This was a puzzler.
I’ve had an iPhone 5S since last fall, but haven’t ever done much more than just play with the slow motion video capture feature. Yesterday though, I had a need to take a slow-mo video and post it to Facebook. I recorded the video easily enough, set the slow motion start and stop points, and then used OS X’s Image Capture app to export the video to my Mac. I figured I could then just upload the movie to Facebook.
Not so fast.
The video that Image Capture pulls off your phone is the raw 120FPS movie with no slow motion start/stop points. While this behavior actually makes sense, it’s not what I wanted. I need the version with the slow motion effect. I did some googling, and the only solution is to upload the video to Facebook using iOS’s native sharing feature. This gives the Photos app an opportunity to render the video at normal speed with the slo-mo effects in place. So I tried that, but the app complained the video was too large. Fine. I tried emailing it to myself – same problem. Too large. The Photos app wanted me to trim the video to a shorter length. I did some more googling but couldn’t find any way of exporting the full-res video with the slow motion effect in place.
Aha!
It dawned on me that Apple’s Photostream feature shares full-res videos to iPhoto on Mac. So here’s what I did…
- Create a new, shared Photostream that only you are a member of.
- Share the video to the new stream.
- Open up iPhoto on your Mac and navigate to the shared stream.
- Drag the video to your Desktop.
- Upload to Facebook/Instagram/wherever.
Boom.