With the order for the Apple Vision Pro said and done, you’re now ready to spatialize your point of view of using the Apple ecosystem. Here are some tips and tricks to record spatial videos on the iPhone and get the best results possible.
Table of Contents
How to Enable and Record Spatial Videos on iPhone
Before we begin with tips and tricks to record awesome spatial videos on your iPhone, let’s first see how to enable the feature first. It is disabled by default to improve performance and save storage space.
1. To enable Spatial Videos on the iPhone, open Settings and scroll down to find Camera. Then tap on it.
2. Tap on Formats. Scroll down and enable Spatial Video for Apple Vision Pro. With this, you should be able to record spatial videos on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.
3. To start recording a spatial Video, open the Camera on your iPhone 15 Pro series and tap 
icon. Then rotate your phone to landscape mode and tap the Record button on the iPhone.
Note: You can enable and record spatial videos only on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max.
1. Recording Tips
Record the spatial video within 3-8 feet of the subject to get good output. Keep the iPhone steady and levelled. You should shoot the video from the angle that you would want to watch it from the most. It’s just like watching content from a first-person perspective.
Source: Apple
You can also use a tripod or a friendly shooting setup to get you the best results. Generally, an area with bright and even lighting is recommended to get a near-identical shot.
2. Change in Specifications
At the time of writing this article, Apple only allows recording spatial videos in 1080p resolution at 30fps. Also, they’re recorded only in SDR and not in HDR format. The recorded spatial videos also don’t have a Dolby Vision certification, whereas the usual videos do have them. It seems like a limitation, but Apple may work some things out to implement it down the line. Nothing confirmed yet though.
You will notice in the screenshots below the difference in the size of the video recorded. It is almost double which means you need a lot more storage space to save spatial videos. More on that later.
For a much better experience, you can switch between spatial and normal videos depending on the situation you’re shooting in. While it may be difficult to differentiate one memory from another, it depends on whether you want a spatial video out of the scenario.
3. Make Some Space
This was understandable even before the option was released. Since the primary and ultra-wide cameras of your iPhone work in tandem to generate a near 3D video out of a scenario, the size of the video is bound to increase.
Source: Apple
As specified by Apple, a spatial video of one minute is approximately 130 MB, whereas a normal video of the same duration is around 65 MB. We also found the same true in our testing as the recorded spatial videos were nearly twice the size in comparison to a regular video.
So ensure you have enough storage available in your iPhone or get extra storage on iCloud before turning on the spatial videos feature. It’s a good thing that you can easily move these spatial videos to an external hard drive using the USB-C port and more in the iPhone 15 series.
4. Editing Options
The only editing options available on the iPhone as of now are Trim or Mute the recorded spatial videos. Apple may release more of these features when the Vision Pro comes out in the testing field.
Final Cut Pro will also get an update sometime this year to edit spatial videos separately. Apart from this, you can edit these videos on any video editing platform but they’ll only be recognized as normal videos. and not spatial ones
5. Sync Across All Devices
Spatial videos will sync across all your devices using the same Apple ID and with iCloud photos turned on. Another Apple ecosystem benefit. So, you can browse through all your spatial videos from any of your Apple devices using the same Apple ID. You get a separate indication of the recorded video by the Spatial tag in the gallery when viewing them on the iPhone, iPad, or MacBook.
Spatialize the Videos
You can now shoot amazing videos for your Vision Pro with these tips and tricks on recording spatial videos on the iPhone 15 Pro series.
