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8mm For iPhone Applies Vintage Effects to Videos In Real-Time

Hipstamatic is one of the most popular iPhone apps in the App Store: not only it’s a great app with a cool camera-like interface and tons of filters, films and flashes to choose from, it has also been named “iPhone App of the Year” by Apple and journalists at the New York Times use it. Hipstamatic is the closest thing to having an old analog camera on your iPhone. Some say it’s overly designed and too complicated for the average users, I think the results and popularity of the software speak by themselves.

Then again, Hipstamatic (and other apps that apply cool effects to photos like Instagram or Camera+) is for photos.  8mm Vintage Camera by Nexvio is a new app that can apply vintage film effects to videos, all in real-time through the iPhone’s rear and front-facing cameras.

8mm comes with a skeuomorphic camera-like UI that allows you to check on video captured by the camera in real-time from the app’s display, change lens in the upper right corner and switch between different films at the bottom. The app comes with 5 different vintage films: XPro (I love this one), Siena, 1920 (cool black & white effect), 7os and Sakura. A swipe-down gesture is required to change films, but I think a button would have been better. Sometimes the app doesn’t recognize my gestures and it takes an annoying amount of seconds to get from XPro to, say, 1920. A minor caveat that I hope will be fixed in an upcoming update. From the same film-switching menu you can also activate a “film jitter” which will make the film slowly move as in vintage camera reels. It’s pretty cool.

The best thing about 8mm is that every effect, lens and film happens live on screen as you’re recording. Once the video has been saved, you can access it in the Reels menu, view it, delete it, save it to the iPhone’s camera roll or upload it to Youtube. You can also send videos via email.

At $1.99 in the App Store, 8mm Vintage Camera might just be the best way to capture and share all those videos you’re going to shoot on New Year’s Eve.

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