Ventura’s Continuity Camera is More Limited Than I Thought

But it’s still cool

When macOS Ventura was announced, the feature that caught my eye the most was Continuity Camera. At last, we would be able to use our iPhones as webcams, right from macOS. Pretty cool. But I think I was pretty naïve and I didn’t read the fine print.

If I had, I would have saved myself a bit of frustration and time. But live and learn, right?

Continuity Camera rocks

First off, let me just say that I do love Continuity Camera. The ability to use my phone as a webcam is phenomenal, and the image quality from my iPhone is substantially better than what I get from my 14-inch MacBook Pro’s webcam, and that’s exactly what I would expect.

Unlike my Mac’s webcam, I can move the phone around to get angles and compositions that wouldn’t otherwise be practical. I can put my phone on a desktop tripod and move it to get just the right lighting and composition.

Good job, Apple. This is nice. Well done.

In order to use Continuity Camera, you’ll need a Mac running macOS Ventura and an iPhone running at least iOS 16.

But there’s a catch

My iPhone, with a great camera, can shoot 4K video at 60fps with no problem. And there’s no shortage of 4K webcams on the market.

So, I naively assumed that Continuity Camera would allow me use my iPhone as a 4K webcam.

I was wrong.

I loaded up OBS Studio on my Mac, popped my iPhone into my Reticam tripod and Joby mount, and set up a 4K recording session. All went well until I viewed the exported video.

Why was it so grainy? Yikes.

After some fiddling, I discovered my error.

Continuity Camera can record at 60fps without problems (30fps for Desk View mode), but the resolution can only go up to 1920 x 1440.

Oh.

Oops.

Heh. I uh… I guess I should have read better.

To be fair and in my defense though, that bit of information appears nowhere on Apple’s page about Ventura.

Why does this limit exist?

My iPhone shoots in 4K. I should be able to use that full resolution for Continuity Camera, right?

But before you raise your fists and start writing some tweets @Apple, let’s think through this.

Video is data-intensive. Every second your camera is recording, it’s sending tons of information to storage. Just a few minutes of video can quickly fill up gigabytes of space. With a wired connection between camera and computer, this isn’t as much of an issue — though even then it can get congested depending on the speed of your computer.

But wireless? That’s another story.

Continuity Camera can wirelessly send video between your iPhone and a Mac running macOS Ventura at a resolution of up to 1920 by 1440 at 60fps. That, by itself, is considerable. But upping that maximum to 4K — let alone at 60fps — would mean Continuity Camera would need to support wirelessly transferring a metric ton of data between the phone and Mac wirelessly, constantly. Probably not the best setup.

Whether or not it could handle this for a few seconds at a time, I don’t know.

And maybe there’s another software solution that can make this work. (If you know of one, please let me know!)

My dream is to be able to pipe full, 4K video directly from my iPhone into OBS or my video app of choice on my laptop. Is that realistic? I’m not sure. It’s looking like it probably isn’t.

Even if it’s not 4K, Continuity Camera is still cool

No, it won’t turn my iPhone into a 4K webcam like I (foolishly) thought it would, but Continuity Camera is a great feature that I’m happy to see in macOS Ventura. It opens up a world of new creative possibilities for vloggers and offers much better camera quality over what most of us have built in to our Macs and monitors. For that reason, it’s still a great option for Zoom and Teams calls.

If you don’t care about shooting in 4K and are happy with recording 1080p videos for YouTube or other platforms, then Continuity Camera might be exactly what you’re looking for. And maybe for someone it’s a good starting point before making the move up to 4K down the road.

While I would love to see it work in 4K down the road what we have currently is a great step in the right direction. And to be clear, I don’t know if it would even be technically possible for this feature to work in 4K or if it would be practical for Apple to implement. Maybe it could work with a wired connection in a future update (either software or hardware)?

But it’s features like this that make me think Apple is starting to listen to creative professionals again.

My temporary solution

I know. I know. Not being able to stream 4K video from my iPhone into my computer is the epitome of a first world problem, and I’ll get over it.

What I’m doing for the time being is simply relying on my Logitech c920 webcam for Zoom and Teams calls from my PC. It’s an older model, but it’s not a bad little 1080p camera, and it gets the job done. With my Mac, I’ll use my iPhone because it kicks the Logitech’s back side.

For recording, I’m using my iPhone with FiLMiC Pro and using FiLMiC Remote on my iPad. It’s not perfect, and it’s not exactly giving me that background blur I’d like (not that an iPhone really can without janky software processing, of course.) But it can shoot in 4K60 pretty well, even though I’ll be sticking with 4K30 for the time being.

In the near future, I plan to get a decent hybrid camera for some photo and video work -one that will work as a more professional-looking option for content creation. But as I wrote in another post, picking a camera is hard!

Currently I’m leaning toward the Sony ZV-E10, but there are a couple of interesting models in that price range that would work for vlogging-style, talking-head videos — and I’d like to be able to do a bit more than just talking head videos.

As I write this, I’m laughing at myself a bit. What a first world problem, huh?