In the golden age of mini camcorders, some Sony Handycams had "zoom" microphones which used beam forming to limit gathered sound to roughly the area equal to the what your sensor sees.
Another great idea.
Oh. They still make similar stuff: https://electronics.sony.com/imaging/imaging-accessories/all...
I feel like my iPhone does it. But not sure. Sound definitely changes when you zoom while recording
They do. They rarely mention it but they do:
https://devstreaming-cdn.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2019/249a0jw9...
The only content regarding audio I saw here are slides 124-140, which cover beam-forming but I didn't see anything about a default beam-forming profile tied to virtual zoom.
On current iPhone Pro (16) you can even select the audio mix you want for recorded video after recording.
This is a feature of iPhone, yes. Believe it came around the 11 (?) but it can really help when recording concerts if you're into that sort of thing.
Funny, that’s exactly when I hate it the most! If you zoom mid clip the sound very audibly changes which is not desirable.
Samsung phones have this as well, can be enabled or disabled in the camera settings.
Mine is too old to test the claim, but knowing that it has at least three microphones on board, It'd be absurd if Apple didn't implement it.
It's pretty computationally cheap, too, as long as you've got the math right and an easy way to choose where to aim the beam