“Every now and then you may wish to display something from your iPhone or iPad on your Mac,” Topher Kessler writes for MacIssues.
“This may be during a presentation, or just for kicks, but if you have content on your phone and while you can always use various sharing services to send content to people or even to your Mac for displaying,” Kessler writes, “another very quick approach can be done if you simply have an available lightning cable.”
“Since this is a movie recording, you can click the record button to capture what your screen is showing, but if you want audio from your phone to also be recorded then be sure to choose your iOS device from the same drop-down menu next to the record button,” Kessler writes. “If you use your Mac’s microphone then you can narrate what you are doing to your recording, so this default setting may be preferred in some cases.”
Full instructions here.
Nice tip!!
This is a good tip to use the iPad Pro’s camera (far better than the iMac’s camera) for QuickTime recordings. But it’s 4:3 format. Is there an iPad app to get 16:9?
iPad Pro records video in HD (16:9), either at 720p / 30fps, or 1080p / 30fps. It can’t record video at 4:3 (SD, 480i).
When you are recording video, the displayed image is cropped to 4:3, but the recorded video is actually wide, so you’re capturing things that you can’t actually see while recording (far left and far right part of the capture image).
> iPad Pro records video in HD (16:9)…
Yes – I meant when using the iPad as camera for recordings on the Mac (like a very good webcam). Via the camera app that’s always 3:4 (and there is always that menu visible at the right side). Is there other software for recording 16:9 on the Mac (without visible menu)?
…”when using the iPad as camera for recordings on the Mac…”
I am not sure what exactly do you mean by that. When you connect the iPad with the Mac (using the lightning cable), it will allow you to use the display output from your iPad as a video recording source on your Mac. However, it will only record screen action from that iPad, such as what happens when you open an app. In order to make it appear like you are using your iPad as a webcam, you would then presumably have to open the camera app and essentially just use whatever iPad is streaming across that lightning cable. This is, in terms of quality of video, well below what your modern Mac webcam produces, since it is NOT the original, raw camera feed, but just the monitoring image, in much lower resolution, and often with lower frame rate.
I’m sure there is likely a photo (or video) recording app that allows for no on-screen menus or anything else, but I don’t think there exist an app that would essentially convert iPad into a proper webcam (providing USB video feed the way normal webcams do).
What a brilliant tip, I never knew you could do this!
Definitely one I’ll be using in the future.
Awesome tip! So easy to do!!