Pause While Recording Video on Your iPhone

A new creative feature of the Camera app in iOS 18 is the ability to pause right in the middle of recording a video, and then resume. You can use this to take a single video that looks like a series of videos that have been edited together.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you a great new thing that you can do when recording video on your iPhone in iOS 18. 
So among all the great new features of iOS 18 for your iPhone there's one tiny little one that Apple barely mentions but I love this new feature. It's the ability to pause while recording video in the Camera App. Sounds really simple but it opens up all sorts of new creative avenues.
So, for instance, here's a video that I shot while on a walk recently. It looks like it is several different video clips all put together in one, like maybe using an app like iMovie. But in fact it's just one video that I recorded directly in the regular Camera App on the iPhone. All I did was Pause the recording at some point and then walked a little further, pointed the camera somewhere else, and started recording again. I continued to do that all by just pausing and unpausing the recording of the video. 
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So here's how you do it in the Camera App. When you first go to the Camera App you may find yourself in Photo mode. You need, of course, switch to Video Mode. Once you're in Video Mode you can choose between your iPhone's different cameras and you can switch between the front and the back cameras. Then you can start recording. Now when you start recording in iOS 18 you get this Pause Button up here. This is what's new. You can tap that and it pauses recording. The video isn't finished yet. You can now move on, point it somewhere else, do something else, or maybe you just need to take a break while you're recording yourself, and then you press this button again to resume. Pressing this button here, that will stop the video and finish it. But pressing this one resumes recording and you can see the clock is ticking up again. 
You can Pause again by tapping this button right here. You can even change the camera you're using though you can't switch between front and back. But you can use two-fingers on the screen to zoom in and zoom out like that. Then you can resume recording again, pause it, do that as many times as you like. When you're totally finished with the video then you press the Stop button right there. Now you have the entire video all spliced together as one single video without having to do anything else. 
You don't need to take a bunch of clips and bring them into another app and create a new video from that. It's all done already. It's ready to be shared over social media, sent via Messages, or shared in the Photos App. It certainly can make your photo library neater just having this one video instead of several of them in there and not giving you any extra work to do to produce something to share online. 
 You can use it to tell a story. Something like this: "As you know in addition to collecting things that have to do with games and the history of games I also love to collect playing cards. In fact here are a couple of recent additions. I love the Beatles so these are perfect. I have lots of cards and they are stored mostly like in boxes and drawers and stuff. I don't have room to display then. But you may have spotted these books that are behind the cards here and these actually aren't books. These are boxes. So when you open one up it's just an empty space and there's room for eight decks. A neat way to store my collection."
You can also use it when recording yourself. You can pause and then gather your thoughts and then resume again and keep doing that and have it all as one finished video. It can be really useful at events. Say you want to do one of those videos where you go around talking to people at a birthday party or wedding or something. You can start recording and talking to somebody, pause it, go to somebody else and set them up with the same question, then unpause it for them to answer, pause it again and continue and end up with just one single video. You're done when you're done. There's no additional work for you. 
Now, of course, there's a ton that you can't do with this, that you could do if you had individual clips. For instance you can't delete a part here. If you record something and pause you can't go back and say don't use that last part. It is just part of that video there. So it's kind of your artistic canvas for creating a video. You've got to just record in segments and you can't go back. But it still may be easier to record a whole bunch of different segments in one video, bring them into an app like iMovie, and then cut parts of it out than have, say, fifteen different clips that you need to bring in and arrange. 
So give this a try with your iPhone today. Try recording a video in little segments like this and see what you can create. Think about what you can use it for in the future. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 8 Responses to “Pause While Recording Video on Your iPhone”

Cheryl F

4 months ago

Thanks for this valuable information, Gary. I had no idea that the pause feature, which will serve me well, was available. Looking forward to checking it out.

Mike D

Great tip. Thank you for sharing that. I played with this feature and discovered that you can't minimize or switch apps and expect the video to be available to resume when you open the camera app again but just the same a really helpful feature that I would not have known about without you sharing this.

Michael

Thanks for noting this feature. I was completely unaware of it. Also a big Beatles fan. Actually wrote a book on 60's music, The Dead Superstar Bar. If you have KU, you can read it for free. Enjoying these videos and am going to join the MacMost Patreon.

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Jim Terrinoni

Yes! This will be one of those techniques that might only get used occasionally, yet save a lot of time when it’s used.

Karen

Gary as usual you give great tips. I love this feature and will be sure to use it in the near future.

Nancy Bishopp

What a great catch from Apple! I wish I’d know about it before my vacation! Thanks once again, Gary

José Luís Monteiro

É útil para algumas fases da filmagem,