Steady Camera lets you capture shake-free video footage with your iPhone

Apple's iPhone is a great tool for both photographers and videographers, as the masses of iPhone photos and videos available on the web demonstrate quite impressively. However, for serious videography the iPhone has one shortcoming: the lack of image stabilization.

This is also something that many iPhone videos on the web demonstrate impressively, as it's quite easy to find shaky footage that was recorded hand-held. More ambitious videographers resolve to external stabilization options such as tripods or gimbals, which make the setup not only bulky, but also much less flexible.

So unless Apple decides to introduce image stabilization into a future generation of the iPhone -- be it optical inside the lens, or mechanical via sensor shift -- iPhone users will have to make do with third-party solutions. Fortunately for those who do not always carry a tripod, or don't want to shell out the cash for a gimbal, there's a clever app that helps achieve shake-free video even hand-held.

Called Steady Camera, the app's main function is providing stabilizied video footage, which it achieves by cropping out part of the image so the rest can be shifted opposite of the iPhone's movement. For this, the app makes use of the iPhone's built-in gyro sensor, which delivers real-time information about the phone's movement in three dimensions.

In addition to the stabilizing function, Steady Camera also supports slow-mo video with up to 120 fps on the iPhone 5S and 60 fps on the iPhone 5 and 5C. Videos can be recorded in either a 1:1 aspect, which should work nicely for Instagram and Vine, or the regular 16:9 aspect, and can also be trimmed after capture.

Steady Camera version 1.0 for iPhone 4S and newer is available on iTunes for US$1.99. Watch the video below to see the app in action.

(via Übergizmo)