GEAR HACK: Cell phone into Field Monitor
April 18, 2017These days if you have a DSLR, you have a smart phone. But most of the time you’re shooting, your cell phone is in your pocket, and you’re using a tiny little back-of-the-camera reference monitor. For me, I shoot my run’n’gun video with a Canon 5D Mark III and that little monitor just kills me.
While shooting EDM shows and nightlife, I was sick of sacrificing a shot for the review monitor to make sure the shot was good. It was ridiculous. I didn’t want to put my Ikan 7″ on top of the camera because it’s just bulky enough to be a pain in tight quarters, and I try to keep my budget as low as possible. It occurred to me my phone has a great screen with a solid refresh rate, and there’s no reason it couldn’t be tethered to the camera with an adjustable mount.
I did a little Amazon hunting and a fair amount of Googling, and found little on the topic. No one makes an app dedicated to DSLR HDMI mirroring (which is ridiculous), so I went after the next best thing: an app that controls your DSLR. These apps offer live view mode (because they weren’t intended to be camera-mounted), so once you link the app with your camera, you have a live-view field monitor.
THE APP:
The DSLR interactive apps don’t utilize HDMI out as I mentioned. Rather, they use USB because they are intended to dialog with the camera and slave the controls as a digital device. This requires decent hardware support and ample testing since the intended use is on-site professional use. I wanted a minimum 4-star review that was tried and true to app’s features as well. After toying with multiple apps, I landed on DSLR Controller which is intended for Canon cameras and works with Android. They also have an iOS version. A couple quick notes on the app: I shoot nightlife at 60fps, which means the monitor needs a high refresh rate to keep up. Most apps won’t actually surpass 30fps refresh rate in real-life use, but don’t worry. You’re not controlling the camera through app, just watching it through the app. Any lag or skipped frames won’t show up in your recorded files’ playback.
THE GEAR:
This set-up is shockingly simple, because both the app and the camera are designed to talk to each other. Here’s what’s on my rig –
Hot Shoe Mount for Tablets and Smart Phones
That’s it.
This hack gets a lot of attention from other shooters as well as amateurs, because it’s so simple and 100% common sense.