Summary
- Premium video recording may finally come to Android with Blackmagic Camera app, offering near-professional level features for budding videographers.
- Blackmagic, known for DaVinci Resolve, will bring free app to Android phones, syncing with desktop for easier clip transfer between devices.
- Filmic Pro, once gold-standard for Android video recording, may face competition with free Blackmagic Camera app on the horizon.
If you record video on an Android phone, you’re probably used to disappointment. For years, software support for cameras in the Android ecosystem has been a tangled mess of contradictions and incompatibilities. And the third-party apps you can use have been more of an afterthought than a properly developed application. If you need to record video on your phone, you’re almost certainly better off with an iPhone. But all that may be about to change thanks to a new app from Blackmagic previewed at NAB Las Vegas this week.
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Premium video recording is coming to Android
Blackmagic is the company behind the massively popular (and free) DaVinci Resolve non-linear video editing software. Back in September it released a free app — Blackmagic Camera — for the iPhone, and now it’s finally bringing it to Android (via MrAlexTech). If you’re a budding Android videographer, don’t get your hopes up just yet, because there’s no word on when it will be released to the public or which phones it will be available on.
There’s not a lot to see from the five-minute video posted on Sunday, but we can see the app running on a Samsung S24 (which one isn’t clear) and a Google Pixel 8 Pro. The app will only be available on a few phones to start with and that’s because software support for third-party cameras on Android is a bit of a disaster. Phone makers often lock their cameras’ most powerful features away from third-party developers, forcing them to provide an inferior experience. Worse, even though there are standard APIs for OEMs to implement on their phones to make it easier for developers to access the camera hardware, there’s no obligation for them to do so.
For phones that will support the Blackmagic Camera app, users can expect to have an app at a near-professional level. I’m not fully qualified to expound on all the features available in the app (go to Reddit for that) but in the video you can see that you can change your lens, FPS, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, and tint. And, of course, it will sync with DaVinci Resolve on your desktop to make moving clips between devices easier.
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Filmic should be worried
Right now, if you want to do professional video recording on your Android you’re going to have to shell out some money. Filmic Pro was the gold-standard for a while until it moved from a one-time purchase of $15 to a $5 per week subscription service. The Blackmagic Camera app will be free, which probably has a lot of camera app developers sweating right now. And those of you that are new to the smartphone camera scene, check out our explainer on OIS and EIS image stabilization.
