A lot of people here are bringing up all of the expensive gear surrounding the iPhone that helped give it the professional look. This isn't unique to iPhone as a sensor.
I work in TV and have spent a great deal of time on set shooting. The only time I've ever relied entirely on the camera's sensor and lens for a high quality image is shooting outside, and even then that requires adjustments, such as facing away from the sun, moving away from contrasty shadows, ect.
Outside of documentaries, every other shoot will have a great deal of time, effort, and money spent on lighting and set design to elevate what is being shot. For scripted projects/films, an even smaller % of shots will be shot with the raw, available light/environment.
What Apple did with the iPhone 15 proved that the iPhone can be used in a professional setting without being the on set bottle neck. For example, a short film shoot which had it's budget blown entirely on renting an Alexa will be bottle necked by the lack of lighting for the scene. Similarly, a short film which had its budget blown entirely on renting lights will be bottle necked if its shot on an iPhone 4.
The goal is balance and for smaller productions, that balance is found in budgeting. If anyone on set has an iPhone 15 Pro in their pocket, the shoot suddenly has a viable second camera-- maybe its not good enough for the entire shoot, but its surely going to be good enough as a B-Cam or even as an A-Cam in certain scenarios where a smaller form factor is required to get the shot.
I don't think Apple is sugar coating their demonstration here with all the expensive toys being used in parallel with the iPhone. The use of these tools in parallel with the iPhone IS the demonstration.
Like any good video, if its shot correctly and edited correctly, you won't have an easy time visually identifying what sensor is being used.
Without the expensive gear, the iPhone looks considerably downgraded compared to better source equipment. I had a Canon 5DII the day it was released and within a week some friends and I had a music video entered into a festival, and within a year, two short films, all done without any extra lighting or equipment - including gimbals. The source camera and lenses were good enough - and the look was amazing compared to camcorders - to achieve this.
Forgetting "shoots" and professional lighting, the iPhone isn't going to have the massive range of other equipment, and when you're spending literally thousands of pounds on studio time, lighting hire, operator costs, etc etc, are you really going to pick up and shoot on an iPhone when you've got a Black Magic or Sony or Canon at hand? Unless you're being paid by Apple?
I get that it's viable but there really is a lot of road between viable and superlative.
The new Olivia Rodrigo music video/ad was shot on an iPhone. And it shows. Even on 4k, there's blurriness, color balance issues, and noticeable artifacts that just aren't present on videos shot with a proper video camera (i.e., the commercials airing right before and after).
Yes, the iPhone can be used as a video camera. The same way that a camcorder can be used as a video camera. And neither of them are anywhere close to professional-level quality without a lot of extra work and equipment: you actually need more expensive equipment than you would with an expensive camera (and this other equipment usually costs a multiple of what a good camera would cost).
All of Jet Lag The Game and DankPods are shot on iPhone and they look fine. It doesn’t look like some ultra high quality movie production but they also don’t stand out particularly looking bad, it’s completely fine for the content m
I don't think many people were really wondering if this sort of thing "could" be done.
IMO that's not the important question.
The question is, did the people who filmed and created the video with the iPhone hardware actually enjoy this process / workflow? Or did this process cause a bunch more pain and hassle to deal with the iPhone as the source camera?
Compared to some alternative they could have used.
Is there actually a compelling reason to use an iPhone for this type of work over the various alternatives?
> Or did this process cause a bunch more pain and hassle to deal with the iPhone as the source camera?
Did you read/skim the article because that's the focal point of the whole piece and discussions taking place in the videos. The whole thing is touting how easy the pros were able to slot this in and do their normal workflows on top.
> Is there actually a compelling reason to use an iPhone for this type of work over the various alternatives?
I'd guess cost is the big one, and the fact this will be in your pocket already for a lot of people.
If you don't have any of those alternatives in the first place.
The Best Food Review Show Ever went to Egypt for a series and the authorities impounded their video equipment and wouldn't let the team access the equipment until they left Egypt. Sunny, the host, was super frustrated but stated that the default was buying a few iPhones and filming the whole show through those devices.
This seems to be more like people doing software development on their laptop vs at a desk with large monitor, a proper keyboard and ergonomics.
(on a tangent, there are no osha-approved laptops, they are not ergonomic. To work for hours, you should have a proper body posture. You should be looking forward at the screen with your head balanced on your neck, not up or down. there is also posture for arms, wrists, shoulders, etc.)
The compelling reason for Apple is to show off their phone. Other than that, I can't imagine the workflow on set is more effective. However, maybe the team enjoyed the process simply from the novelty and challenge of it.
I love their commitment to walking the walk with the camera on the iPhone, but as this footage shows, while YES it is "shot on an iPhone 15 Pro Max" it also uses thousands of dollars worth of equipment that makes it hard for the average user to replicate similar quality.
Apple is showing that an iPhone Pro can be used by _professionals_ to replace their existing camera. It’s not trying to replace an entire studio (yet). That would be like expecting a new centrifuge machine to replace an entire lab of equipment. Nobody expects an average user to compete with professionals, even if they were given a $20k RED camera.
So I think the important question is though, if you had spent thousands on dollars on a camera would those lights still be required?
If the answer is yes, then the feat is still an important one.
I know that some lights would still be required, but I honesty don't know the answer if they needed additional lights to compensate or if they could have gotten away with less.
I think what this shows is that it's capable of being used at all for pro-level work. No, I don't have all the nice gear that Apple has, but I can have the same camera.
It's similar to how they show MacBook Pro users making movies, doing AI work, processing huge datasets, etc. The message is that I don't need to do all those things. But if I did, the computer would be good enough to do them.
In the context of the iPhone's camera, I'm not going to shoot an ad on one, but it's clearly going to be good enough to take pictures of my vacation.
Like siblings comments have mentioned, the gear has always been part of the game. Before I was in software I did low budget videography. Lighting, audio, set equipment, editing, and the little bits that add extra quality have always been part of a good production. There are hacks to make equipment or repurpose things for the same effect as the expensive and nice hardware you’re seeing.
One of the most common hacked together items is a steady cam rig. The simplest version is made from a couple iron pipes and an appropriate screw for your camera mount.
> worth of equipment that makes it hard for the average user to replicate similar quality.
Define quality. What I take away from the documentation is that you can replace iPhone's in workflows that would have traditionally used a heavy and expensive film grade camera. The gimbals, rigs and software used the video are actually quite normal for professional video shoots and you'd see them in use with more expensive cameras as well.
That's always been part of the prosumer equation; kit to go around the digital lynchpin. It's the void Digidesign/Avid filled with the mbox series back when.
Consumer --> Prosumer --> Pro
Aka tacit endorsement of the incumbent 'way things be.'
Also interestingly, shot with the Blackmagic app. Not sure if they also used Davinci or FCP. But if they would have used FCP, I guess they would have mentioned it?
you can likely jerry rig a cart and attach a tripod to it, not expensive, bottom line is that it is possible with the iPhone to film something like that.
“a great deal of fancy equipment — from drones, gimbals, dollies, industrial set lighting, and other recording accessories — is still required to make iPhone footage look this good.”
But that’s just a standard requirement to make stuff look that good.
Slap a cheap lens on an Alexa and light like an amateur and you will get a subpar video-result with the only redeeming factor being the sensor.
And sure, the sensor (or medium) does matter, but production design and good lighting can be used to make almost any camera look great. I don’t think thhere’s anything wrong with that.
Steven Soderberg shot a movie some years ago on an earlier iphone. Some of the shots were truly terrific because of attention to the above.
You can copy or emulate a lot of high-end/cinematic/filmic looks quite affordably.
For light you need output + size of light source, easily attainable on a budget.
Good audio solutions also exist for reasonable $$.
What you pay the most for when using expensive equpiment is more features related to interconmectedness and lifting some of the work in post-production, and durability. But it does not nescessarily translate to better images than what can be achieved by even bedroom-indie filmmakers
You can be skeptical of it like the Verge or impressed by it like some in these comments, but either way it's good that Apple is showing you exactly what that means in practice.
The transparency here is welcome and both Google and Apple should do something similar when it comes to the photographs they show off when rolling out new phones. They shouldn't show a photo in those keynotes without also showing exactly what it took to get those photos out of those phones.
The first party camera is designed to be operated by every human being on the planet. Redesigning it to accommodate highend workflows makes as much sense as redesigning a $50,000 cinema camera to accommodate parents who want to record their kid's soccer game.
I was honestly curious about that myself, I have generally just used the stock one but I am now curious if that one works better or has some better features.
Genuine question, since I'm not part of the Apple ecosystem and my smartphones tend to be from the low end of the range.
Even my humble one takes great pictures and video, but the touch-screen UI is really limiting. Whereas professional movie camera work has smooth pan/zoom work that, at least until now, was done with appropriate controls. Do professionals using a slab phone have external pan/tilt/zoom/focus rigs that they can plug in as an accessory, or do they have to do all that via the touchscreen UI?
If you watch the video, you can see that they have a big rig with like a gimbal and external controllers and screens. So it's not "just an iPhone" but it's also not a $50k+ pro camera body.
Look at pretty much any one of the pictures in the article for your answer.
No professional camera, iPhone or not, isn't in a rig/harness/on a trolley etc. That's for pan/tilt/push in/pull out. For controlling camera settings/zoom/focus, the article says they are using Blackmagic Camera.
A major problem with telephone cameras, including the iPhone (not sure for the last model), is that they suffer from very notable reflections of light [1] which are very distracting. Dealing with this on a set must not be easy.
I think that explains why they did this one at night and it had that same annoyingly dark look as modern streaming shows. "Look, our phone makes it possible for the best DPs and colorists in the world to produce the same unwatchable dimness as they could with cameras costing orders of magnitude more!"
Yes! I recently watched Hello Tomorrow during the day and had to turn up the brightness on my TV to make out some of the scenes. Day or night shots in the show didn't matter, it was all too dark and pale looking.
Watching the same episode at night for me was a much nicer experience.
~4 yr old 4k Samsung Smart TV with all the motion blur and vivid stuff turned off.
I'd love to see what they did to work around the framerate issues. iPhones record in variable framerate (they just encode one frame, once that's fully encoded read the next frame and repeat). This leads to fps varying by up to ±10%, which causes a lot of issues with most editing software.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max costs more than 1400€. You can get a nice "real" video camera for that money!
Now, the iPhone has the advantage of being always available (without all the pro gear that Apple used). But in the case of a production like this, that's not relevant.
My guess is that most upcoming filmmakers on a budget will continue to other options such as Blackmagic cameras.
“The production was advised by Apple’s Jon Carr, a Pro Workflow video specialist whose credits include Top Gun: Maverick and Terminator: Dark Fate, and Jeff Wozniak, who has worked on productions including Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Avatar, and Iron Man 2.”
I can’t even imagine how annoying it must be for that guy to be working with Apple on stuff with the last name Wozniak and to have everyone whispering around him “is he related to Steve??”. It’s an uncommon enough name that it’s not an unreasonable supposition.
Good on them for walking the walk. But I genuinely believe you could, with that equipment, get the same footage with a 10-year-old dslr-camera and its stock lens for just a few hundred bucks.
Presuming they also shoot this behind the scenes video with an iPhone as well, the video quality is out-of-focus for the individual on the right at 0m39s.
Look how the right side of their face is fuzzy, not well defined.
I wish somebody can tell me what was wrong with the video being shot on iPhone, is it visible for a professional eye that it is iPhone? I was always told that the lens and matrix size is everything. Have things changed dramatically since the time you could only make a good shot on a full-frame DSLR?
It's noticeable if you're specifically looking for it, but much harder to tell. Log color makes a huge difference, and the equipment they're using around the iPhone, along with the editing (and now better color grading) really close a lot of the gap.
"Full frame DSLRs" were not ever the cameras that took the best pictures, they were just the top end prosumer for a while. Mirrorless are somewhat better than DSLR now, rangefinders always were if you were into Leica, and medium format or large format have always been better than full frame.
Lens and matrix size is everything when you cannot control the environment, when you can change the lighting and design the scene, then you can make up for the smaller sensor.
While watching the presentation, I found the faces a bit too sharp, but I was watching on a different, newer screen, which I imagined had a higher pixel density than the one I'm used to everyday.
But I just checked and the difference is neglectable (224 vs 218 ppi), so my guess is the over-sharpening of the iPhone.
Not that it was bad, just different enough to be noticeable.
This is a super impressive tech-demo. Not practical for us consumers (who don't have expensive pro-level equipment surrounding the phone-camera), and not meaningful for professionals (who would just use a normal camera), but it is still a pure technical achievement that deserves a look and a cheer.
-1 for Apple for using a third party app to capture the footage. I dont have an iphone so how do they control the camera app without touching the screen?
This could have been accomplished with an iPhone 8 years ago. For a keynote that 99.9% of the population will watch on YouTube, what is this trying to prove?
It's an interesting demonstration, that's about it.
An iPhone 8 years ago (iPhone 6S released Sep 2015):
- Is limited to a 12MP sensor (15 Pro has 48MP on the main sensor)
- Can only shoot 4K SDR at 30fps
- Cannot shoot ProRes LOG mode
You could absolutely get a great video with an iPhone 6S. Soderbergh shot all of Unsane with an iPhone 7 and FiLMiC Pro. But comparing the video quality from Unsane to this clearly shows how far the iPhone has come.
It's an interesting demonstration. That's all it ever needed to be.
zavertnik|2 years ago
I work in TV and have spent a great deal of time on set shooting. The only time I've ever relied entirely on the camera's sensor and lens for a high quality image is shooting outside, and even then that requires adjustments, such as facing away from the sun, moving away from contrasty shadows, ect.
Outside of documentaries, every other shoot will have a great deal of time, effort, and money spent on lighting and set design to elevate what is being shot. For scripted projects/films, an even smaller % of shots will be shot with the raw, available light/environment.
What Apple did with the iPhone 15 proved that the iPhone can be used in a professional setting without being the on set bottle neck. For example, a short film shoot which had it's budget blown entirely on renting an Alexa will be bottle necked by the lack of lighting for the scene. Similarly, a short film which had its budget blown entirely on renting lights will be bottle necked if its shot on an iPhone 4.
The goal is balance and for smaller productions, that balance is found in budgeting. If anyone on set has an iPhone 15 Pro in their pocket, the shoot suddenly has a viable second camera-- maybe its not good enough for the entire shoot, but its surely going to be good enough as a B-Cam or even as an A-Cam in certain scenarios where a smaller form factor is required to get the shot.
I don't think Apple is sugar coating their demonstration here with all the expensive toys being used in parallel with the iPhone. The use of these tools in parallel with the iPhone IS the demonstration.
Like any good video, if its shot correctly and edited correctly, you won't have an easy time visually identifying what sensor is being used.
vr46|2 years ago
Forgetting "shoots" and professional lighting, the iPhone isn't going to have the massive range of other equipment, and when you're spending literally thousands of pounds on studio time, lighting hire, operator costs, etc etc, are you really going to pick up and shoot on an iPhone when you've got a Black Magic or Sony or Canon at hand? Unless you're being paid by Apple?
I get that it's viable but there really is a lot of road between viable and superlative.
gamblor956|2 years ago
Yes, the iPhone can be used as a video camera. The same way that a camcorder can be used as a video camera. And neither of them are anywhere close to professional-level quality without a lot of extra work and equipment: you actually need more expensive equipment than you would with an expensive camera (and this other equipment usually costs a multiple of what a good camera would cost).
Shawnj2|2 years ago
SirMaster|2 years ago
IMO that's not the important question.
The question is, did the people who filmed and created the video with the iPhone hardware actually enjoy this process / workflow? Or did this process cause a bunch more pain and hassle to deal with the iPhone as the source camera?
Compared to some alternative they could have used.
Is there actually a compelling reason to use an iPhone for this type of work over the various alternatives?
conductr|2 years ago
Did you read/skim the article because that's the focal point of the whole piece and discussions taking place in the videos. The whole thing is touting how easy the pros were able to slot this in and do their normal workflows on top.
> Is there actually a compelling reason to use an iPhone for this type of work over the various alternatives?
I'd guess cost is the big one, and the fact this will be in your pocket already for a lot of people.
crazygringo|2 years ago
For major studios? Of course not.
For tiny-budget indie films, student films, YouTube comedy webseries, and the like? Hugely.
andrewcl|2 years ago
The Best Food Review Show Ever went to Egypt for a series and the authorities impounded their video equipment and wouldn't let the team access the equipment until they left Egypt. Sunny, the host, was super frustrated but stated that the default was buying a few iPhones and filming the whole show through those devices.
I believe this is the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-PgumHXWVo
kranke155|2 years ago
Ie go to your producer and say hey Apple did this. We can do it
dimmke|2 years ago
And that movie had a lot of night scenes too. I can only imagine how much the situation has improved.
m463|2 years ago
(on a tangent, there are no osha-approved laptops, they are not ergonomic. To work for hours, you should have a proper body posture. You should be looking forward at the screen with your head balanced on your neck, not up or down. there is also posture for arms, wrists, shoulders, etc.)
owenpalmer|2 years ago
joshmanders|2 years ago
guptaneil|2 years ago
nerdjon|2 years ago
If the answer is yes, then the feat is still an important one.
I know that some lights would still be required, but I honesty don't know the answer if they needed additional lights to compensate or if they could have gotten away with less.
stuff4ben|2 years ago
kstrauser|2 years ago
It's similar to how they show MacBook Pro users making movies, doing AI work, processing huge datasets, etc. The message is that I don't need to do all those things. But if I did, the computer would be good enough to do them.
In the context of the iPhone's camera, I'm not going to shoot an ad on one, but it's clearly going to be good enough to take pictures of my vacation.
Moto7451|2 years ago
One of the most common hacked together items is a steady cam rig. The simplest version is made from a couple iron pipes and an appropriate screw for your camera mount.
awesomeMilou|2 years ago
Define quality. What I take away from the documentation is that you can replace iPhone's in workflows that would have traditionally used a heavy and expensive film grade camera. The gimbals, rigs and software used the video are actually quite normal for professional video shoots and you'd see them in use with more expensive cameras as well.
plussed_reader|2 years ago
Consumer --> Prosumer --> Pro
Aka tacit endorsement of the incumbent 'way things be.'
steve1977|2 years ago
geodel|2 years ago
kube-system|2 years ago
asimpletune|2 years ago
m3kw9|2 years ago
NelsonMinar|2 years ago
hipshaker|2 years ago
But that’s just a standard requirement to make stuff look that good.
Slap a cheap lens on an Alexa and light like an amateur and you will get a subpar video-result with the only redeeming factor being the sensor.
And sure, the sensor (or medium) does matter, but production design and good lighting can be used to make almost any camera look great. I don’t think thhere’s anything wrong with that.
Steven Soderberg shot a movie some years ago on an earlier iphone. Some of the shots were truly terrific because of attention to the above.
You can copy or emulate a lot of high-end/cinematic/filmic looks quite affordably. For light you need output + size of light source, easily attainable on a budget. Good audio solutions also exist for reasonable $$. What you pay the most for when using expensive equpiment is more features related to interconmectedness and lifting some of the work in post-production, and durability. But it does not nescessarily translate to better images than what can be achieved by even bedroom-indie filmmakers
elicash|2 years ago
The transparency here is welcome and both Google and Apple should do something similar when it comes to the photographs they show off when rolling out new phones. They shouldn't show a photo in those keynotes without also showing exactly what it took to get those photos out of those phones.
threeseed|2 years ago
Apple was always going to use that equipment. It's needed for all decent video production work.
What they've shown is that you can skip the Red Camera and use an iPhone instead.
ayoreis|2 years ago
sandofsky|2 years ago
alberth|2 years ago
Historically, this has meant for the Mac.
But it also includes iPhone.
randomdata|2 years ago
nerdjon|2 years ago
cglong|2 years ago
alberth|2 years ago
MarkusWandel|2 years ago
Even my humble one takes great pictures and video, but the touch-screen UI is really limiting. Whereas professional movie camera work has smooth pan/zoom work that, at least until now, was done with appropriate controls. Do professionals using a slab phone have external pan/tilt/zoom/focus rigs that they can plug in as an accessory, or do they have to do all that via the touchscreen UI?
lbourdages|2 years ago
brianpan|2 years ago
No professional camera, iPhone or not, isn't in a rig/harness/on a trolley etc. That's for pan/tilt/push in/pull out. For controlling camera settings/zoom/focus, the article says they are using Blackmagic Camera.
spacedcowboy|2 years ago
y04nn|2 years ago
[1]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251977011
masto|2 years ago
residentraspber|2 years ago
Watching the same episode at night for me was a much nicer experience.
~4 yr old 4k Samsung Smart TV with all the motion blur and vivid stuff turned off.
kuschku|2 years ago
mnemoni_c|2 years ago
Tepix|2 years ago
My guess is that most upcoming filmmakers on a budget will continue to other options such as Blackmagic cameras.
TimTheTinker|2 years ago
randomdata|2 years ago
someNameIG|2 years ago
ggoo|2 years ago
aresant|2 years ago
whalesalad|2 years ago
eigenvalue|2 years ago
I can’t even imagine how annoying it must be for that guy to be working with Apple on stuff with the last name Wozniak and to have everyone whispering around him “is he related to Steve??”. It’s an uncommon enough name that it’s not an unreasonable supposition.
I bet people are really nice to him just in case!
kaugesaar|2 years ago
alberth|2 years ago
This is definitely a nitpick…
Presuming they also shoot this behind the scenes video with an iPhone as well, the video quality is out-of-focus for the individual on the right at 0m39s.
Look how the right side of their face is fuzzy, not well defined.
https://ibb.co/xLKZkQ8
As an aside, I do appreciate Apple bringing Pro-Level functionality to the masses.
neilv|2 years ago
RomanPushkin|2 years ago
mholm|2 years ago
brokencode|2 years ago
astrange|2 years ago
chazeon|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
baz00|2 years ago
The difficult bit is the expensive rig + post processing software + extensive skills required to get this result.
asimpletune|2 years ago
t0bia_s|2 years ago
Why this doesn't make any sense?
tambourine_man|2 years ago
But I just checked and the difference is neglectable (224 vs 218 ppi), so my guess is the over-sharpening of the iPhone.
Not that it was bad, just different enough to be noticeable.
flakiness|2 years ago
inparen|2 years ago
altairprime|2 years ago
GoToRO|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
kart23|2 years ago
hnburnsy|2 years ago
chr-s|2 years ago
[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2023/10/behind-the-sce...
[1] https://tilta.com/shop/nucleus-m-fiz-unit/
rconti|2 years ago
Upon reading that, I immediately looked at the domain of the source. I know, I should be in this habit BEFORE reading anything, but still.
_factor|2 years ago
empath-nirvana|2 years ago
So much of what people have been doing matter of factly on iphones daily for years was just pure science fiction when I was a kid.
artimaeis|2 years ago
- Is limited to a 12MP sensor (15 Pro has 48MP on the main sensor)
- Can only shoot 4K SDR at 30fps
- Cannot shoot ProRes LOG mode
You could absolutely get a great video with an iPhone 6S. Soderbergh shot all of Unsane with an iPhone 7 and FiLMiC Pro. But comparing the video quality from Unsane to this clearly shows how far the iPhone has come.
It's an interesting demonstration. That's all it ever needed to be.
threeseed|2 years ago
It is the only one to support ProRes with the Log profile.
Without it it's not possible to do decent video color grading.
m3kw9|2 years ago
blairbeckwith|2 years ago