Precorder Review

Recording video on the iPhone is one of the many marvels of the smartphone era. I know, plenty of camera/video phones have been able to record video before the iPhone, but none have made it nearly as easy to share these videos with the world. Now I can take a video, send it out to all my friends, post in on various websites to the world to see, or just ship it over to my computer for some editing. These videos are all coming out in movie quality, so every iPhone owner is now a budding director, not just a home video hack.

The real problem with taking video though is that it is so easy to miss the most important moments in life. Try taking a video of your dog being attacked by a cat that you are watching for a friend (this was the case for me over the holidays). All you want to see is your dog bark and flip out or the cat to make some sort of guttural moan and pounce; either would be fine, but both occurrences are so random that you really have set your camera to record and wait. After 30+ minutes of waiting you'll finally get the moment you want, but then it's off to editing to clip out the other 30 min of boring junk. Fortunately for us, there's an app that works great for these situations.

Precorder is an app that automatically saves 1-10 seconds of video so that when you click the record button, you already have X amount of time recorded. What this allows you to do is wait for an event to happen and then start recording, allowing you to not have to go into editing to wipe out unwanted moments. The catch is that you have to have the app open and aiming at the action, but auto-skimming off the unwanted fat is more fantastic than you would know.

With its painfully simple UI, Precorder is definitely one of those apps that should be downloaded by anyone who uses their video camera feature. It won't add filters or do anything wonky to your video, but its simple functionality makes it a great purchase.