Apple’s “Let Loose” iPad event was shot on iPhone with Panavision lenses
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Don't be rude to the audience that is coming to the article, either. It is specifically engaging with people that will have these interests.
It's like if I feed you a six-course gourmet meal and tell you "I made it on a camping stove", when in fact the camping stove was just used to keep one of the sauces warm while everything else was made in a professional kitchen. That's what is happening here; there are some shots that the iPhone is physically incapable of making, so they used something that is capable of it and filmed that on the iPhone.
"Shot on iPhone" is implicitly promising that you can make what you're seeing if you have an iPhone. NOT that you could make it if you have an iPhone plus some additional equipment that is capable of making those shots, that nobody would even imagine using. For the most part, none of us even knew such a thing existed, although it's not hard to imagine theoretically.
"Shot on Sony A7iv", on the other hand, is pretty obvious to anyone at all familiar with photography that it is only telling you what camera body was used. In fact, people with any level of familiarity would respond with "ok, what's your point?" because the model of camera body is a relatively small detail if you're trying to describe what you used to make an image. What lens, exposure, postprocessing, etc? It's like admiring someone's work in a gallery and asking "what did you use to make this landscape scene?" and getting back "paint."
Not really. A very cinematic look is fairly achievable on any recent DSLR with a pretty run-of-the-mill 'holy trinity' set of lenses—14-24 ƒ/2.8, 24-70mm ƒ/2.8, 70-200mm ƒ/2.8—and a cloudy day.
Of course, each of these lenses are still a couple thousand each (less so if bought used), but they're workhorses and nearly every semi-pro photographer probably has at least one. I own a 70-200 ƒ/2.8 myself.
But compared to real cine gear, they're about an order of magnitude less costly.
How close to OOC is the end result? What processing was done in Apple software?
It appears the post-processing was some combo of Mac and iPad... was that Final Cut, or Adobe, or something not readily available to consumers?
What I'd love to see is a dual video - one done with Panavision rig and whatever workflow Apple's media team uses. And a second that's the same scenes, but shot with only an iPhone and the only post-processing is in Apple's consumer software ecosystem. Zooming with the cameraman's feet, etc.
Edit: because it apparently needs explaining: "that rig is so big yet comes with so many limitations that it's foolish to not just use any normal camera body"
Yes other rigs might make more sense, but that’s not the point. The point is that they’re putting their money where their mouth is, and proving that it’s capable enough.
Factually, it is shot on an iPhone. This is no more a lie than when a film says it’s shot on an Arri or if a Sony commercial says it’s shot on an FX3.
None of the results are possible without the rest of the equation.
That's so disingenuous. The iPhone has a lens, and no one expects to put another lens on it. In fact, I'd wager a large amount that >99.9% of consumers have never even considered that it's possible. Whereas 100% of FX3 customers expect to use a lens.
I could probably make a pretty sweet setup to record a Netflix movie in awesome quality on my iPhone camera and there would be the perfect depth-of-field that comes with the professional gear that Netflix uses. And it would be factually shot on an iPhone.
It’s a professional shoot. End of story. It’s factual that it’s shot on an iPhone. If you replaced it with a full frame body, you’d still not achieve this.
If your entire point is that a customer might buy the device and think they can achieve the same results, then why does that not extend to anything else?
I see apple's point being that an iPhone can compete with standalone camera bodies of today if you put a good lens on them. Something that was not true 10 years ago for phones, and only slightly older than that for any camera.
- Dynamic range - Colour science - Video output (as in, what codec is actually worked on in the editing room)
The idea that even a higher-end phone can put out ~12 stops of dynamic range while outputting ProRes with a log colour profile is notable, no matter how much work a Panavision lens is doing. It makes editing with industry-standard tools and getting a product comparable to what you'd get with dedicated photo/video equipment easier.
When you buy an iPhone for photography and video, you're buying the sensor, lenses, shutter, focusing system, and onboard image processing in a single package. Changing that package by using an aerial image from a different lens is a material change in the system because whole chunks of the iPhone image system are no longer doing the work.
Theres been a ton of press about this, because, yeah, it is hella rare. And yeah usually there's some dude pulling focus on a $20k+ monitor (the brightness these things need to work in even shaded daylight is absurd).
I think it's worth assessing what impacts the look and feel versus what is for production sake; there's a lot of ways to spend more but more to help production than to affect look. A talented camera operator probably could hold focus themselves on many scenes without the focus operator (especially with modern autofocus) and get similar output. But if you're making a $100m+ movie, heck yeah you rent gear & hire the focus puller, way less risk (although the autofocus probably is more precise & reliable in many ways now!), way less need to make sure you pick the right expert operator. Ditto for a lot of this stuff; just rent the most badass stabilizers and camera mounts, for that little extra edge of stability. Having good/expensive synced time-codes, having better position tracking; they speed production, not necessarily super improve it's output.
It's pretty awesome seeing the Netflix approved pipelines keep getting more in reach. There's really good options now. Even a $1000 lens can be super impressive. There's really good budget cine lens sets now. But yeah the rest of production stuff is never cheap. Lighting is the key thing that keeps coming to mind for me, where light budget can easily get to camera budget and then some, and boy does that make a huge difference; improve the output of the scene that your camera is set to input.
Assessing by weight seems like a pretty obvious-ish way to assess.
We could also do by volume? That would probably be even worse on iPhone's claim; I feel like phones are pretty dense? Lenses certainly can be, filled with heavy glass, but now a days there's also a big drive to make lenses lighter; reviews these days often have people surprised how relatively lightweight even a sizable lens is. It'd be fun to have total volume as a standard consumer spec item, so we could calculate average density.
Regardless of what you are thinking, the "not a full frame sensor" in the phone is kind of the point. As well as all of the "AI" processing done to the photons captured by whatever piece of glass is in front of it. It's this processing that makes the phone they are showcasing different than an "modern FF body" that you are suggesting.
You've clearly missed the point
The iPhone in this use case has multiple limitations that make no sense in the use case where it is a glorified sensor.
You can't swap the memory out, the memory is limited to begin with, you can't use attachments like monitors and other gear, etc.
If you're going to end up renting a huge professional rig to attach a sensor to it to get the same results as a typical FF or even APS-C camera, you've lost the message.
In other words, "that rig is so big yet comes with so many limitations that it's foolish to not just use any normal camera body"
Today, what is a normal camera body? BlackMagic's cinema cameras are not much larger than an iPhone Pro Max Ultra+ model. I have seen the BMD 16mm format camera with giant Angénieux lenses attached to them. The camera is barely noticeable. Not really sure what you're point about the camera size is, and why you're so focused on it. The fact that a small device like a phone can create the clean log ProRes file is the point.
iPhone has a lot of things that other bodies won't have. A chip powerful enough to do on-device editing, a top-tier calibrated OLED screen with 1600 nits HDR brightness, an extensive suite of apps, on-board AI, etc etc.
I think it's really cool to see these devices become even more capable.
- can afford the rig showcased here
- use an iphone to shoot professional videos
- edit their videos in a mobile device
is empty
For that matter, does Apple still not offer a way to get regular RAW files from your phone, or are we still stuck in proprietary candyland?
https://petapixel.com/2020/12/21/understanding-apple-proraw/
If yes, than you are correct to point out the difference. If no, than the way it was phrased was not that wrong, after all. Using the iPhone did make a difference.
The main difference is nobody's running massive marketing campaigns for "Shot on Huawei" or "Shot on Pixel"
The lenses are the most relevant part of a camera. Outside of that, the next most relevant part of the iPhone camera is software. (And I'm sure there's post-processing on that video too.)
We say movies are "shot on iMax" or "shot in 70mm" not "shot on Carl Zeiss."
>Feel free to re-read this: What Does and Doesn't Matter about Apple Shooting their October Event on iPhone 15 Pro Max — but in short, the fact that Apple can drop an iPhone into an otherwise-unaltered professional film production and match the look of their previous videos without anyone even noticing is meaningful.
This reminds a bit of the stuff last year when the Halloween was shot on iPhone.
“They cheated! They used cranes and dollies and light boxes and microphones and…”
No one complains something wasn’t “shot on a RED camera” because of that stuff. It’s just standard fare for professional work.
The iPhone is acting like a camera body. It happens to have an integrated lens they’re using with the Pannavision, but otherwise it’s being used much like they’d use another camera body.
If they shot it with RED and a similar lens for those shots and said "shot with RED camera" would that be considered faking it?
Phones, on the other hand, have long not been considered equal to dedicated camera hardware. Apple would like to change that perception, so they hitch the dedicated fancy hardware to their phone and say "look how good our phone is," without properly calling attention to the fact that it doesn't look the same without the fancy hardware they are suggesting you shouldn't need to use.
Further, the average person would see "shot on iPhone" and think "they held up an iPhone and recorded this," not "they hooked the iPhone up to professional-grade equipment and recorded this."
The language is deliberately misleading, and the efforts to insist that it somehow isn't just because it is technically true are deeply unconvincing.
They did not say "look how good our phone is" for those shots or suggest they were made just by holding the phone up. That's an absurd injection. It's weird to call something deliberately misleading when you're the one saying it.
It's like saying they're not allowed to use a tripod, a dolly, any lights, do any color grading, etc. without it being called fake. It's literally just how you do photography.
It’s getting a lot of criticism, but I don’t see this as being all that different than the myriad of other things they used: From expensive lighting to special mounts, nothing about this was like handheld shooting and we knew that from the start. This add on was just one of many.
There are adapters where the integrated lens is focused on a flat disk of ground glass that's vibrated to move the grain around. The principal lens then projects an image onto the ground glass for the camera to record. This technique was used way back with camcorders and such to get a full frame effect on the cheap, before the DSLR video phenomenon happened.
While it's unclear if Panavision's implementation uses vibrating ground glass, the fundamentals will be the same: the iPhone is recording an image that's been projected onto an external surface.
Incidentally, I think an advert for one of those camcorders back in the day that used this technique would be decidedly judged as deceptive!
Obviously, Apple dogfooding with their own cameras is good PR, but does anyone else actually shoot like this for professional work? Specifically the combination of extensive professional rigging, lights, lenses etc and iPhones/iPads.
It just seems like once you're at this level, surely there's better digital cameras to use?
But they do seem to put a lot of technical effort into supporting things like ProRes video and high data streaming rates, so I guess someone must be doing it?
I wonder why it didn't say Edited on Mac and iPad with Final Cut Pro"...
Were they might’ve just said they let the people use whatever they normally used instead even if that was a competitors product.
I’m not sure there are other video editing things on the iPad that a professional would use are there?
I mean it's absolutely possible of course that they have used Final Cut. But then it would be kinda funny if they didn't highlight that, in a video that was more or less specifically about iPad Pro and also had a section about Final Cut on iPad.
> I thought they said they used Final Cut Pro when they released a making of video for the Halloween event.
If you mean this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3dbG9pAi8I
then what you see for editing is Adobe Premier and what you see for color grading is Davinci Resolve.