How We Got iPhone 15 to Look Like an 8K Cinema Camera
What is a cinema camera?
In terms of specifications, most professionals shoot ProRes 4K in 10bit log to an SSD. Since iPhone 15 now now has those specs, I wonder how far the iPhone 15 can go simply treating it like any other ProRes 10bit cinema camera? With the right talent, the right equipment, and the right software, we think we can inch smartphones a little closer to the cinematic arena.
If you want to be a filmmaker, shooting a movie on an iPhone should not be your end goal – but if a smartphone is all you have access to, it’s a great place to start. One of the best aspects of democratization is that it enables individuals who lack resources to access higher-quality tools.
In this episode, we compare the iPhone 15 cinema mode to the RED Monstro by rigging out the iPhone as a cinema camera and using an A.I. post-production pipeline to get the image looking as close as possible (hint: you might be more impressed than you’d like to be by the results.)
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Cranky old man comment: This was fun to watch and kind of amusing; it’s the same problem I saw with people having to add a whole science project’s worth of hardware to the early DSLR’s to get to the same place they would have, had they just rented a real camcorder. The iPhone is amazing, making stuff with it is amazing. I plan on using it for this too. But I think the most important part of working with the thing is that you’re leaving behind all the external hardware, as much as possible, so you can put that iPhone into scenes you couldn’t afford to do before.
Adding all these external bits to the phone raises the cost and complexity of doing the shot, and makes it impractical for the everyman/everyperson. And 90 percent of your expense and effort is spent chasing the extra ten percent of capability. I kept wondering who this exercise was for, because while it’s an interesting intellectual challenge to gear-up the phone, a producer or cinematographer working on a commercial isn’t going to build such a rig to imitate the RED; they are going to go rent the actual RED for the same or less money, and go make the shoot. Same for a movie maker with any kind of functional budget. I think a proper strategy to exploit the phone is to concentrate on best lighting practices, proper grip gear and external power and memory to support the phone, but beyond that, I think it’s useless to chase more and more accessories. Accept and understand what the camera CAN do, and just construct your shots and visual design to work with the wider depth of field the phone sensors give you. Orson Welles celebrated long DOF scenes and staged his action and scenery to take advantage of them by drawing the eye with movement, color, light, positioning in the frame, not just racking the focus. I think driving the eye just by throwing the focus around the frame is actually kind of overdone these days, the way the “shakeycam” style quickly became a cliche’ in the 80’s. When you’re shooting on a phone, because of that wider depth of focus, you should think more of stage acting than screen acting, and lean into both the advantages of the phone as well as its limitations. Shoehorning the phone’s abilities into the shape of a cinema camera workflow IMO is kinda missing the point.
Amen.