Snapchat doubles up with new dual cam

Snapchat thinks two cameras are better than one.

Back in April, the platform unveiled Director Mode, a suite of camera and editing tools it said would be a “game-changer” for content creators looking to “create polished content, or enhance every day moments captured with our camera that grab the viewer’s attention.”

Now, it’s pulling one of Director Mode’s key features, Dual Camera, out and putting it within the Snapchat app’s main camera toolbar.

Dual Camera lets users film with both their front-facing and back-facing cameras simultaneously, and then publish the resulting video with the two streams of footage spliced together.

Snapchat has a few different layouts for the spliced results, including stacking the two feeds vertically, setting them next to one another horizontally, and a picture-in-picture mode where one feed shows up as a smaller bubble within a larger edge-to-edge video.

Videos made with Dual Camera can be uploaded to Snapchat as regular Snaps, as Stories, or as entries to Snapchat’s TikTok competitor Spotlight, where they have a shot at earning money for their makers.

Dual Camera will still be available in the Director Mode suite, too. Snapchat says it chose to duplicate Dual Camera in the general camera to “bring even more visibility—and spontaneity—to the tool.”

“Snapchat was founded on the idea that the camera supports real friendship through visual communication, self expression and storytelling,” it added. “Dual Camera is an evolution of that idea; in that now our camera lets you capture multiple perspectives at the same time.”

Dual Camera is available now to global Snapchat users on iOS with iPhone XS, iPhone XR, and newer iPhone models. Snap says Android users will get access “in the coming months.”