How to film a skateboarding trick video with both iPhone cameras
A skate clip usually needs two things that do not come from the same camera position: the trick itself, wide enough to show the approach, the pop and the landing, and your reaction to whether it landed clean. Propping a phone up nearby and hoping one angle covers both is the usual workaround, and it tends to produce either a clean trick with no reaction in it, or your face up close next to a trick shot from whatever angle the phone happened to be leaning at. Recording front and back at once puts both in the same file — the trick full-frame, your reaction riding in a small window, with no second phone and nobody standing behind the lens.
What makes a trick different from most things people film this way is that most of a session is misses. A usable clip is one clean make surrounded by a pile of attempts that did not land, so what actually matters in a dual-camera setup here is the part that makes filming that many attempts in a row practical — where the phone sits, what has to stay inside the frame, and how you keep track of which take was the one.
Point the back camera at the whole line, not just the landing
The trick lives in the approach and the pop as much as it does in the landing — where the board sits under the feet in the air, whether the shove happens early or late is what makes a clip worth rewatching instead of just confirming it worked. Framing tight on the spot where the board is expected to land captures the outcome and loses the trick. Back up further than feels necessary, or switch to the ultra wide lens on the back camera if your iPhone has one and the distance allows it, so the run-up, the obstacle, and enough space to ride away all sit inside the frame before you press record.
That framing has to be right before recording starts, not fixed afterward. The canvas DualCam writes to is exactly what the viewfinder shows — nothing gets re-cropped or re-composed once the file is finished — so a trick that lands half out of frame stays that way permanently. Check a practice run against the live preview, not just how much space you take up standing still, since the width a body occupies mid-trick is usually wider than it looks before pushing off.
Picture-in-picture, not split screen, and keep the small window off the landing
A trick needs its full frame to read. A left/right split screen crops roughly a quarter off each side to fit two 16:9 sources into a vertical canvas, which works against a shot that already wants more width, not less. Picture-in-picture keeps the trick at full size and drops your reaction into a corner instead — the layout built for exactly this kind of shot, where one side is clearly the one that matters.
Which corner that small window sits in matters more here than in most footage, because the frame itself is the thing worth keeping clear. Put it on whichever corner is furthest from where the board actually lands — usually the corner nearer the camera than the one the trick resolves toward — so a clean make is not also the one take where the inset happened to sit over the exact spot that mattered.
Expect some wobble, and mount the phone instead of holding it
A trick moves fast enough relative to the frame that rolling shutter skew — a straight rail or fence line leaning during a quick pan — is more likely to show up here than in slower footage. It comes from the way a phone sensor reads a frame line by line rather than all at once, not from anything specific to recording two cameras together, and no resolution setting removes it. The only real fix is not adding camera motion on top of the subject’s own motion, which a mount does automatically and a hand does not.
A multi-camera session also has less stabilization to lean on than a single camera gets on its own — the formats a shared hardware budget allows only cover the plainer stabilization modes, not the heavier digital smoothing a single camera can call on. Between that and the rolling shutter, a tripod or a low, ground-level mount earns its keep more here than in a lot of dual-camera footage: it removes camera shake at the source instead of asking a limited stabilization mode to absorb it afterward.
Filming attempt after attempt without losing the one that lands
Landing a trick usually takes several minutes and a dozen tries, with only a few seconds of it worth keeping. Stopping the recording after each attempt and starting a fresh one for the next, rather than pausing and resuming a single long file, keeps a clean make as its own short clip in DualCam’s library instead of buried somewhere inside ten minutes of setup and misses. Every take sits there with a thumbnail, so finding the one that landed is a scroll back through the library, not a scrub through a long timeline looking for the right second.
A session like this also runs long in a way that tests the phone more than a quick reaction shot does — real time outdoors, often in direct sun, with two cameras and a real-time composite running the whole time. Check on the phone between attempts rather than only after a recording stops on its own. Heat is one of the things that ends a dual recording early, and it is easier to give the phone a minute of shade every so often than to lose a session partway through a run.
Common follow-up questions
Should a skate clip use picture-in-picture or split screen?
Picture-in-picture. The trick needs its full frame — split screen crops roughly a quarter off each side to fit two sources into a vertical canvas, which works against a shot that already needs more width, not less.
Can I switch to a wider back lens partway through a session if a trick needs more room?
Not mid-recording — the back lens is one of the settings a dual-camera recording locks the moment it starts. Stop the current recording, pick the wider lens, and start the next one; that is a new file, so the lens choice is free to change between attempts, just not inside one.
Does the lower resolution ceiling on dual-camera recording matter for a trick clip?
Usually not — a clip posted at typical social sizes does not show the difference much. It matters more if you plan to step through the landing frame by frame, the same way it does for a golf swing check, where the extra detail a single camera could capture would actually get used.
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.