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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

See also a more skeptical take, emphasizing all the expensive studio equipment involved: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/31/23940060/apple-event-sho...

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“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.

I think you and others have completely missed the point.

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.

How are they missing a point? They only provided a link to a different take.

Expanding slightly on this, the cheapest Red Camera costs $6k (and I think might not include a lens?), so that's a pretty big savings.

Is it though? How much does all the associated gear, operators, actors, sets, producers cost? In the context of professional video production, a one time savings of $6k seems pretty small.

The point is what the footage looks like. It’s about the camera output.

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.

Yeah, I think the real target of this kind of marketing is indie/student filmmakers. People whose entire budget for a short film is a few thousand dollars they've pooled together.

On this shoot? $100K+ of equipment, and that team?

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?

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