Cine Meter II measures light and color, so you can light and shoot and know what you'll get.
“Cine Meter II is an essential app for every cinematographer.”
— Jon Fauer, ASC
“[T]he perfect app to have with you at all times.”
— Roberto “Ganzo” Schaefer, ASC, AIC
It's a zoomable spotmeter with an RGB waveform monitor and a false-color picture.
It's an incident meter using a Lenny Hat or other diffusion, or Lumu™ Lite attachment, with lux and foot-candle readouts. (Lumu Power is NOT supported, and flash metering is NOT possible.)
It's a color meter, showing color temperature and green/magenta tint, and giving you corrections to or from your target color.
Measure more than just shutter-priority or aperture-priority: calculate shutter speed, shutter angle, aperture, ND, or ISO directly.
• The exposure meter shows your stop as a decimal value (for cameras with EVF iris readouts) or as a full stop and fraction (for cine lenses with marked iris rings). Cine Meter II lets you use shutter angles – ideal for Digital Bolex and Blackmagic cameras – as well as speeds, and you can dial in ND filters and arbitrary exposure compensations. The spotmeter is zoomable up to 15x magnification (on devices that support camera zooming), using either the front or back camera.
• The waveform monitor shows you how light levels vary across a scene. You'll see how smooth and even the lighting is on a greenscreen or background, and find subtle hotspots and shadows at a glance. The waveform’s RGB mode shows you color imbalances in the image and gives you a handy way to check color purity and separation for chroma-keying.
• False-color mode lets you define allowable contrast ranges, and see instantly which shadows are underexposed and what highlights risk clipping.
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READ BEFORE YOU BUY:
Cine Meter II is NOT a flash meter; it can't measure strobes.
Cine Meter II does NOT work with Lumu Power (the Lightning port Lumu), only Lumu Lite (the headphone jack Lumu).
Cine Meter II gives you *absolute* light meter readings, but *relative* picture and waveform monitor levels: Cine Meter II’s picture and waveform monitor do not use the *exact* exposure shown by the light meter (they are close to the meter reading, but can differ from it slightly). The picture and waveform monitor show you *relative* levels within a scene, not *absolute* levels based on the meter reading.
Shutter speeds, apertures, and ISOs shown in Cine Meter II are for metering purposes only and do not control the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO of the iPhone camera. The iPhone camera uses whatever exposure settings it needs to capture a reading. Cine Meter II is a light and color meter only; it is *not* a camera simulator.
See http://www.adamwilt.com/cinemeterii/details.html#How_It_Works for details.
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Cine Meter II FAQ
Is Cine Meter II free?
Yes, Cine Meter II is completely free and it doesn't have any in-app purchases or subscriptions.
Is Cine Meter II legit?
🤔 The Cine Meter II app's quality is mixed. Some users are satisfied, while others report issues. Consider reading individual reviews for more context.
Please make some simple tutorial videos - the documentation is overly wordy, dense and confusing - and spread over multiple webpages. I’ve read the docs several times and still having difficulty using this to match a light to ambient. It’s more of an interface problem than a technical one. For example, I just want to point it at one light (or ambient) and then point it at another light and have it tell me what I need to make it match. Maybe it can do this but I cannot find it.
A gimmick
You need a 1500 $ color meter or a spot on incandescent source to calibrate the kelvin, you also need a professional light meter to calibrate the aperture readout. (To the best of my observation you cannot calibrate the lux/ Foot Candle output (AND the Lux read out is therefore incorrect as compared with my pro meter.
After I purchased I finally read the fine print in the manual that says “tint correction values shown are appropriate for full spectrum sources with fluorescent LED’s and other “discontinuous spectrum sources” you typically need 1/2 to 2/3 of the tint correction shown.
Not for professional use
Every time I navigate in or out of the settings menu I get a pop up window that says “no mail accounts.” Telling my to set a mail account on my phone. Of which I already have several. Very annoying. Not for professional use. Sad, because there are some good elements but overshadowed by poor UX design 😕
The best $25 I have spent in recent memory
For aspiring cinematographers (and probably professional ones as well) this is an amazing app. I will be using it regularly for my fledgling short film productions. Also great customer service. Five stars all around.
Great tool!
Cine Meter II is a very useful and accurate light and color meter for video and stills (both digital and silver).
It is an accurate spot meter (matches my venerable Pentax and my newer Sekonic perfectly after one calibration) and with a Luxi sphere works as an incident meter also (matches my Sekonic too, after calibration). Even better, it is a color meter, and seems *more* accurate than my old Minolta, matching my Kinos to cheap fluorescents.
While this won't replace my meters (but it probably could) I don't bother carrying my older ones any more...
The developer is super responsive too!
Most recent upgrade is broken
I love this app. To have a color temp meter for $25 + cost of a little white dome? Amazing!
Only thing, the app received an update a few days ago, and now it won't open. At all. I deleted it and downloaded it again, in case I had a rare corrupted copy — but nope. The fresh download is busted, too. There was a catastrophic bug that shipped in the last package.
I hope you are on it, Adam Wilt. I won't give you one star for a bug that will hopefully get fixed immediately (since low stars are forever). But, well, it's a zero star app at the moment, because it's working zero percent. Please fix soon.
Lumu Power Support in future?
Adam, I love the app and have used it for years with the Lumu alongside my Sekonic. I just purchased the Lumu Power before having realized it's not supported by CineMeter. Do you have any plans to support? Curious what barriers might stand in the way if any.
Great product!
Photographers DON'T PURCHASE
Unfortunatly they advertise this as a photography and cine color meter but after purchasing it I found out that it only works with constant lighting sources NOT STROBE/FLASH. So I just wasted the $25 on a product that is useless to my needs. One big problem that I see is that you have to calabrate it using a real color meter that cost $1,500. Now if I had a real color meter why would I purchase this ap, the reason for purchasing it was to save the money. Photographers DON'T PURCHASE!!!
Best light meter app, hands down
Difference between this and an actual clunky light meter that you would have to carry around?
1. You always have this with you, if you have your phone
2. You can actually CALIBRATE this, and change calibration when needed. Can't do that with a traditional light meter, you would have to send it in to the company to do that.
3. This one has color temp and tint readings, which is huge. Most apps are just about exposure. This one goes way deeper. Even tells you exactly what correction gels you need to use to hit a target color temp. Takes all the guesswork out and speeds up the process of lighting significantly.
4. The maker of this app isn't some faceless corporation, it's a REAL GUY, named Adam Wilt, that you can actually email (he is quite fast to respond too) if you have a question.
I have too much good to say about this app and zero bad to say. I could go on forever, but that would make for a very long review. Just buy it. It's awesome. You won't regret it. Period. :)
Finally!
A very reliable and accurate light and color meter once you calibrate it. I have used it both on my iPad and phone using 216 diffusion instead of the Lumu and get great results. The false color option matches the Alexa very nicely and is truly a good tool. The real beauty is that I don't always carry my Spectra or Minolta meters but I do have my phone with me and it gives me the confidence to have extremely accurate light and kelvin and green-magenta shift readings. I have used it on scouts and production with good results. If you are a cinematographer at any level it is the perfect app to have with you at all times.