Moment Pro Camera 4.0 Impressions
It’s not a secret that I’m a huge fan of Moment — just look here, here, and here. I have a couple of their lenses, shop with them all the time, and full disclosure, I am one of their ambassadors. I have already written about Moment’s newest app, Rtro, but I have yet to talk about their first app — Pro Camera.
For those of you that aren’t super familiar with Moment’s Pro Camera app, let me fill you in. The Pro Camera app started as the best place to shoot with Moment lenses, but quickly evolved into a full-blown pro camera app. Moment totally revamped the app in 2018 to add all of those ‘pro’ features like RAW shooting and manual control over exposure, ISO, shutter, focus, and white balance. These controls paired with some other powerful software magic have allowed for some pretty cool features like the slow shutter update. So, needless to say that when they released the Pro Camera 4.0 update I was excited. This time around the update added a couple of new logo options, some refinements (like a level 🙏🏻), but the major feature is the highly requested time-lapse mode.
So why are time-lapses such a big deal?They’re a super handy tool to keep in the filmmaking kit. Time-lapses are remarkably good at setting the scene or showing the progression of time. They can help record the big epic sunsets over, but they can also be used to record the smaller moments like brewing a pour over, cooking some dinner, or an impromptu dance session if you’re Andrew Kearns. Casey Neistat was a notorious user of time-lapses in his wildly popular daily vlogs, which is certainly where I became most familiar with the technique. But if you do using the native app or even more simply just record a video and speed it up it’s hard to create a distinct style — basically everything just ends up looking super sped up without any style. Moment took its knowledge from their prior updates and rolled them all into their time-lapse mode.
With Pro Cam 4.0 you’re able to capture time-lapses with sweet, sweet motion blur in the middle of the day without having to bring out filters. Additionally, Moment’s time-lapses take full resolution photos at whatever interval you set in the app instead of the native camera app’s 4K cap. This gives you an immense amount of flexibility when it comes to processing your time-lapses. Within the Pro Cam app you’re able to choose the format, resolution, bitrate, and frame rate. They make it super easy to process and post the time-lapses straight from your phone, but if you want to get more involved in the process you’re able to export a full album of JPEGs and process the time-lapse however you want.
So, now we know why the update is so cool, but how do we make these sweet stylized time-lapses? You can go handheld, but the sped up motion will pick up every jolt and jitter. Personally, I love using my DJI Osmo Mobile 3 — one of the many pieces of gear in my 2020 Mobile Kit. The gimbal keeps your footage super stable and is great for landscapes, but where the Osmo really shines is with hyper-lapses. A hyper-lapse is basically a time-lapse, but with movement through a scene. The master of mobile hyper-lapses is Andy To — if you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Tim Cook — and his favorite piece of gear is his Osmo as well. Niles from the Moment team does a great job of going over how to nail your hyper-lapses using just an iPhone and an Osmo. Like any great piece of software, Pro Cam, is made even better when paired with the right hardware. In addition to my Osmo I’ll also throw one of my Moment lenses on there to really change up the perspective. Moment has been helping to push the boundaries of mobile photography since 2013, and this update just proves that Moment continues to lead the charge.
Moment is pushing the entire mobile photography industry forward with both hardware and software. The Pro Cam app is further evidence of just how much Moment cares about pushing the boundaries of mobile creating. We have incredible cameras in our pockets, and for $2.99 you can fully unlock that potential.
Disclaimer: I am a member of the#momentsquad. By shopping through my link I get a portion of each sale.
