Cinamatic 1.5.3

Every once in a while comes a developer that blows the competition out of the water with a truly original idea coupled with great design. Hipstamatic is one of those developers, and Cinamatic is one of those ideas that really shine.

Chosen App of the Week by Apple itself, it’s hard not to see the value in Cinamatic, even the limited free version which only comes packed with a handful of filters and no audio.

Just right

Achieving a simple design that also doesn’t overlook anything important is not easy. You need UX experts to get the job done, and clearly Hipstamatic has a few engineering talents under its belt. Cinamatic is the perfect example of form + function, which is why we’d like to spend more time discussing the latter aspect. The visuals require no explanation on our part. The UI is simply “just right.”

Become a short-film director

The purpose of Cinamatic is to create short films (three to fifteen seconds long) that can then be processed into film-festival material. You know, the kind of stuff that gets showed off at Sundance, or nabs a BAFTA award.

When you launch the app, it quickly introduces you to the features and lets you shoot instantly. You hold down the record button for as long as you want your scenes to last, and when the 15 seconds are up, you can go into post-processing mode.

You can select your filters as you shoot in real time, which lets you get a sense of what the end-clip will feel like. A lot of the tweaks that can be made are behind a paywall, but the free features are enough to let you make awesome short films nonetheless. There’s no sound in the free version, but sometimes that can lead to an even more dramatic story.

The app allows you to shoot videos in 16:9 format and to share them all to YouTube and Vimeo. There are some pretty awesome manual controls for things like Focus, Exposure, White Balance, Shutter Speed, and ISO while you record videos, although these all require you have your iDevice updated to iOS 8.

Cinamatic also comes with more capture speeds, such as Timelapse, where you can pick between 3, 6 or 9 frames per second, and Slow-Motion, where you can pick between 120 and 240 fps, although these latter ones require you have an iPhone 5s or 6.

The iPad version is almost identical, but does take advantage of the increased screen space to rearrange some of the items for easier access.

Security issue

Cinamatic poses a tricky privacy issue. It forcibly tags the clip with your current location, down to the City name and area designation. You can’t change that, since your location becomes the name of the actual clip. What you can do is add an extra caption and a hashtag, but there’s no way to avoid geolocation tagging. Also, Cinamatic fetches your Facebook info if you integrate the app with the social network.

It’s not clear if the Hipstamatic sends any of this info back to its servers, but the EULA does say, “We may combine information about you that we have with information we obtain from business partners or other third parties.” It’s really disappointing that it has to be like this.

IAP trouble

The developer makes it very clear what’s free and what isn’t. However, to get the full product you actually need to make multiple in-app purchases, some costing as much as $3.99 / €3.59. Some film effects are free to download. The free version is enough to create awesome, 15-second silent films. Fine adjusting also requires you to cough up some cash.

Add to watchlist:

Video sharingTimelapseRecorderEditor

• YouTube 10.09.11358
• Mindie 3.1.1
• Vimeo 5.2
• Hyperlapse 1.1.3
• Lapse It 2.52
• Kamcord 3.4.0