Apple’s keynote event shot on iPhone and edited on Mac
apple.com
apple.com
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.
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 source camera and lenses were good enough - and the look was amazing compared to camcorders - to achieve this.
I would bet that the camera and lenses used didn't do the heavy lifting there, the selection of the location, the time of day, and the direction from the DP did. An expensive lighting setup isn't a requirement for a good image but good lighting is. Whether its natural or artificial is up to the DP.
The minimum viable quality you need for a project depends on the needs of the shoot.
> 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?
Of course not! I don't think anyone thinks the iPhone 15 is replacing the main camera on a shoot with a proper budget. But could the iPhone 15 be an additional camera for specialty shots or experimentation? Absolutely. For instance, if I'm shooting an unscripted scene with two people talking alone and I can mount my phone for a passable wide shot that can roll the whole time, giving me flexibility to shoot both individuals without losing coverage, then that's a huge value add.
I think in cases like that and in cases where people want to experiment without buying into a camera system, the iPhone becomes elevated beyond being just a mobile camera.
> I get that it's viable but there really is a lot of road between viable and superlative.
Totally agree, however I don't think I argued that. From my perspective, a viable camera is a viable camera for a job. The iPhone 15 seems viable from my viewing and it lives in my pocket while every other viable camera does not. That to me is the impressive feat. iPhone not living up to a proper DSLR is expected.
Also, it's funny seeing arguments about 1k+ iPhones being able to "save money" for video production when a Canon 5D MKII can be picked up for about 500 with a decent lens; and it cost less than 50 a day to rent. Results would be infinitely superior to the iPhone. The iPhone can be a camera argument to justify its price is simple pure nonsense.
But the 5D4 is superior, from the lovely focus-pulling via touchscreen to 1D-grade focusing. Let alone GPS, dual cards and the buffers.
There were definitely areas where these SLRs could improve from generation to generation, which seems to be much reduced regarding the iPhones, since the form is fixed, and upgrades or changes are often extremely unobvious.
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).
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?
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.
And then I noticed that those same professionals went right back to using regular video cameras for their next shoots. (See e.g., Olivia Rodrigo...who shot 1 music video with an iPhone 15 because Apple paid $$$ for to do it and went right back to using regular video equipment for everything else. Also Sodenberg, for an earlier version of the iPhone, who uses regular video equipment after that brief, well-funded experiment.)
> the pros were able to slot this in and do their normal workflows
Because you can't do it with "just the phone in your pocket". You can do it with the $50-100K of equipment you see on that page, just using the phone as the camera, one small part of the process. (Not to denigrate the camera's role - I am a photographer, though not a videographer, so I appreciate the importance).
How is that misleading that all they used was “the phone in your pocket”?
But he rest of Apple's marketing around things like this is much more "look at the videos you can create with just an iPhone and a Mac".
I get it, marketing.
I think it does still highlight that you can take this device far, almost as far as you'd ever need to. I think most people making videos are doing it for youtube and social, they would invest in a few smaller accessories that would cover 80% of the needs and would never need to use all of what Apple had at their disposal (the SpaceCam rig is excessive, a lot can be done with amateur/affordable gimbles and rigs). So, it's selling the fact that it's a good starter device for budding videographers (plenty of room for you can grow into it). But also not likely to convert pros away from whatever they're already using.
If you're doing an indie/film school short or similar, I can't see people breaking down their tech budget as "$100K for lighting, gimbals, etc., and $1100 for an iPhone".
I'll do better next time.
They always do this. The question was if this is what really happened.
For major studios? Of course not.
For tiny-budget indie films, student films, YouTube comedy webseries, and the like? Hugely.
I can see a lot of potential use of the iPhone 15 as on hand as a "deploy anytime, anywhere" B-Cam. For the editor, having that B-Cam to cut away to is invaluable and for small shoots or tight schedules, slapping the iPhone 15 on a cheap tripod is at the right level of convenience to give that a shot.
There's easily $100K of equipment on that page.
You can rent an EOS C700 and 6 CN-E lenses for $2000/week. RED for not much more.
If you're making a tiny budget indie, you already have similar caliber equipment. You're not renting high end ARRI and Panavision optics.
I love that you can make good video with such small equipment. I just think if you're doing something like this, optimizing for "well, let's buy an iPhone" over the benefits of traditional cameras is odd, even for a smaller scale production.
Frankly, I think, "show us what you can do with an iPhone and a small gimbal, a couple of basic continuous lights, even if it doesn't look as good as this production" would have given a better view of the capabilities and potential.
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
Ie go to your producer and say hey Apple did this. We can do it
Being serious - there's no point in doing that, because it requires ton of additional, janky equipment and ton of extra job in the post production.
See: https://youtu.be/OkPter7MC1I?si=Enx7IAFzNHfOPrBW
This is just marketing stunt. No idea why anybody cares.
An actual film camera instead can be much, much more per day.
In reality no one other than apple is going to have high end professional light rigs and a phone camera. But plenty of people could use the money they aren't spending on a "proper" camera on better lighting instead and perhaps get a better final product than the historical configuration of "we've spent a tonne renting the camera, let's see if we can afford any lighting".
At 4000-6000€, you can buy an Alexa Classic, and get incredible quality.
But in a real shoot, you'd just rent a full kit for 200$ a day.
There is absolutely no situation where purchasing an iPhone 15 for this use case makes sense.
The only reason they did this ad was so people who'd never actually shoot films can brag that their b-class home movies are hollywood level quality.
You can rent a Sony Venice for around 250 bucks per day. ARRI Alexa is maybe twice as much?
This is not some low-budget video, it’s a high-end production.
If you have that kind of budget, your producer probably won’t care if you’re using an iPhone or a Sony FX-3(0) or even a rented “real” cinema camera like a Sony Venice or an Arri
And that movie had a lot of night scenes too. I can only imagine how much the situation has improved.
(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.)
It still looks strictly worse than an equivalently priced $1000 camera+lens when directed, lit, operated, and edited by professionals.
Also note that, according to its datasheet, the iPhone cannot capture video on its tiny 48MP sensor at that resolution at all - just 4k.
Equivalent is maybe Sigma 24-70 which is constant f/2.8 at an extra 1200 USD.
So all up ~3x more expensive than iPhone.
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.
Important considerations include where the light is coming from, how diffuse it is, and its color.
Lights (or flashes for photography) get used even outdoors. Amateur outdoor headshots usually give the subject racoon eyes since the eyes are sunken in versus the eyebrows. Pros will get light on the face to get rid of that.
I can recommend watching the Better Call Saul DVD documentary, they regularly have the lead lighting guy answering questions in there. The tl;dr was to me that yes, you definetely need additional lighting, even if your camera has a massive, light sensitive sensor.
I don't think anyone expects an iPhone to compete with a top of the line Arri 65 or other IMAX enabled cameras when it comes to low light performance (the sensor on these is huge after all), but the intro shot with Apple Park shows that it's possible.
Maybe don't try to reenact a shooting of Barry Lyndon on an iPhone, but for nearly everything else it seems to work just fine.
So yes extremely fast even with today's technologies.
> After "tinker[ing] with different combinations of lenses and film stock," the production obtained three super-fast 50mm lenses (Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7) developed by Zeiss for use by NASA in the Apollo Moon landings, which Kubrick had discovered. These super-fast lenses "with their huge aperture (the film actually features the lowest f-stop in film history) and fixed focal length" were problematic to mount, and were extensively modified into three versions by Cinema Products Corp. for Kubrick to gain a wider angle of view, with input from optics expert Richard Vetter of Todd-AO. The rear element of the lens had to be 2.5 mm away from the film plane, requiring special modification to the rotating camera shutter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon
> The lens was designed and made specifically for the NASA Apollo lunar program to capture the far side of the Moon in 1966.
> In total there were only 10 lenses made. One was kept by Carl Zeiss, six were sold to NASA, and three were sold to Kubrick.
But to me the important question is if it has any impact on the number of lights. If you still need all the same lights to use the iPhone that you would for a camera that is several thousand dollars. it is still really cool.
People forget how much more sensitive silicon is to light than film.
Edit: got currious, it was ISO 100 pushed 1 stop during development[1]. So, since an iPhone's ƒ/1.78 main lens is ≈2.5 stops slower than ƒ0.7, using ISO ≈1200 should give you the same exposure (if shot at 24fps). Certainly doable.
[1] https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-fa...
You couldn't do that with an iPhone.
But it's not so much to compensate, just to ensure that your shot is lit the way you want, without the weird hard shadows and background-brighter-than-foreground problems that occur in your average space that hasn't been specifically lit for film/TV.
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.
Is that clear? Even ignoring the form factor, I expect you would be quite disappointed casually shooting your vacation on a camera typically used on these types of shoots.
That may be true, but cinema cameras are often less camera in many ways. For example, they often lack autofocus (at best, poor autofocus). It assumed you will have a dedicated focus puller on set. Probably not something you want to bring with you on vacation.
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.
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.
Consumer --> Prosumer --> Pro
Aka tacit endorsement of the incumbent 'way things be.'
Apple has massively reduced the barrier to entry.
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
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.
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.
I can rent a RED camera and lenses for maybe $1000/day ($3,000/week).
It's not that big a savings at all, for one of the most pivotal parts to the process, is that where you want to be skimping?
An iPhone + good lighting + microphone will give you fantastic footage.
You don’t need the drone or lift. If you’re not trying to do those effects they don’t matter. The iPhone can give you great results if you own one, you don’t need to buy a fancy camera, you can spend your budget elsewhere if you’re getting started.
Historically, this has meant for the Mac.
But it also includes iPhone.
It also has far better features for exposure, focus peaking, etc. It's the same UI which is in Blackmagic's actual cameras.
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?
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.
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.
MKBHD says it was a camera app from BlackMagic. Their software Resolve is used in professional movies, but for some reason it's also available for free with some minor limitations. I've used it when I needed quickly combine some simple video clips and it was really intuitive use. Though the color grading and other advanced tabs looked scary to a noob :)
My guess is that most upcoming filmmakers on a budget will continue to other options such as Blackmagic cameras.
I hope Apple takes that as a shot across the bow -- they need to up their game with FCP and its ecosystem, if the contractor they hired to produce an Apple event shot on iPhone and edited on Mac doesn't even use FCP.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cmwov/comment/c0...
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!
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.
As an aside, I do appreciate Apple bringing Pro-Level functionality to the masses.
The difficult bit is the expensive rig + post processing software + extensive skills required to get this result.
Why this doesn't make any sense?
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.
[0] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2023/10/behind-the-sce...
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.
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.
- 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.
It is the only one to support ProRes with the Log profile.
Without it it's not possible to do decent video color grading.