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.
A Blackmagic Pocket Cinema starter bundle comes close, would be under 1500 but over 1000 USD. Gives you BRAW or ProRes, both log. Infinite more control over the captures, huge ecosystem of (professional) tooling and equipment that is compatible with it.
That's already way more than you need to beat the iPhone. The iPhone can't even capture 4k 60fps ProRes on device - you need to connect an external recording device to use that.
Also note that, according to its datasheet, the iPhone cannot capture video on its tiny 48MP sensor at that resolution at all - just 4k.
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.
Yes the lights are very important. Lighting is more than just about “how much light there is”.
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.
> If the answer is yes, then the feat is still an important one.
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.
Explaining that semi-obscure reference: Barry Lyndon is a Kubrick film that famously has shots lit by only candlelight. This was accomplished by using extremely ”fast” lenses created by NASA for (I believe) the Apollo missions.
> 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.
Maybe I should have written the question better, since I know you would still need lights.
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.
I think you could shoot Barry Lyndon’s candle light scenes on iPhone just fine. The lens was custom made ƒ/0.7 because the film was shot at ISO 100, IIRC.
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.
The answer is no, and that's exactly what "The Creator" showed. High end cameras today are good enough that you can shoot entire blockbusters with only a single light or even with only available light.
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.
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.
> 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.
It's clear to me, perhaps because I don't know enough about it to appreciate why I might be wrong. When it comes to cameras, I'm just a regular Joe who points my phone at stuff and then it shows up in Photos. More camera == more better, right?
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.
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.
