iphone director's viewfinder app now supports 5DmkII and 7D!
 

Absolutely essential if you want to understand lenses and work out which lens to use on a shot! $30!

Director’s viewfinder app for iphone and storyboard app | Philip Bloom

Gadget heaven.
Makes you wonder how cinema evolved without it ;-)

How can this simulate the narrow field of view of a longer lens or the greater amount of background captured with a wide lens? It seems to just crop the standard iphone lens' shot.

wide lens, cannot work out how it can do that. but long lens sure, it just crops. but that is all it needs to do!

Sorry about the misinformation. I get so used to changing lenses and moving the camera to keep the subject framed the same but to change the background view that I got things backwards.

I like the idea of this, but I'm having trouble with practical purposes in a production environment. If you're on a real production fully geared up with rental equipment, then you're not going to be pulling out your iphone as a director or DP when there is going to be a viewfinder on-set. For pre-production for us indie people using 5D or 7D, wouldn't you just walk around with the camera with a zoom? Ok so maybe those times when you just happen to be at a spot without a camera and are like, "wow this would be a great location". Well in that case you're not going to know exactly where you were standing, nor do you have stand-ins right with you to check out various lens lengths. And even if you did, the iphone camera would be more then adequate for this since you still will have to frame up the day of the shoot. So now we come to the day of shooting no-budget so big-time viewfinders are out of the question, still I don't see the use for 5D, 7D users when lens changes, even with the most pimped out rigs for DSLR video, are very quick. It's not like you have a crew of 3 gearing up a Red for a 1/2 hour only to need to reconfig because you want to go from 50mm to 135mm. Plus it doesn't give you a feeling of DOF, etc. which is a wonderful bonus of using a lightweight DSLR (I use my old orginal 5D to find my setup then bring my rig in).

Again, I do like the idea of this and I'm a heavy iphone user and gadget early adopter, but for $30 what is the use of this for 5D and 7D users that I'm missing? I know there must be a "duh Christopher" here but I can't find it.

PS - I do however love the idea of the Hitchcock app and most likely going to purchase this. Just working out the practicalities of doing heavy story-boarding on the iphone and I wish it could export the .mov that it shows on the iphone. But for $19 this product seems like a gem to me.

Oh and Phil it was nice to see your work projected nice and big in Brooklyn the other night and to hear the story about SNL being inspired by your Dublin piece.