Does dual camera recording support 60fps on iPhone?

Why the frame rate is fixed, not a setting

A multi-camera session has to run every camera in it on a format explicitly flagged as multi-cam capable, and the combined cost of both camera streams, the real-time GPU composite and the hardware encode all has to fit inside one shared budget. Frame rate is one of the biggest levers in that budget — doubling it does not add a small amount of extra work, it roughly doubles the work every part of the pipeline has to do, for both cameras at once. A single camera running at 60fps is already a heavier format than one running at 30fps; a multi-camera session asking for that from two cameras simultaneously, on top of everything else it is already paying for, is not a format the hardware exposes as an option.

That is the same reason DualCam’s two capture settings are 720p and 1080p rather than a longer menu, and why both of them run at 30 frames per second regardless of which one you pick. Resolution is the dial you get; frame rate is not, because a multi-camera session was never able to offer it in the first place.

What 60fps would actually change

A higher frame rate does not make footage sharper or more detailed — each individual frame is still just an image. What it changes is how motion looks between frames. At 30fps, something moving quickly across the frame covers noticeably more ground from one frame to the next, and on a screen that shows up as a slight stutter or judder, most visible in panning shots, fast hand gestures, or a subject moving directly toward or away from the camera. At 60fps the same motion is split across twice as many frames, so each step is smaller and the movement reads as smoother.

This is a different thing from slow motion, which uses an even higher capture rate specifically so footage can be stretched out and played back slower than it was shot. 60fps footage is normally still played back at normal speed — the extra frames go toward smoothness, not a slowed-down effect.

Keeping fast motion from looking choppy at a fixed 30fps

None of this makes 30fps unusable, it just means judder is something to shoot around rather than something a setting will fix. A slower, steadier camera move covers less ground per frame than a fast whip pan, so it reads as smooth even at 30fps — if the shot needs to follow something quick, letting the subject move within the frame usually looks better than swinging the phone to chase it. Bright, even light also helps more than it seems like it should: in dim light the camera compensates with a longer exposure per frame, and a longer exposure smears a fast-moving subject across more of the frame, which reads as more blur on top of whatever judder is already there. More light lets each frame stay crisp, and crisp frames make the same 30fps motion look cleaner even though the frame rate has not changed.

If a shot genuinely needs 60fps, capture it separately

When smooth motion is doing real work in a shot — sports, a pet in motion, anything with fast panning you actually want to keep — the reliable option is to shoot that specific piece with the stock Camera app at 60fps on a single camera, and shoot the dual-camera part of the video as its own normal take. Combine the two afterward in a video editor the same way you would drop in any other clip.

It costs an extra take, but it means the footage that needs a higher frame rate gets a capture mode built for it, and the footage that needs two faces in one frame gets the session built for that — rather than asking one recording to do a job the hardware was never able to give it.