While at SxSW I met the developer of a terrific app called PHILM. It is currently free, shoots stills or 10 second video, has a stack of filters (my favorite is “Warp”), comes with stock tunes (or you can add from your music library), the ability to mix levels between music and recorded background, has “stickers,” edits, and does a few other things.
I also like PHILM because the app redraws the video in real time using graphics processing unit (GPU) within the cell phone; not the central processing unit (CPU) which is usually tasked with all computational heavy lifting.
Mostly though, I like the code because the rendering occurs in real-time and the processed videos remind me of the hallucinogenic Scanner Darkly and neo-noir Sin City. The extreme like is not all love and rockets: there are three issues that bother me.
The app is rough on battery life. I’ve taken to bringing an external battery to charge my phone when out as rendering one five segment video (with music) will drain my phone’s battery by 20%. The app is currently limited to recording ten second video segments and there is a watermark on the lower left. The recording limit might be lifted once the product is sold. But… I would really like to see this technology as a plugin for video editing.