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Comment by user_7832 | Hacker News Reader

I think there are 2 parts to this:

One is "iPhone camera sensors are competitive with commercial offerings in some cases". I think this is what Apple was trying to go for with the entire thing including the behind the scenes.

The other is "If you (edit: just) have an iPhone you too can make such a video". Which is what anyone who isn't affiliated with the film industry (aka 99% of the population) might think, especially if they didn't see the behind the scenes.

"Shot on iPhone" hence has 2 perspectives.

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> The other is "If you have an iPhone you too can make such a video". Which is what anyone who isn't affiliated with the film industry (aka 99% of the population) might think, especially if they didn't see the behind the scenes.

I honestly don't think it's a reasonable takeaway for anyone who is at all interested in creating highly produced video with their iPhone. Even if you're an absolute beginner, it's abundantly clear that these Apple videos are serious productions.

It's not significantly different than hearing that an accomplished journalist wrote a column on their iPad, or a successful entrepreneur manages their schedule with their iPhone calendar, or a famous musician uses GarageBand for songwriting (or even full production).

The point in all of these examples is never that you can accomplish these things with an iPhone and don't need talent, creativity, years of practice, other gear, etc. The only point is that the iPhone is not a significant limiting factor on the quality of results you can achieve.

> I honestly don't think it's a reasonable takeaway for anyone who is at all interested in creating highly produced video with their iPhone. Even if you're an absolute beginner, it's abundantly clear that these Apple videos are serious productions.

I agree that that's how it is in reality, but that's not something many people really know or understand. Apple also likes to sell their products as "see how good our x product is that we used in-house" which likely further may make some people think an iPhone is enough to make a high quality video.

(I think the funny thing is that even without extra hardware an iPhone can shoot very good/near professional quality video but this debate is only about Apple using very fancy hardware. I also made a small edit to my comment.)

Yes, but did you make the edit with an iphone?

The behind the scenes video had lavish scenes of the editor working on the footage shot on iPhone ... with Adobe Premiere.

Lots of shots of Davinci Resolve, didn't spot any Premier at a quick glance? But it's not unusual for both to be used on the same production

Further, Resolve is available on iPad now, and Black Magic have a film app on iPhone (that I think was shown in the BTS). So technically they could've edited on iOS if necessary.

On the photo side, Lightroom on iOS is pretty decent.

"musician uses GarageBand for songwriting (or even full production

Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles' masterpiece, one of the most highly-regarded and influential albums of all time) was recorded on an analog 4-track.

At the time it was recorded, that was cutting edge tech, wasn't it?

>2 track recording is still a rare & deluxe feature in most consumer gear!

Even in professional gear, it's usually a ridiculous jump in price - often double - to much fancier hardware to get more channels.

It makes sense as few people do need it, but I do wish there were more assorted consumer electronics that would throw in more channel recording just because. Rather than as an upsell to way more expensive gear.

Yes, in that everything was being recorded on analog tape in that era because it was the best quality recording format available.

The album is a little unusual in that by 1967 tape recorders with larger channel counts were becoming more common, allowing separate recording of most of the original channels. But linear editing of audio was very difficult, recording engineers still did the mix as live, so there were recording studios that hadn't seen a reason to make the upgrade or were attached to older equipment that they were very familiar with. Especially with analog equipment prominent recording engineers were often averse to new equipment since they would learn how to get the best results out of their particulat setup - and things like frequency response could vary noticeably from one model to another.

... and no amount of money or technology can make "Now and Then" a good song.

An extremely high quality analog 4 track. Not to be confused with (not even in the same universe as) the cheap 1980s or 90s tascam 4-track cassette tape recorder that people are much more likely to have encountered.

Not really if you compare it the 1969's Abbey road, which sounds quite a bit better. American productions were sounding much better though the mid to late 60s as well.

Abbey Road sounds clearer because it was the first Beatles to be produced with a transistorized mixer. The mixer used in Sgt. Pepper had vacuum tubes.

It's less "tinny" sounding than the earlier albums. Interesting because tubes are the alleged choice for a warmer sound today. So there must be additional factors in the new equipment.

By now solid state equipment can do everything tubes do, only better. I think only nostalgia and audiophile stupidity remain as reasons for tube equipment to continue existing. Certainly there is no reason to build new tube gear.

Admittedly cheap solid state gear sounds worse than high quality tube gear but that has way more to do with good design and quality components than the tubes themselves.

Any idea how much the device cost at the time?

Not sure about at the time, but I have had the opportunity to record onto one of the tape machines they used (they had multiple) and the studio had paid around £30,000 for it.

That device is just the recording medium used for those recordings, don't forget the £100k in microphones and signal routing, plus the £1M in the building itself.

Yep. As any photographer or videographer will tell you, it's not the camera that makes the difference, it's the person operating it. Do they understand the importance of lighting? Can they get around the technical limitations of the device?

We all know that Apple demos take place under the most regimented of conditions. Jobs' iPhone demo had full reception bars hard-coded into it. I imagine the iPhone cameras were used in similarly generous conditions.

I think beyond “it’s not the camera that makes the difference” we need to have a discussion about lighting.

A shitty camera and shitty lens in fantastic lighting will give good results. The best camera with the best lens in awful lighting will give bad results.

Kind of like microphones, that way. Like how the Apple video was shot on an iPhone (except it had great lighting and a ton of production work), there are hit songs with parts recorded on iPhone. They aren’t advertised like that. But it happens. The advantage of the iPhone is that it’s already in your pocket, and for something as intimate as singing, that proves to be a major, major advantage. Your producer may try to get you to recreate that beautiful performance in the studio, but audio quality doesn’t matter as much when you compare the recording of a good performance to the recording of a much better performance.

The amount a good camera can tolerate bad lighting has significantly improved over time, as has the minimum quality of an average camera.

Not that long ago you needed a great camera and great lighting to get a great result, now there’s a lot more flexibility available. Decent camera + great lighting or decent lighting + great camera both work well enough for the general public not to notice anything wrong.

A lot depends on how you're viewing the content too. Lots of stuff that looks good on a tiny phone screen looks like trash on a monitor.

And forget about printing, not that anyone other than dedicated photographers do that these days.

I think people are using "lighting" two different ways in this conversation.

Assuming there are decent light levels to begin with, "lighting" means the play of light and shadow that makes your subject pop, that makes their face look like it has depth, then generally makes everything look attractive. This has nothing to do with your camera, and cameras have not gotten better at this, because cameras are irrelevant to it. When TV shows are lit well today, this is the lighting that's usually being talked about.

The other thing "lighting" means is "light that isn't too low". This was harsh studio lighting in the 1920's for example, and why even in the 1960's studio scenes couldn't be "naturally" lit -- and which was a major focus of lighting TV shows well in the 1960's, for example. But which we don't worry about anymore -- TV shows are generally shot at "real life" brightness levels today.

The larger point is that today, when we say that it's the lighting that matters for a shot more than the camera, we're usually referring to the first type I'm describing -- the artistic lighting. Cameras have not gotten any "better" at that. What has happened is that they've enabled shots at low lighting that weren't possible before, but that's only relevant in low-light conditions -- and you still need to distinguish between good/bad artistic lighting even when the light is low.

Light levels and “artistic Lighting” are linked through a camera’s dynamic range.

Harsh studio lighting wasn’t just about the total amount of light it was also attempting to compensate for limited dynamic ranges. Getting everything evenly lit was an exacting process which has simply become less demanding.

The artistic side of lighting is just as complex and relevant as it ever was. However, as sensors get closer to human capabilities setting things up gets closer to what you see is what you get, which is extremely helpful. There is still a disconnect which must be accounted for to get the best results, and plenty of new options to play with. But fewer gotchas mean decent lighting is generally fine.

I think what probably confuses people is that since everything was so dark they think that "wow the iPhone handles low light really well", but actually that only has to do with exposure. If you look at the behind the scenes shots they still had massive LED panels lighting the scenes.

Lighting is also over-emphasised, in my opinion. The unfortunate truth is that it's everything. Production design and talent are HUGELY important. If you have an amazing art department, costume design and beautiful people your camera and lighting team can be on autopilot and it will still look pretty great.

Grip is also huge for high production value camera movement — and you'll see on the BTS video Apple absolutely don't skimp here. Pretty funny putting a $1000 phone on a $200,000 (at least! I'm not a grip guy, but that's the region) crane.

I think the point here is not the effort it takes to make good lighting - but the cost. A normal person will not have 10x2000w ARRI panels. But they will look at this production and think that they will get the same result because hey it was shot on an iPhone.

Absolutely. I suppose what I was commenting on was a pattern I’ve observed that goes something like:

1. My videos don’t look good, it must be because I don’t have a good camera/lens 2. I have a good camera lens, but my videos still don’t look good, it must be because I don’t have good lights

And a lot of people just stop there because lighting is a lot more work and a lot less fun (for most people) than buying expensive cameras, but for those that do pursue lighting, there’s a third stage:

3. I’ve got a good camera, good lights AND I know how to use them AND STILL my video looks a bit underwhelming

That’s when you realise location, art, talent etc are massively important too.

Ie you could have a truck full of Arri lights and if you have bad production design and inappropriate talent it will still look bad.

True true :)

> Your producer may try to get you to recreate that beautiful performance in the studio, but audio quality doesn’t matter as much when you compare the recording of a good performance to the recording of a much better performance.

Nobody is going to keep your iphone recorded song in their playlist.

Is a laptop mic close enough?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathconsciousness#Composition...

Eheh, you have no idea what I keep in my playlists.

I've seen bands perform where the harmonica guy sounded like a feedback loop, the guitarists didn't agree if they had to play major or major chords and people still clapped.

However when you're not drinking and dancing you care more for the actual quality of what you're hearing.

>it's not the camera that makes the difference, it's the person operating it

Mostly yes, but the phone cameras are easier to operate (in a way to get really nice photos) than more traditional cameras. My mom had this exact remark about her iPhone (and her ability to take nice photos) on a recent vacation.

This is categorically not true. If it were true professional photographers wouldn't waste six figures on high-end equipment.

Not only there are visible differences - smoothness, sharpness, colour balance, the overall look - but some effects and looks are impossible without expensive tools. Especially in difficult light, or challenging shooting situations.

And then there's the workflow.

The difference is more that amateurs and prosumers never reach the point where the equipment limits their talent. Top professionals reach that point fairly quickly because they just can't do some of the things they want to do.

The iPhone is no different. It's a decent video camera and may be starting to edge against some of the mirrorless/SLR prosumer cams. But it doesn't have features that are standard on ARRI and RED.

You can make some videos with it, and if you have talent they'll be good. But you can't make all currently possible videos with it.

No-compromise professionals are going to understand the difference.

I hate this type of argument; it is very often nonsense. Sure, someone is not good because of its tools, but those enable him to be good it is not an either/or relation. A lot of the time, some skills are indissociable from the necessary tooling, and it does not matter how good you are if you do not get the tool to enable it.

I had this argument with a friend about darts. I recently started playing with him and he has a lot more experience than I do, thus he is quite a bit better than me no matter what darts we use. But after we broke some darts, I decided to look at what the pro uses and buy something similar. He said the same thing about skills not requiring a particular dart. Yet since we have had the new darts, we are both more consistent in our shots and hit the targets way more often, the consistency is extremely obvious considering how grouped the darts land compared to cheaper one. I did not become magically better than he is, he still wins more often than I do. However, with those darts I improved a lot more than he did and if the end goal is proficiency, it seems logical to use as close the "end game" tooling as is reasonable for training.

Sometimes people feel like others are trying to minimize their achievements, but this is not about that at all. The tools are a major part of the road to expertise and anyone pretending otherwise is lying and I would be very suspicious. It reads like: "yeah I achieved my skill with this high level, performant tool, but just use this much worse one, it will be fine." I feel like it is disingenuous and most of the time, people trying to prevent new competitions in their fields.

And this is exactly why Apple's marketing is extremely deceptive at best. Sure, if you are an accomplished videographer and understand all the limitations coming from working with such a tool, you will work around/with those limitations, because you already know. But if you are starting out or still an amateur the iPhone is a poor choice as it will make your work harder than it would be with a more specialized camera (that can be had for cheaper than a brand-new iPhone, that most people do not need...).

> The only point is that the iPhone is not a significant limiting factor on the quality of results you can achieve.

Which is a big deal.

Right, and I thought the line in the article:

> [before this] Apple was effectively saying “pro enough for you, but not for us.”

summed that up nicely

I honestly don't think it's a reasonable takeaway for anyone who is at all interested in creating highly produced video with their iPhone.

That isn't who this marketing is aimed at though. Apple are acutely aware that 'camera quality' is a key selling point for consumers. People want to point their phone at something and take a good looking photo. That isn't 'people interested in creating highly produced video'; it's people who want their selfies to look nice. By showing a professionally shot production where the camera is an iPhone and everything else is pro video production Apple make people believe their non-pro photos will be much higher quality than other people's photos.

The fact Apple released a behind the scenes video should tell you that they've thought about a scenario where someone makes a video with an iPhone to show it's not as good as Apple's marketing demonstrates. The behind the scenes video is Apple covering their ass because they know as well as we do that buying an iPhone isn't going to get you pro video quality footage.

If anything Apple's marketing makes me think that selfies on a Google or Samsung phone are probably better than an iPhone just because Google and Samsung don't seem to need to tell me "you can make this video with our phone! (but wait, not like that..)"

Well, Samsung did hire Ridley Scott to make a short movie using S23 Ultra.

> By showing a professionally shot production where the camera is an iPhone and everything else is pro video production Apple make people believe their non-pro photos will be much higher quality than other people's photos.

Which is true. The pictures from my phone are just as good as those taken with my semi-professional DSLR. The phone loses in some specific situations (typically low-light, small depth of field, and long-range) because it does not have the same glass and the sensor is smaller, but that’s about it.

I guarantee you that if you were to give a professional medium format camera to random people on the street, they would take much worse pictures than with their phones (assuming somewhat high-end devices).

I have worked in some moderate level video production and the iPhone is potentially a game changer. It significantly reduces the kit you need to produce a professional looking video.

This is an extreme use case, but what the iPhone really has the potential to replace are all of the videos being shot on DSLRs and Mirrorless cameras. It is getting closer and closer to these cameras and is significantly easier to use.

> If you have an iPhone you too can make such a video

You can though.

What it showed was that the real limitation to making high quality content is skill and knowledge. You can get away with just your iPhone, iPad and cheap lighting from AliExpress for 99% of the shots.

Having expensive equipment simply allows you to deliver that quality fast and at a consistent level. Which is what commercial clients demand.

Professional photography and videography gear has always only been about that though. It broadens the range of shots you can get and/or the efficiency of the process (and usually puts up with more abuse).

It helps, sometimes. There are plenty of shooters running around with elite gear and getting slightly above average images of the classic (read: cliche) sunset, etc.

Scarcity is the spark that ignites creativity.

Put another way, look how many shite films Hollywood makes, and they have top gear.

Great gear will never save a lack of creativity, lack of vision, etc.

Other than robustness, 'pro' gear mostly expands the range of parameters you can push and still get a decent shot. It's not going to give you an eye.

Elsewhere in thread it's correctly noted that in a lot of cases lighting is more important that cameras anyway. But similarly, you have to know how to set up - same applies though, the gear can't do the setup for you.

> look how many shite films Hollywood makes, and they have top gear.

You can't even judge the output of the gear by what Hollywood puts out. Maybe the gear does make a huge difference. For all we know every shot out of the camera is breathtaking, but it doesn't matter if by the time it gets to the screen they've barfed orange and teal all over it, darkened it to the hide bad CGI, and edited it to assault the viewer with a muddy blur of special effects and fast cutting.

It can. But sometimes the important thing is not the gear, but rather being in the right place and having the skill to frame a good composition or get good footage.

Yeah like while getting a good shot is obviously a skill, there are shots of, for example, wildlife, that I fully can't capture because it's just too far away and I don't have a zoom lens.

Gear matters for things like that.

Not completely. You could always make certain types of excellent creative works with cheap gear, but cheap gear would limit you to more lo-fi aesthetics. It also requires more careful attention to everything else from lighting to acoustics to work around deficiencies of the gear.

For example, cheaper camera gear would have worse low light sensitivity, meaning you’re either getting grainy images or you need extra lighting. As cameras improved, fewer compromises need to be made and you can get the result you want.

With infinite creativity and luck you can always get something get if you try long enough, but great gear really does open the door to more options and opportunities to catch a good shot.

Another good example is sports photography, where fast imaging is mandatory for capturing movement shots. With slower cameras your only option would be to catch slower, more stationary moments.

I’m not even remotely close to being a professional photographer or videographer, but I’ve used camera phones (including old iPhones) with amazingly poor performance in anything but the brightest light. Careful attention to lighting might have involved lighting scenes painfully brightly, which causes its own problems.

Modern phone cameras seem to perform at least as well as I remember early fancy digital cameras performing, and they really are good enough for a lot of purposes. (But they still can’t do a good job of blurring the background. I keep expecting ML advances to improve this, but even latest-generation iPhones produce pretty bad results IMO in portrait mode.)

“Broadens the range of shots”

We aren’t disagreeing. But it’s mostly at the fringe where you can’t do anything at all with meh gear.

The professional gear can also be too good. I remember when the first Hobbit film came out the picture was so crystal clear it was distracting - like a very high end BBC drama.

That wasn't the issue. The Hobbit was shot at 48 FPS in true 3-D. While it might have seemed "too clear," it was a truly remarkable movie experience that set a new standard of quality that we should get used to. It was higher-quality motion.

I hate the fake interpolated frame rates on recent TVs. But if we started legitimately shooting at 48 FPS, I think we'd get over the "video"-ness of it.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2023/10/behind-the-sce...

iPhone, knowledge, skill, another half million in fancy equipment, and you are good to go!

Seriously though, there was an astounding amount of cool gear in the behind the scenes. If it was just a guy shooting handheld iPhone using his skill and knowledge, that's one thing. It seems to be a different value proposition to take all the equipment, and crew, from a multi million dollar production company, and just swap the camera for an iPhone. It is extremely impressive quality demonstration, but not clearly accessible to the typical iPhone purchaser.

There is an astounding amount of cool gear. None of it is mandatory.

You will be surprised what a DJI gimbal, duct tape and house hold objects could accomplish.

The limiting factor is now very much creativity and passion.

I was just on a poorly planned shoot where the iPhone saved us. The camera we used was too big and heavy to actually get the camera movements we had planned. We had just gotten a new DJI phone gimbal to test and we ended up using it with the iPhone. This was on a green screen stage so we didn’t want character from the lens or a shallow depth of field. All the shots were within the focal range of the phone too. I’m guessing about 70% of the final shots were shot on the phone. And because it’s LOG and ProRes, the footage fits right into the pipeline. Now even though we shot on a phone, we didn’t turn off the lights or send the actors home so maybe that’s cheating…

Sure, a company milking its customer with a Pro laptop starting with 8GB of RAM to save at best 20$ per unit is willing to pay up to a million dollar of gear "just because". No no no, totally unnecessary. Apple apologists should really listen to themselves, like seriously.

My takeaway from the article was that most of that gear either wasn't necessary or was only necessary because of Apple's specific self-imposed production requirements. And also due to the fact that they just hired a production team like they always do for these things, but this time they had them slap the iphone into the usual equipment in place of their regular camera.

>The other is "If you (edit: just) have an iPhone you too can make such a video". Which is what anyone who isn't affiliated with the film industry (aka 99% of the population) might think

no, 99% of the population doesn't watch iphone launch events, and doesn't care whether it was shot on iPhone or not. they have literally no opinion about this. of the 1% who cares that it was shot on iPhone, i'd guess roughly 95% understand that a professional photo shoot requires more than a camera, and the 5% who didn't saw the behind the scenes video. nobody was mislead into thinking that Tim Cook's assistant just pulled their phone out of their pocket and shot the launch video.

the whole discussion around this video being shot on iPhone seems to have imagined a huge class of people who both care about this, and are dumb. presumably for the sole purpose of feeling smug about having the special insight of knowing the things communicated by the behind the scenes video that apple published and heavily promoted. those people you're imagining might have been misled by this do not exist.

I think a better way to express this--that captures both perspectives--is that, if you have an iPhone, it's not your camera that's holding you back.

Not yet getting professional results? It's your skill level, it's your lights, it's your other gear, it's your talent, it's your script, etc. Not your camera.

I agree on both points.

From a still photos perspective, unless you're using very wide or very long lenses, and/or otherwise have relatively specific requirements that require burst shooting/a viewfinder/etc. phones can handle a lot. No-brainer ISO range is good enough for most things these days--and would have been unthinkable in the film era.

I increasingly think about whether I really need anything other than my phone traveling even given I have a couple of good cameras and a lot of glass. I'll still bring (mostly my mirrorless) camera if I'm doing a relatively photogenic "exotic" trip but often I don't.

Same. I'll often use my iPhone for general shots and leave a zoom on my z5 for other shots.

When I was a kid just having a camera at all was a big deal. Now, every person has a great camera in their pocket almost 100% of the time. It's pretty amazing to be honest.

> "Shot on iPhone" hence has 2 perspectives.

Apple's perspective is that they want to sell a lot of iPhones. They don't care what 1% who have access to professional gear do. There are a huge number of young people who can afford iPhones and can't afford much additional gear, and want to be "creators". They'll do all the learning and work they have to do.

This will sell more iPhones, whether it makes better content or not (it will because more people trying, but that's not Apple's business)

> "If you just have an iPhone you too can make such a video"

I do not think that most people before thought that if they got a professional camera they could just start shooting professional movies.

It’s broader than that, but simpler: it’s just what you can get out of a platform VS what you can get out of a platform under controlled conditions.

It is no different than Intel or AMD benchmarking their chips, car companies and their mpg, electric cars and their ranges, etc.

This is much ado about nothing. It’s just journalistic framing that has caused this discussion.

If this is PR, which it’s likely not, it’s brilliant.

I thought that everything apple does is PR (well mostly, everything else is a secret)

This is why this whole thing felt like a loss for Apple. They're 100% right, it was shot on an iPhone, but they also had 99% of the population believing something which seemed really cool, and then turned out to "appear" misleading.

Maybe this whole stunt was aimed at the 1%, and if so good for them, they succeeded. From a branding and PR perspective, I wouldn't be happy if that was how my company was perceived to the general public.

There have been people shooting terrific pictures and great movies on phones for years now. Nobody is under the illusion that your holiday pictures will be great as well just because you used the same camera phone as a famous hip videographer.

It does not appear misleading unless you really want it to.

> Nobody is under the illusion that your holiday pictures will be great as well just because you used the same camera phone as a famous hip videographer.

Unfortunately (fortunately?) that kind of marketing does work though. Going slightly tangential but collaborations with Leica/Zeiss etc often are major marketing points in phone sales.

My vague understanding is those are often real, ie Leica/Zeiss actually do collaborate on lenses, coatings and camera tuning.

And while they do say the camera isn't the most important thing for a photo, one reason for that is the lens is more important :)

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