharing options for Twitter and Facebook. Another itch is the low resolution of the movies. The output size of only 360p stands in no relation to the 720p available on the iPhone. We assume that this is due to the realtime rendering, which the app applies. Another aspect might be the compatibility to the iPhone 3GS, which has a lot less computing power available. Other vintage video apps record the film first and apply the effect afterwards.
Especially for the 20’s movie effect it would be helpful to allow some editing. Currently the iPhone doesn’t allow mute recordings, so it might appear a little pretentious when these ‘old’ movies are accompanied by crystal clear sound. Remove the sound or add a suitable soundtrack and you get a neat result.
Update
The developers were faster than we thought. Almost the moment we put this article online our iPhones received an update note for 8mm, now available as release 1.1. The sound issue has been solved and you can now choose between normal microphone sound, mute or the very cool projector-sound option. Thanks guys, that’s what we were looking for!
The beautiful example videos below were taken with the 8mm Vintage Camera app and edited with ReelDirector – all on the iPhone.
Data sheet:
Price: – $1.99/1,59€
System: – iOS min. 4.1
Size: – 2,5MB
Language: – English, Chinese, Japanese
Ads: – no
optimized for Retina Display (iPhone4): – yes
Multitasking: – yes
Universal-App: – no
Push-Notifications: – no
Download:
Appstore
Screenshots
MO/SdP
