PrimeCam: Cinema Camera

PrimeCam by Ryabinski Labs is a 4K HLG10 cinema camera for Android, built for one job: producing footage a professional editor can cut without fighting it.

IT WRITES A FILE FINAL CUT PRO OPENS

Every clip is HEVC Main 10 in a .mov file, tagged with the full Rec. 2020 HLG colour triple and using the hvc1 sample entry Apple's stack actually accepts. Drop one into a Final Cut Pro library set to automatic colour and Final Cut recognises it as Rec. 2020 HLG on its own, offers to switch the library to wide-gamut HDR, and cuts the original file. No optimised media. No proxies. No transcode.

3840 x 2160, 24 fps, AAC 48 kHz stereo.

IT HAS NO INTERNET PERMISSION

Not a privacy policy — a missing capability. PrimeCam ships without the Android INTERNET permission, so the operating system itself will refuse the app a network connection. There are no accounts, no analytics, no in-app crash reporting, and no advertising SDKs. Subject detection runs on models bundled inside the app, not on a server.

You can verify the missing INTERNET permission in the app manifest.

PRIMES, NOT A ZOOM SLIDER

Available physical lenses are named in millimetres, with focal lengths and availability determined by your device. The rail tells you which glass you are on and what the stabiliser is taking off the edges, so the crop is a number you chose rather than a surprise.

EYE-DETECTION AUTOFOCUS, AND IT SAYS WHETHER IT REALLY WORKED

Eye-detection autofocus — Eye AF — runs eye, then head, then body. PrimeCam runs that ladder on the phone, holding the nearer eye by its own coordinate, not the middle of a face box. It follows the subject’s eye, not the operator’s gaze — eye-detection autofocus, not eye tracking.

PrimeCam names the rung it is on: EYE, FACE, BODY, or NO SUBJECT. It uses the same ladder for animals.

EVERY TAKE REMEMBERS ITSELF

Each clip is written with a JSON sidecar recording the lens, equivalent focal length, frame rate, stabilisation mode and its measured crop, bitrate, audio source and device — and every automatic action the camera took while you were rolling, with the second it happened. When a take looks wrong in the edit, the file tells you why.

MONITORING THAT EARNS ITS PIXELS

Waveform, false colour and focus peaking. A shutter-angle and ISO readout that stays legible in a greyscale photograph of the screen. And a stabilisation ladder that greys out the rungs the available light will not support, with the reason, instead of letting you shoot an unusable take and find out later.

THIS IS AN EARLY BUILD

PrimeCam is version 0.1.0. The developer reports testing on Pixel 11, Pixel 10 Pro and Pixel 10, plus a Samsung phone on 15 September 2026 whose model has not been recorded. Earlier documented field testing also covers Pixel 10 Pro XL and Pixel 6a. These reports do not establish support for all Samsung phones or every recording mode; capabilities vary by device. Developer testing on 15 September 2026 found that Pixel 9a does not support 10-bit recording in PrimeCam; it is not a supported device for the current 10-bit HLG recording mode. A take is written as a spanned clip — numbered parts of a few seconds each, each finished as it is written — so a crash costs the last few seconds, not the take. The parts share the take’s name and import as one clip. One known issue is worth stating plainly: the rate. PrimeCam targets 24 fps rather than 23.976, but measured clips average marginally under nominal, and the JSON sidecar records measuredFps alongside the requested fps when the take misses its target by more than 0.1%. Please do not shoot anything irreplaceable on this build.

Requires Android 13 or later, for the HLG10 dynamic-range profiles the camera depends on, and a camera that can record 4K in 10-bit HLG. Where a device cannot, PrimeCam says which part it cannot do rather than guessing.