Ultrakam app lets you take film-quality videos on your iPhone

While Sony and Samsung are busy making phones with 4K recording capabilities, one developer has worked its pixel magic to get more from iPhone cameras.Ultrakam is the first iOS app capable of recording 2K film resolution, letting iPhone 5s owners shoot 2240 x 1672 pixel video and output movie-quality footage at the touch of a button. There’s support for the iPhone 5 and 5c, as well as the the iPad mini and iPad with Retina display, but the app is limited to high-definition and 2K at 20fps on “older” devices.

These days, it seems, everyone’s a videographer. We can attribute (or blame) that phenomenon at least partly on the ubiquity of video on smartphones and consumer cameras. But now there’s a way for mobile filmmakers of all levels to push even harder beyond creative limits. VFXWarrior today launched Ultrakam, the first and only iOS app that can record 2K video—a higher resolution than Full HD. With Ultrakam, you can shoot in either H.264 (iFrame) or M-JPEG codecs to yield up to 2240 x 1672 pixels, or 70 percent more than 1920 x 1080 Full HD. The app’s ability to capture 4:2:0 full range color shows denser blacks and whites. “My vision is to create the most powerful tools for the next generation of content creators and to integrate mobile devices as a professional tool in content production,” said Hassan Uriostegui, the developer behind Ultrakam. The emphasis is both on high resolution and minimal compression.