Picture-in-picture is the two-camera look everyone recognises: the scene fills the frame and a small window holds the second view, usually a face. The usual way to get it on an iPhone is to record two clips, open an editor, stack them, resize the top one, and hope they line up. Dual Recorder records the picture-in-picture live, so the window is in the file the moment you stop.
Record it, do not edit it
Swipe to Front + Back and the front camera appears as a window over the back camera’s picture. What you see is what the combined video contains, to the pixel, because the preview and the recorder share one description of where the window is. No export step is needed to make the look; the export only moves the finished file to Photos.
The window is yours
- Move it. Drag the window anywhere on the picture. It keeps clear of the zoom controls on its own.
- Resize it. Pull the corner handle.
- Reshape it. The control on the window walks through three rectangles, a circle, a square and a star; each keeps the window’s area, so a circle is as big as the rectangle it replaced.
- Swap it. Put the other camera in the window without stopping the take.
- Keep it. Once touched, the window keeps its shape, size and place across takes and modes.
The rim, in the file
The window carries a thin sunset-coloured rim on screen, and the same rim is drawn into the video, so the recorded picture looks like the preview rather than like a flat rectangle pasted on afterwards. The rim is part of the layout geometry both sides share.
When a window is not the right layout
A window keeps one picture large and the other as a reference. When both pictures matter equally, a split serves better: over / under, side by side or the diagonal. All four layouts are chosen from the top bar and can be changed mid-take.
Keep the clean pictures too
Set What to save to Both and the take writes the picture-in-picture video plus a clean full-frame file from each camera. If you later want the window somewhere else, or no window at all, the editor’s Layout tool rebuilds the combined video from the clean files, and the original stays untouched.
Picture-in-picture used to be an editing effect. On an iPhone with two cameras running, it is a recording.