iPhone 4: How does it perform for video recording? Let’s bike to the skate park…

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BoingBoing.net’s Xeni Jardin takes the iPhone 4 out for a Venice Beach bike ride, to test the smartphone’s new high-resolution video recording capabilities. 100% of video footage in this video was shot with iPhone 4. For some portions (while riding bike), the iPhone was strapped on to Xeni’s hand with rubber bands (The Rubber Band Steadicam), and the iPhone camera was facing one direction with medium-res video recording. In other sections of this video (skaters skating, orchids, ocean, and interview with skater Kiko, age 8) the iPhone camera was activated in the other direction and captured high-resolution video. You can see the difference, but both outperformed other smartphones and handheld ultra-mobile digital video camcorders. When it comes to video recording, iPhone 4 is the one to beat. You have to be mindful of that camera orientation switch option noted above with FaceTime: when you shoot video out of one side of the device, you get lower-resolution 640 x 480 footage, and when you shoot out of the other side, you get far higher-res 1280 x 720. As with the still camera function, you can tap an area to focus in, even while you are shooting. Video is saved and exported as h.264 QuickTime, and you can email, MMS, or publish to YouTube right from the iPhone. File sizes for the raw footage we used to edit together this video were surprisingly small, too. For an example: a 13-second clip of Xeni talking to camera, shot in the medium-resolution (640×480) mode, was 5.2MB …