AI Filmmaking: HUAWEI Mate 20 Pro

The HUAWEI Mate 20 Pro builds on the success of the “world’s best smartphone camera” (allegedly, the HUAWEI P20 Pro) and adds to it a Leica Ultra Wide Angle Lens. So, will it help us make better smartphone films?

Huawei say that the “…new Leica Triple Camera supports AI filmmaking, enabling everyday consumers to elevate their video clips into cinematic masterpieces.”

What’s this AI Filmmaking then?

So, have they mapped the genius of Orson Welles’ filmmaking brain and installed it into HUAWEI’s new smartphone?

Let’s check out these instant and effortless cinematic masterpieces…

Basically, the AI works out what human figures are supposed to be the focus of the shot and removes all colour from everything around them. Probably not best tested as it is in this video, in a busy street. Unless you like the effect of colour jumping from one pedestrian to the next.

HUAWEI claim the AI filmmaking features enable anyone to shoot cinematic videos. That might be an ambitious claim, I feel…

Anyway, here’s a better example, demonstrating not just the black and white background effect, but also the blurred background effect (to my mind, much more potentially useful).

Triple Camera

The new Leica Triple Camera with Leica Ultra Wide Angle Camera is said to capture landscapes with an “expansive perspective and exquisite details”.

There’s a 40MP main camera, a 20MP ultra wide-angle camera, and an 8MP telephoto camera. This trio of lenses supports a wide range of focal lengths (equivalent to a 16-270mm zoom lens), enabling it to “mimic the results from professional cameras”.

The new camera system also supports macro photography, able to focus on objects as close as 2.5cm.

AI camera system

AI Cinema Mode allows you to tweak the hue, saturation and brightness of their video clips. There’s a range of those Instagram style presets, including Vintage, Fresh, Suspense and the trendy new Background Blur.

If you haven’t used this yet, the blur is like a fake shallow depth of field. The software detects what it thinks is the object you want to be in focus. Then it attempts to mask around it, adding a blur effect to everything outside the mask. Left in focus is the masked object.

Usually, there’s a little blurring at the edges of the object, so it doesn’t quite match the effect of doing this with a shallow depth of field lens set up.

AI Spotlight Reel identifies clips with a shared theme and auto-generates a 10-second montage, made entirely of highlights.

Over $1000

The HUWEI Mate 20 Pro costs over $1000 so it’s pricing itself with the very top range smartphones. So the phone needs to match the standards of competitors like Google, iPhone and Samsung to make it worth the purchase. If we were looking at a budget alternative here, it might be tempting.

Here’s Btekt’s review of the video performance of the phone. The video looks good and the OIS (inbuilt stabilization) is great in 1080p. However, the OIS does not work for 4k video. Also, the super slow-mo does not match up to the quality of the Sony camera phone he tests it against.

He does not mention any of the AI features, however. Presumably, he feels confident he can produce cinematic masterpieces without…

Read Next: Best Smartphone Filmmaking Kit 2019.

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