During the shoot · Framing & metering

Video Scout

Video Scout (director’s viewfinder): pick a camera body and recording format, type in a focal length and an anamorphic squeeze, and the phone’s live picture gets the frame that cine camera would actually see, worked out from geometry — outside the frame dims, the frame lines are gold. Swipe left/right for exposure compensation and up/down for focus; the axis locks on the first movement, so the two never move together. You can build a scouting project per location, record the parameters plus one reference frame for each set-up, and export a self-contained HTML scouting report (images embedded, single file, readable offline) to send to the director and producer. A tape measure and a bit of triangulation calibrate your phone lens’s real angle of view, so the frame matches what you shot. The whole screen is locked to landscape — cinema formats are wide. Its split from Composition & Metering is deliberate: that one is a stills camera with a meter (galvanometer, Zone scale, false colour, latitude), this one has no metering at all and answers one question, what this shot frames. Free.

When you would reach for it

• director viewfinder
• video scout
• location scouting
• recce
• scouting a location
• cine camera framing
• anamorphic
• anamorphic widescreen
• squeeze
• squeeze factor
• desqueeze
• how wide does this lens see
• field of view
• angle of view
• convert field of view
• aspect ratio
• framing
• 2.39
• S35
• full frame angle of view
• scout report
• continuity notes
• camera position log
• lens calibration
• calibrate lens
• tape measure calibration
• shoot video
• recording

At a glance

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