How to film a day in the life video with both iPhone cameras
A day in the life is not one continuous vlog take — it is closer to a birthday party’s approach stretched across a lot more hours: a fresh recording for breakfast, another for the commute, another for whatever the afternoon turns into, and on into the evening. Because each of those is its own recording, nothing carries a choice you made that morning into the one you start that evening — it is worth a glance at the inset’s corner, size and shape before each new segment rather than assuming it is still set the way you left it.
What actually needs deciding in this format is not any single clip, it is how to manage a lot of them spread across a lot of hours: keeping them visually consistent enough that they read as one video, picking resolution fresh for each segment instead of once for the day, getting a battery through a day of stop-and-start shooting instead of one continuous session, and being able to find the right clip again once the day is over. Those are the four things this page covers.
Pick a layout convention for the day and only break it on purpose
Because a day in the life is really many separate recordings and not one, nothing carries the corner, size or shape you chose three hours ago into the recording you are about to start — it is worth a two-second check before each new segment rather than assuming it is still set the way you left it that morning.
Settle on one default for the day — picture-in-picture with your face in a top corner covers most segments — and depart from it only for a moment that specifically calls for something else, the same way a walking vlog swaps to a face-led frame only for the moment you stop and talk straight to camera. Ten clips that all default to the same corner cut together as one video with different scenes in it; ten clips that each guessed at a layout fresh read as ten unrelated clips stitched together.
Resolution resets with every recording — use that on purpose
Resolution is one of the settings DualCam locks the moment a recording starts, which for one continuous vlog take means deciding it once before you press record. A day in the life is made of many separate recordings, so that lock resets with every one of them — the choice is not made once for the whole day, it gets made fresh, and on purpose, for whatever you are about to shoot next.
Use that. A quiet few minutes — making coffee, sitting down to work — costs the phone nothing extra to shoot at 1080p. A longer segment that is also physically demanding — a workout, most of a commute — is a better candidate for 720p, which roughly halves what each camera and the encoder have to push, and is often the difference between a segment that finishes and one that ends early from heat. None of this needs to be decided for the whole day at once; it only has to get decided again each time a new recording starts.
Charging and shooting do not mix — plan around it, not through it
Charging a phone generates heat, and heat is the main thing that cuts a long dual recording short, so the advice for one vlog take is simple: shoot on battery, charge afterward. A day in the life does not fit inside a single charge as cleanly — ten or more segments spread across twelve or more hours will likely need a top-up somewhere in the middle, and “needing to charge” and “needing to not be charging while you shoot” do not resolve themselves.
The practical answer is to treat charging as something that happens between segments, not during one. A commute with the phone on a charger in the car and no camera running, a lunch where it tops up on the table while you are not filming, part of an afternoon spent plugged in at a desk — none of that costs anything, because the segments that matter still get shot on battery once the phone is unplugged again. What does not work is leaving the cable in because the next moment might be worth catching; that is exactly the combination that runs the phone hottest.
Keep a day’s worth of clips findable before you sit down to cut them
Every recording lands in DualCam’s own library with a thumbnail, which is plenty for a handful of clips from one event. A full day is a different scale — ten, fifteen, or more separate recordings, most of them a thumbnail of a room or a face that looks a lot like the one next to it by the time evening comes around. Looking a segment over shortly after shooting it, while it is still obvious what it actually was, is a lot easier than trying to reconstruct a whole day from a grid of similar-looking thumbnails hours later.
Saving or sharing clips as the day goes, rather than leaving all of them sitting untouched in the app until you are ready to edit, also keeps them in the order Photos already understands. Just remember that saving a clip copies it rather than moving it, so a day’s worth of segments left in both places after you save each one adds up faster than a single event ever would — the guide on why saved recordings take up double storage covers how to actually clear that space back out.
What a full day of footage actually costs in storage
DualCam’s composited video runs at roughly 10 Mbps regardless of whether a segment was shot at 720p or 1080p, since it is the canvas being written that sets that number, not how much detail went into it — about 75 MB a minute, a little over 4 GB for an hour of continuous recording. A day in the life rarely gets close to that, because the individual clips stay short even though there are a lot of them.
Ten segments of two minutes each is twenty minutes of actual footage, which comes out to roughly 1.5 GB — a fraction of what one continuous hour-long vlog take would cost, even though the day feels like it covered a lot more ground. The total is governed by how many minutes actually got recorded, not by how many separate times the record button got pressed, so a day built from a lot of short clips is usually the lighter option, not the heavier one.
Common follow-up questions
Do I need to start a brand new recording for every part of the day?
Yes, and that is not a workaround — it is the format. A day in the life is a sequence of separate, already-finished clips cut together afterward, not one long file with the good parts buried somewhere inside it. It also means an interruption, like a call or the phone overheating, only costs the segment being shot at the time, not the rest of the day.
Does every clip need exactly the same layout?
Not necessarily, but it helps to pick a default — most people default to picture-in-picture with their face in one corner — and only switch away from it for a moment that specifically calls for something else, like a split screen once a second person joins a scene. A day of clips that mostly share a layout convention cuts together as one video; a day where each clip guessed fresh reads as unrelated footage stitched together.
Does filming a whole day use a lot of storage?
Less than it sounds like. DualCam’s composited video costs about 75 MB per minute of actual recording regardless of resolution, so the total depends on how many minutes got recorded, not how many separate clips got made. Ten short segments spread across a day usually add up to a lot less than one continuous hour-long take.
Want to just do this?
DualCam records the iPhone front and back cameras at the same time and writes one finished MP4 while you shoot. Free, no account, no ads, nothing leaves the phone.