FiLMiC, the company that showed the amazing multi-cam video recording in its FiLMiC Pro app during the iPhone 11 keynote, has decided to release that feature as a new standalone app for now. Called DoubleTake, the app is free to download on the App Store.
DoubleTake lets you shoot from all the cameras on your iPhone. If you have the iPhone 11 Pro, this means you can shoot from all four cameras, including the three on the back and the one on the front. The number goes down depending upon the number of cameras you have on your iPhone.
The UI is fairly simple. From the bottom left corner of the screen, you can select how many cameras you want to activate. From the top right corner you can select having a split-screen view, PiP or discreet.
Split-screen mode shows you the feed from all the selected cameras on the screen at once and the final video includes the feed from all of them, as they appear on the viewfinder. PiP or picture in picture mode lets you have one main camera in the background and one secondary camera in the foreground inside a window and you can move the window around anywhere on screen. Lastly, discreet saves separate files for every active camera, so you get an individual file from every camera instead of one combined file.
The app is currently limited to recording up to 1080p per camera at 24, 25 or 30fps. 1080p is currently the maximum Apple’s API supports for multi-cam app so it’s an OS limitation and not an app limitation.
Despite that, what you have here is still extremely impressive, especially for a free app. An app like this could be great for interview videos, where you can save the perspective of both, the person in front of and behind the camera, and choose to save it as a combined file or separate files. You can also shoot vertically in split screen for sharing on social media.
Unfortunately, the app is only compatible with 2019 and 2018 iPhones. Older iPhones running iOS 13 will technically be able to install the app but can only shoot from one camera at a time, which isn’t very useful. The app is also not available on Android, even though FiLMiC Pro is.
It remains to be seen when the FiLMiC Pro app itself would get this functionality. After all, it was FiLMiC Pro that was shown to have this feature during the Apple keynote, and it was also shooting 4K video at the time. It could be possible Apple changed its API limitations since then, which may have caused FiLMiC to release the feature as a standalone free app. Regardless, if you’re an owner of a relatively modern iPhone and like to shoot videos, this is still a great app to have.
You can download the app here.