Oliver Haslam·

How To Shoot Video In iPhone Portrait Mode

Apple’s Portrait mode has been great since it arrived in 2016 and continues to go from strength to strength. But there’s one aspect that has yet to be improved – its ability to function when recording video.

At the moment, Apple’s stock Camera app just doesn’t support it at all, but as ever, there’s now an app for that in the form of Focos Live.

Available for download from the App Store for free, Focos Live lets you record 720p video without spending a penny. Anything higher resolution than that – 1080p and 4K, specifically – requires the $14.99 in-app purchase. There’s also a subscription model available, too.

Focos Live is the video version of the popular Focos App. With the functionality of taking portrait videos with wide aperture and bokeh effect, Focos Live is the next big thing when it comes to computational photography. With Focos Live, you can make limitless customization of any portrait video that you create, and you can even change the aperture as many times as you wish.
Focos Live offers master class video editing capability, amplified flexibility, and more functionality than any App that you may have tried before. With keyframe and adjustment layers for all options and easily navigable options for both beginners and experts, Focos Live is second to none.

That certainly sounds promising, doesn’t it? We’ve also seen test video created by Ben Geskin and, sure enough, it looks pretty great.

However, Geskin does point out that there’s currently no stabilization going on, making for some potentially bouncy content. We don’t know whether that’s something that will be added in the future, but given the hoops likely being jumped through to make this work at all, we wouldn’t want to bet on it.

For now, this is definitely a great option if you want to add some bokeh to your video. Just perhaps don’t expect it to be amazing quality afterward.

(Download: Focos Live for iPhone and iPad from the App Store)

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