There’s only so much your phone can do to give you the best videos you can hope for. While phone cameras focus on making the sensor bigger and the images better, there’s little a phone camera can do to give you cinematic footage. The Movi (cleverly named to represent both physical movement, and the movie format) literally brings drone tech into your smartphone via the robotic arm that uses a 3-axis motor to negate your hand’s movements, making it look like you shot footage on a steadicam.
Made by the guys who developed Hollywood-quality drones and shooting rigs for the likes of Game of Thrones, Mad Max: Fury Road and Tour De France, the Movi literally brings cinematic prowess to the camera that’s on you. The Movi is literally as small as the phone itself, and comes with easy-access controls that allow you to stabilize like a pro. The Movi even comes bundled with Freefly’s video capturing and post-processing app that lets you further stabilize your video using the app’s Majestic Mode or create elaborate time-lapses using the Movi-Lapse feature.
What the Movi achieves for a product its size is truly stunning. Designed to retrofit phones of all sizes, and to literally compress the kind of full-body rigs Hollywood uses into something the size of your phone, Movi truly does what it claims to do. Shrink the Hollywood camera crew to sit around your phone!
To complement their live streaming video platform, NYC-based startup Livestream have just launched a 4K camera that enables you to edit the video as you stream it.
Launched in 2007 and known for a while as Mogulus (that definitely made it sound like a streaming service for moguls), Livestream is a live streaming video platform that’s currently used by such customers as Spotify, World Economic Forum, Tesla, Space X, and more than 200 local TV affiliates. The first piece of hardware the company came up with was Broadcaster, an entry level device that could be connected to any camera that had HDMI video output. Next, Livestream launched the Studio HD line that included switchers with multiple camera inputs. That must have sounded like great news for anyone wanting to shoot professional, multi-camera productions, but the latest product to come from this company is yet again targeting regular consumers. The Movi camera, which is capable of streaming video at resolutions up to 4K, enables its users to edit content on the fly, or just record and share it later.
First thing you’ll notice about Movi is its ridiculous size for a camera that records and even streams 4K videos. It’s slightly smaller than your head, and as The Verge’s Sean O’Kane noted, it puts a multi-camera setup in your pocket.
Secondly, but most importantly feature-wise, Movi comes with real-time editing capabilities. Not at last, Movi is a connected live streaming camera that benefits from a feature-rich companion app. For the time being, the Movi app is only available for iOS, but Android support should be available soon, too. Once you fire up the app on your iPhone, Movi will start detecting faces and motion. The most impressive aspect is that it gives users nine different shots to choose from, each of them shot at a different degree of zoom.
It’s the companion app that really boosts Movi’s real-time editing capabilities, as it enables users to zoom, pan, or move to a different shot using touchscreen gestures on the iPhone.
The video shot with the camera’s 150-degree lens and 4K sensor can be stored either on a microSD card (a 16GB one is included in the package), or in iPhone’s internal memory. The video can be streamed live or it can be shared later using your favorite service. The downside of streaming it as it’s being shot is that Livestream charges a monthly subscription for that, and I don’t know if people will step on each other’s toes to pay $9 each month and get their video online instantly. That’s definitely a negligible amount for vloggers, but casual users might have second thoughts.
Even though the retail value of the Movi camera is $399, Livestream is taking pre-orders for it on the Movi website for $200. The MSRP seems a bit steep, but the pre-order price tag is rather decent, considering the device’s features.
One of the hottest gadgets at NAB isn't quite what you'd expect. Freefly, the company behind a series of professional-grade cinema hexacopters, is demoing its new Movi three-axis stabilized camera gimbal. We heard some rumblings about such a device last week, but the $15,000 price tag is quite a turnoff -- until you see it in action. We dropped by the company's booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center to check it out with an attached Canon EOS-1D C. Movi weighs in at just 3.5 pounds, jumping to 10 pounds once you mount the Canon camera and lens.
It's a very robust system, despite the weight and footprint, letting you pull off shots that otherwise may require hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment, and a substantial crew. In other words, you can capture incredibly compelling motion scenes with just a single camera operator. Don't take our word for it, though -- join us past the break to see Movi in action, along with a glowing testimonial from director Vincent Laforet, who Freefly tapped to shoot the gimbal's very first sample reel.
