From the video description:
Most people believe that a smartphone camera doesn't have the quality to do challenging cinematic work. When it comes to the new Nokia Lumia, we disagree. To prove it, we set out to film something awe inspiring to bring to life the quality of the camera features in Nokia Lumia phones, including its ability to film high definition video in 1080p, and its Optical Image Stabilization technology to create blur free shots.
In order to do this, we went to Squamish valley in British Columbia, which is renowned for its natural beauty. We attached the Lumia to a remote control helicopter and filmed as many remote, scenic and inaccessible locations as we could in one amazing day of good weather. We drove up old logging roads and flew off the sides of cliffs, we filmed sunken barges that can only be seen when the tide is completely out, and we flew the helicopter into waterfalls and river gorges to capture footage that you wouldn't be able to see in any other way.
Which is fair enough, and credit to the team for setting this up, finding the locations and so on - the finished video (below) is certainly attractive and compelling. The opening few seconds is a little dodgy, but then the phone was almost certainly shooting video through a windscreen and partly into the sun. My main observations revolve around:
- the (non) use of auto-focus. The team was going for 'cinematic', which is fair enough, and you never see auto-focus hunting in the cinema - focus is locked and depth of field accepted as a fact of life. Look at the footage closely and you'll notice that almost every scene has something in the fairly near foreground (less than ten metres away), which is nice and clear, plus the background, which isn't. In other words, continuous auto-focus was turned off (and the camera reverts to a neutral hyperfocal setting). The default, used for 99% of video by 99% of users, is for continuous auto-focus to be on, and this usually results in far 'messier' footage.
- the tightness of the editing - obviously, we're seeing just the very clearest, best bits of an entire day of filming, I'm guessing over six hours of footage. Not that this invalidates the short sequences, but real world footage will never be this clear or consistent. Especially with continuous auto-focus turned on (see above).
Given these observations, it's clear that the same footage could be obtained with the older 920, given that it too has the same optically stabilised camera. And I'd wager that decent results would also have been obtained on the Nokia 808 PureView, the Lumia 720, the Samsung Galaxy S4 or Apple iPhone 5.
But hey, it's Nokia's promo, presumably for the officially teased Lumia 928. Enjoy the film!
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