 All champions have discipline. When others choose to stop, you don't stop for anything, because it's the discipline to work hard. Even in times when all seems hopeless, you gotta stay strong and remind yourself who you are. Remain disciplined and your time will come. What is up smart phone filmmakers and welcome back to my channel. This is the best time of year to start filming with your phone, because the video quality you get out of it is just very good. We almost always see at least some level of camera improvements every year and it's only getting better and better. I'm always looking for the best possible ways to achieve a cinematic look in our videos when it comes to using a phone. With the iPhone 13 lineup, we have come a step closer to achieving that look. If you haven't heard of it already, it's called cinematic mode, which by the way, the video you saw was shot with it. So what does cinematic mode do? Well, it's basically port your video on your iPhone, which blurs out the background. That creates what is called a bokeh or depth of field effect. This makes your video look more dynamic and helps isolate the subject, allowing the viewer to focus their attention on what's important. By the way, this talking head video you're seeing right now is shot on the iPhone 13 Pro Max using cinematic mode. For those that don't have the iPhone 13 Pro Max, don't worry. You can still achieve a blurry background with your iPhone. I will leave links in the video description below for you to check out. Before the launch of cinematic mode, the process of achieving a blurry background wasn't easy. You either had the method to download a third-party app like Focus Live or Protake App, but these come with a lot of imperfections or use the method of buying a DOF adapter, which can be quite costly and you aren't as flexible when shooting. I'm not saying that cinematic mode is perfect, but from my user experience, it's more advanced and overall gives you a better quality of depth of field. The footage looks convincing, it does a great job of processing the image in real time and you can create some cool focus transitions. So how can we use cinematic mode in our videos? First, launch the camera app on your iPhone 13 and swipe to select cinematic mode. Once selected, you have a live preview of what the cinematic footage will look like. You can record in 1080p 30 frames per second and it works with the front and selfie camera. When a person or an object is detected, which it does quickly, it automatically sets them in focus, making the background blurry. By tapping on the screen, you can set your focus as you record. Tap again to track the focus. This is great for moving subjects. Tap holding on the screen will lock the focus. If you have two subjects in the frame, cinematic mode will place the focus on the subject that is closer to the camera. If the subject then turns their head, the focus shift towards the subject that is further away, creating a focus pool and it does it quite organically. If you want to change the amount of blur in the background, you can tap one of the symbols in the top right hand corner. A slider will appear at the bottom where you can change the blur amount between two for very blurry and 16 for less blurry. I suggest you keep the blur amount between F5 and F8 to get a more natural looking shallow depth of field. There is also a hidden menu when tapping the arrow to the left. The plus minus symbol allows you to adjust your exposure to make your videos brighter or darker. I would generally turn down the exposure to a minus one because the cinematic mode tends to overexpose the image most of the time. The lighting bolt allows you to turn on or off the flashlight for additional light. And keep in mind that cinematic mode works well in good lit environments. You can also use the wide or telephoto lens by tapping on the one time button. However, the ultra wide lens is not available in cinematic mode. A good way to save time is to preserve the camera settings when using a cinematic mode. This way you can set your values such as the exposure and f-stop. And when you open cinematic mode again, the settings will stay the way how you left it. This also works with the normal video mode on the iPhone. Now, the beauty about recording your videos in cinematic mode is that you can change the focus and blur even after you shot your videos using the camera app's editor. So let me show you how to edit your videos that was taken in cinematic mode. In the photo app, tap the video that you would like to edit. Select the edit and the video timeline appears below your video. The white dots are the points where the focus has changed. You can move the indicator to scrub through your footage. What's great is that you can see what's currently in focus indicated by the yellow square. And it also recognizes people or objects that are in the background, which are indicated with a white square. This is where people get a little bit confused. Now, below the timeline, you have these white dots, which represent the automatic focus pool made by the camera app. These can't be deleted. The yellow dots represent the manual focus pools that were made by me, for example, or by you. These can be deleted. Like I mentioned, a focus pool is basically the change of focus in a scene. On the top left, you can tap the focus button to switch between automatic focus tracking or your manually selected focus point. Since I want to manually adjust my focus, I keep that enabled all the time. You can tap on the white square to change the focus point to that person or object. You can also tap anywhere else to set your focus point. You can double tap on the subject, which will enable automatic focus tracking, which will track the subject throughout the video. To lock the focus, just tap hold on the screen. To change the blur amount, just tap the F button and set a different value, which will then be applied to the entire clip. And this is really awesome because if you find the blur amount too unnatural, you can always change it afterwards. You can also remove the bokeh completely by tapping on the yellow cinematic button at the top of the screen. So guys, as you can see, the editing process with cinematic mode is user-friendly and it is fun to work with. By the way, you can also edit your focus point and change the depth of field using other editing tools such as iMovie or Final Cut Pro, which is really exciting. Cinematic mode isn't perfect, but the quality of depth of field you get out of it is truly amazing and it is getting closer to taking over the jobs of DSLRs. Yes! Yes! I'm gonna throw my Sony a7S III right off my balcony. Say goodbye, Sony a7. You know what? I'm probably gonna wait a couple of years. I don't think it's that quite ready yet. Now it does take practice using cinematic mode and getting to know when to use it because for certain situations, it doesn't always look natural and you get that sort of halo effect. So play around with the f-stop and see what works best. I hope cinematic mode will be available in 24 or 25 frames per second since that is the cinematic frame rate to achieving a realistic motion blur and is the standard for movies. The great thing about cinematic mode is that you don't need additional equipment to achieve a blurry background and it does it pretty good, especially that you can adjust the focus even after you shot the video allows for a lot of flexibility in post. With that said guys, cinematic mode brings a new level of filmmaking on an iPhone and makes shooting videos even more enjoyable. Now I would love to hear your thoughts on the cinematic mode. Would you use it in your daily videos? Let me know in the comment section below. Now if you're new to my channel, make sure to subscribe as this will help the both of us. If you're new to smartphone filmmaking, I got a free guide that will help you get started making quality videos with your phone. Now one of the best ways to learn is to join the smartphone filmmaking community on Facebook that I created where you can share your work and get feedback from others. Thank you guys for watching, stay mobile and I will see you in the next video.