Whenever you decide to take a video of a precious memory you’d like to capture, you have to remember that there’s a powerful camera sitting in your pocket. Whether it’s an iPhone or Android doesn’t matter, especially if the device is relatively new. You can accomplish a lot with the smartphone’s photo and video capabilities right out of the box. But the better acquainted you get with your equipment, the better the results will be.
Since we’re talking about video, it so happens that there’s a simple camera setting you can tweak on your iPhone and Android that will help you capture much smoother videos on your camera. The key is to shoot at 60 frames per second (fps) instead of 30fps.
You don’t have to be a pro to shoot at 60fps on your iPhone or Android device. And you don’t even have to be a camera enthusiast. As ZDNet explains, you might turn on the 60fps video recording mode on your iPhone accidentally. But you’ll realize the clips are suddenly better once you rewatch them.
It’s only then that you’ll try to understand why, all of a sudden, your videos look smoother than before. Increasing the frames per second that the camera captures will do that. You’re practically doubling the frames with a single setting, and the results will show, especially if you watch the videos on larger displays.
The downside to doubling the fps is that the video file will be larger than a regular 30fps clip. Also important here is the resolution of the clip. Shooting at 4K 60fps will consume much more storage than the 1080p 30fps setting.
The following video compares different shooting modes on an iPhone 11, from the default 1080p 30fps all the way up to 4K 60fps. Why an iPhone 11? Because you don’t need the newest model to capture smooth videos, especially on iPhone. Video capture has been a big focus for Apple and an advantage over Android in previous years.
Also, the accidental smooth video in ZDNet’s story came from an iPhone 11.
Now that you understand the basics, you can go ahead and enable 60fps on your iPhone right from the Camera app. You don’t even have to go to the Settings app.
Open the Camera app, switch to Video mode, and then look for the 30 number in the top right corner. Tap on it to turn it to 60. You can do the same thing to HD to turn video recording to 4K.
Increasing the frames per second is the key feature here to help you create smoother clips.
If you’re on Android, you can pull off the same effect from the Camera app. Again, switch to Video and then tap on the settings to select the desired resolution and fps values.
Like on iPhone, recording at higher resolution and increasing the number of frames will increase the size of the resulting clip. You might want to stick with HD (1080p) and 60fps for most recordings, regardless of platform. But it’s up to you to decide.
While we’re talking about camera settings, the following YouTube clip will teach you to customize your camera experience on your iPhone beyond the video settings.
