I can’t seem to find the topic, but I remember reading that the new Camera Remote was going to finally allow recording video WITHOUT having to tap on your iPhone, and I commented that this was a big deal because I used to have to tap the iPhone Camera into Video mode before I could use the watch to start/stop the video. That is not exactly a “remote” experience.
Unfortunately, I just tried it out and it’s a disappointing implementation. If you hold the camera shutter on your watch, it will record video BUT ONLY UNTIL YOU LET GO. It will not keep recording. This is not very useful for me, since I intend to be playing piano during the recording :-)
Hoping I was missing something, I Googled, and Apple confirmed that this inexplicably crippled UX is by design:
The up side is that there are several new watch features I don’t recall seeing before:
flash control
front/rear camera selection
live motion control (camera mode)
zoom via the crown (handy, since it use to mysteriously zoom in the middle of recordings, and I wouldn’t notice until after the night was over. Bad)
tap-to-focus I think is also new
I think the delay timer was there before, right?
There’s also an icon on the watch to indicate whether your pictures are going into the Shared Library or just your Personal Library, if you have that iCloud feature enabled. It took me a while to figure out what that icon meant, and I had to remember seeing it in the Photos app. (No, tapping on it on the watch does nothing).
Interesting question, even if it won’t be useful for my use-case (loud environment, me on stage not wanting to be talking to my watch LOL).
I tried I think all combinations of:
<press and hold crown> "[using Camera], [start|capture|record] a video"
I avoided saying “[Hey] Siri” because my phone kept answering instead. NOTHING WORKED. The watch would confirm my request on the screen, and sometimes it would open the Camera Remote app on the watch, but then the watch screen would basically freeze.
I tried restarting the Camera Remote app, and the Camera app on my iPhone, but that didn’t help. I tried using Siri on my watch for other things, and they worked fine.
More interestingly, things like “take a photo” don’t work either. Isn’t that supposed to work?
I couldn’t tell from this link if Siri support to take a photo was from the Watch or the iPhone, so I tried it directly on the iPhone, and that doesn’t work either. It opens the Camera app, but never presses the shutter. All the options under Settings > Siri > Camera are turned on.
Am I the only one with this issue? I’m running the latest versions of all the softwares.
So, I fully powered down both my phone and watch, started them both up, and tried again, but it still doesn’t work. Siri on the watch will open the iPhone camera app if I ask it to open the app, but that’s not very useful. But if I ask it to either take a photo or video, it does nothing. Crazy!
You made me curious, so I tried this on my phone. Siri on the watch won’t take a photo, but it did open the camera app and I was able to take a photo by taping the shutter button on the watch. But there was no option for video.
However, when I switched the phone to video mode, the shutter button on the watch turned into a red record button. Tapping that started a recording. I did not have to hold the button down. Just a tap to start. When I tapped the button a second time, the video recording stopped.
It seemed to work just like it should to me. I don’t know if there’s something unusual about your setup, but I don’t see a problem here (15 Pro Max and Series 9 watch running latest OS).
Update: I just tried to use the new “finger pinch” tap gesture to activate the recording/picture taking it worked great! Once you’ve got Remote Camera app open on watch and phone is ready, tapping your watch hand’s index and thumb together is the same a pushing the shutter button. Cool!
Yes yes, this works fine, and worked fine this way prior to iOS 17. But this means you aren’t working remotely from your iPhone: you have to switch the phone into video mode before the watch can help you record a video.
Hence the disappointment. The pitch from Apple was that we were getting a way to initiate a video from the watch itself; but that appears to be limited to press-and-hold. If you want a video that keeps recording, you’re stuck going to the phone and getting the Camera app in video mode.
Very cool about finger pinch, though :-) I’m jealous, but not like $400 jealous LOL.
But watch app, accessibility, quick actions. Turn it on, with either full or minimal appearance,
Now a double-tap with the camera app (like the one that is supposed to be limited to the Series 9 and Ultra 2) works, with the Ultra at least. It’s not limited to the camera app. Basically any time the watch presents you with a default action, you should see it highlighted in blue, and a double-tap will be the same as tapping the default action. For notifications, the default is to dismiss them. For Fitness+ workouts, double-tap starts the workout.
So far the only strange one is the timer app, which sometimes dismisses the timer when you double-tap, but generally does not. It usually does after a few tries, though.
I don’t see the issue. You get the phone positioned so the framing is correct for the video. You then open the Camera app on the phone and make sure that Video is selected. You now get in position to start the action you wish to record and open the Camera Remote on the watch. Finally, tap the watch image’s Red button to start recording. To finish the recording, you tap again. There is no need to hold the button down during the recording.
I don’t know if the finger pinch would work for the OP as they are going to play the piano during the video. I would love to know if the action would trigger a command to the watch or if playing an instrument with your fingers triggers a false trigger.
Fair question. In theory that could work. And often works mostly well. But consider my use case of recording out band performances. The event could go on for a couple hours. It’s not uncommon for the phone’s camera app to lose state and revert back to photo mode. I don’t know what causes this. Temporary loss of Bluetooth connectivity?
And sometimes the camera remote seems
To get frozen. I think if I restart the remote, I’m also back in photo mode.
This is hard to troubleshoot because it’s hard to reproduce and when it happens I have to scramble and can’t experiment or take notes. But the bottom line is that I have to get up out of my chair and walk back to the phone and fix things there before the watch remote is useful at all again.
This is a no brainer to fix, especially given how close they are now feature-wise.
I think for the type of usage you’re describing – long performance – a specialized video-recording app and/or a bluetooth camera remote is what you need.
For instance, I have a gimbal I bought for my iPhone that includes an app and a remote and it lets me start/stop video remotely. It’s designed for recording a video of yourself – you can put the phone on the gimbal on a tripod and walk around and the camera will rotate and follow you and you can start/stop the recording and even control the zoom level via a small bluetooth remote. It’s pretty sweet (it cost under $100, if I remember right, though there are different price points depending on features). The one I got even works with Apple’s Camera app, except there it won’t support zoom or person-tracking, only start/stop video.
(If a gimbal is overkill, a $10 bluetooth camera shutter might be all you need.)
I believe Apple’s watch “camera remote” has minimal functionality and is mainly designed to let you take a group photo with you in the picture (or video).
Yes a gimbal is overkill; my camera will be sitting on a tripod.
The devil is in the details here. Is this Bluetooth camera shutter another watch app or a separate device? The watch app has a critical feature which is to 1) confirm the camera sees what it should, and even more importantly 2) confirm that the camera is actively recording after you press the button.
And if they’re anything like my page-turner BT remotes, their quality is all over the map.
So If you have one you can recommend, I’d love a link!
The one I’d bought is no longer on Amazon, but looks exactly like this (note I’m not necessarily recommending this one as I haven’t used it – it’s just what came up in a search). There are even multi-packs of similar ones for under $10.
There’s no display, so no, you can’t preview the photo before you take it. (I don’t see why that’s important if you’re using a tripod and setting up the shot first anyway.)
For confirmation, you’d have to hear the click or recording beep on your phone to know it worked. I also haven’t used it for video that I recall, but in theory it would do video if your phone was in video mode. (My understanding is that these devices mimic a bluetooth keyboard and just send a key that acts a button press to the camera app on the phone.)
Just like with the watch camera remote, you’d have to open the camera app on your phone first (you can shout “hey siri, take a photo” to do that remotely if you want).
In a perfect world, no feedback would be required. But I’ve found that the real world is far from perfect. Field examples:
sometimes pressing start or stop on the Apple Watch “remote” causes the screen in the remote app to freeze. This could be a flaw in the Camera Remote app, which would actually get solved by abandoning it and switching to some bluetooth dongle. But the problem feels more like it’s having trouble communicating with the iPhone (bluetooth issue? phone issue?). And the frozen screen on the watch gives me a way to tell that it failed; the absence of any screen or feedback on a dongle leaves me completely in the dark whether I’m recording or not.
sometimes I have found that the video just randomly stopped recording. This happened even though I wasn’t out of space or battery. I usually remember to put the phone into Airplane Mode and Do Not Disturb. I learned this suggestion when I was still using the Shure MV88+ product. Airplane Mode prevents interference from the cellular radio. But calls and I think some app notifications might also be able to cause video to stop recording. I also try to keep the phone out of direct sunlight to prevent the phone from overheating. But in spite of all these precautions, I have had some inexplicable video recording interruptions.
And when these interruptions happen, the Camera app (always?) resets to Photo mode, not Video mode, even though I have Settings > Camera > Preserve Settings > Camera Mode checked. For this point, however, I don’t have solid data since this is impossible to reproduce.
This might work in a quiet photography studio context. But I doubt you’d hear it if you were out with friends, at an event, at an amusement park, at the beach… And in my case, we’re playing live music. Even between songs there’s way too much ambient people noise to hear any beeps. Seems almost useless. But nice in theory :-)
And this is another “sounds great in theory”, but I can barely get this to work. Sitting here in a quiet room with my phone in my hand, I keep asking Siri to take photos and videos. 90% of the time it fails. It shows my words on the screen. It might OPEN the Camera app. And rarely it might shoot a photo. But often doesn’t. And nothing I say gets it to start a video. Even the old “Siri, say cheese” does nothing. See notes above.
But the fact is, I think the ideal solution would be one iPhone acting as a remote for the iPhone doing the video recording. And I do have a spare one sitting around. So then my question pivots: can I screen share one iPhone to another? A quick Google is giving me lots to read. Let’s see if there’s a way to do this without Internet via WiFi or Cellular…
On the iPhone, Settings / Camera / Preserve Settings. You can try turning on “Camera mode” so that the camera app will remember it should stay in Video after you set it there. It seems to be working for me with the camera app on the watch - it stays in video mode until I switch it back on the iPhone.
