On the road to Mt Evans, CO, cropped with CineCrop
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CineCrop
Version 1.0
Price: $0.99
Bottom Line: A fast, easy and versatile crop utility with a cinematic focus.
When I was 12, my dad bought me my first movie camera — a Bell & Howell 493 Focus-Matic Super 8 movie camera. It was awesome. Although Super 8 had an aspect ratio of 1.36:1, this B&H had a great lens hood that I could use to tape off the wider Panavision and CinemaScope aspect ratios that I’d see in theaters. I’d see in cinema all around me. I would often walk around the house and the yard looking through my viewfinder. Many of the films in my junior high and high school era were shot without a tripod, predating Shaky-Cam by many years. I consider myself an innovator.
CineCrop is a new app from Kert Gartner that quickly and easily lets you crop your iPhone photos to the cinematic aspect ratios of theatrical movies and HDTV. Although not everyone will get as excited as I do about cropping their images to look like Panavision, CineCrop is a great cropping utility that’s a fast and easy way to give your photograph the crop of a theatrical film.
West End, original crop
West End, cropped with CineCrop's US 35mm Film Widescreen preset
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I love the wider, grander visual aspect of widescreen, so have a soft spot for a good iPhone photo app that quickly and easily let�s me recreate the same effect. Some images are just too big in scope for the standard iPhone 4:3 aspect ratio and are better suited to the shape of a movie screen.
In real life, we tend to see wider and not taller. The wide-screen aspect ratios were created to better fill the field of vision of movie-goers. While iPhone images aren’t quite ready for a 30 foot screen, cropping your images wider can give some photographs more impact. Simply because we expect wider frames in movies, cropping your photos to match a motion picture film can enhance the subject and give photos more drama and motion.
CineCrop is easy to use. Simply import an image, select your aspect ratio, position, resize, and crop. Onscreen handles are easy to use and responsive. You can select from any of the standard preset aspect ratios supplied. I especially like the easy input screen to create, save and delete custom presets. CineCrop isn’t limited to cinematic aspect ratios and you can customize your presets to any aspect ratios that you like to crop to. CineCrop performs extremely well. It’s a solid 1.0 release.
CineCrop has a very basic rotate and flip toolset. You can rotate in 90 degree increments as well as flip horizontal and vertical. Double tap the screen to toggle an onscreen display of the pixel dimensions of your crop — a nice feature to indicate what your final trim size will be. CineCrop has great online help, as well as the Wiki of everything you wanted to know about aspect ratios. It’s a thorough, well-designed utility.
The app is fast and very stable. It runs on any iPhone using iOS 4 and is fully iPhone 4 compatible. It saves your images in their maximum width, up to 2592 pixels wide.
Motion picture directors, cinematographers and DPs will love CineCrop’s ability to quickly and easily preview the composition of a scene before putting it to film or video.
While there are other cropping utilities available, almost none are cinema or video focused like CineCrop is. Those that are, such Panavision’s own app or Camera HD, aren’t as versatile as CineCrop. Others, like the crop tools found in image editors like Photogene, PhotoForge and Crop Suey aren’t customizable and are more geared towards traditional and digital still photography crops. These standard cropping tools are perfect for most iPhoneographers’ needs.
The developer, Kert Gartner, is very responsive and proactive. An update for CineCrop is already in the works and should include built-in sharing to social networking sites, as well as a really cool in-app camera with aspect-ratio overlay guides! I’m really looking forward to the new camera function!
I realize that not everyone gets excited about composing photos like they’re movies, but it’s an element of photography that I like to explore sometimes. CineCrop is an excellent, versatile cropping utility for giving your photos a cinematic quality. It’s a great app for releasing your inner Chris Nolan. Dedicated cropping utilities aren’t for everyone, but for a dollar, CineCrop is an excellent buy as a quick cropping tool which also allows you to easily explore alternate crops that can help bring an Oscar-worthy look to your photography.
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Disclosure: We were provided with a promo code of this app for review, as well as promo codes for giveaways. It did not effect the outcome of the review or my enthusiasm for the app. =M=
