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If I was a prosumer/hobbyist video equipment company, I'd be terrified about what Apple does next. They already have significant penetration into the editing ma

If I was a prosumer/hobbyist video equipment company, I'd be terrified about what Apple does next. They already have significant penetration into the editing market (both with Final Cut, and codec design), they control a number of the common codecs, and they have _millions_ of devices in the field along with substantial manufacturing capability. The cinema end aren't in trouble yet IMO, but the rest should be concerned...

mrtksn 3y ago
Well, Apple seems very cozy with blackmagic design but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to be sherlocked. Apple already has offerings in all these categories, it’s just that the markets are different and will stay different some time more because of workflows and laws of nature but the laws of nature don’t seem as safe anymore. Currently, the best editing software for social media appears to be CapCut as its ease of use for the power it provides is miles ahead of anything else.
novok 3y ago
The market for 'actual' pro & prosumer cameras and such is pretty tiny. I think they'll be pretty safe for quite a long time. But they have pro video editing features! Yes, but it's a subfeature of their general platform, so they can 'count that low' for a hardware feature like that, that will also be useful for their entire userbase since everyone takes videos with their hardware and watches video on their devices anyway.
sbierwagen 3y ago
Cell phones already killed standalone cameras: https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/Camera-Sales-Decline.png https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/wp-content/uploads/sit... This is just the mop-up operation. The only products left are going to be super-telephotos for live sports (sales: a hundred a year, if that?) and 4K+ IMAX digital cine cameras.
- quenix 3y ago
  Looks like they killed cameras with built-in lenses. Cameras with interchangeable lesnes, which would've been used by the pros, have kept their market share identical if not grown a bit.
- ClikeX 3y ago
  They killed consumer point and shoots, not professional interchangeable lens cameras.
- MarkMarine 3y ago
  For taking photos and sharing them in the digital only space, sure I’ll buy that for the regular consumer. Making prints will expose all the small sensor flaws that exist quite quickly. I know it gets better every year but I used my phone camera (14 pro) to capture a few important shots that I would do anything to go back and had on a full frame sensor or film for.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    I hate pixel peeping on phone photos. Have a 13 Pro Max and it has a really weird mushy postprocessed look. I always bring an oldschool Nikon DSLR with me when I care about getting some nice shots.
    - mwest217 3y ago
      Using a third party app and capturing native raw photos helps avoid that mushy post processed look. It trades it off for more noise, but the trade off is worth it imo. Halide is my app of choice but there are a number of good ones.
- canbus 3y ago
  maybe for the average consumer. but how many professional photographers do you see using an iPhone? sensor size matters for low-light stuff too. sure, an iPhone can do a pretty good job at taking several pictures over say a 2s. exposure, but there _will_ be artifacts in the shot as there isn't physically enough light to form a legible image regardless of post-processing. this is just one of many reasons why digital cameras are NOT at the brink of collapse yet.
drra 3y ago
Cinema is safe from the optics point of view as achieving some of the effects of large sensor + large lens is impossible with a phone size camera. But Apple has it cracked and they could easily crush that market. They have a great sensor with enough resolution per inch, great dynamic range, ability to produce lenses with super low defects and have enough processing power. Sensor wise ~100 megapixels should be enough to replicate fine grain of a good movie film and iPhone 15 sensor's dynamic range of 12-14 stops is on par with film already.
- kuschku 3y ago
  Apple doesn't build sensors. Sony builds the sensors for Apple. https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1602516736145858561 https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1602516736145858561 And it turns out, Sony already has significantly better sensors in their cinema cameras than what they sell to Apple, which is why almost half of Oscar and Emmy nominations are filmed on Sony Venice. Even the low end of their camera line is extremely capable, e.g. the FX3 which shot The Creator. Apple is far away from actually competing in that market.
  - asimpletune 3y ago
    Just wanted to clarify for others that FX3 is the low end of their cinema line, not their camera line.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  You're contradicting yourself : can they compete with large sensors + big lenses or not ?
m463 3y ago
I think what is terrifying is that they're better enough to kill the details. Sort of a contrived example... you're a pro and let's say you NEED a headphone jack, but apple just killed headphone jacks. But more indirectly, they killed the lower volume, higher margin folks with alternatives that offer a headphone jack, and maybe even XLR headphones and microphones. An analogy might be tesla giving you a 90% better car experience, except they have killed off the dashboard. (now they've killed control stalks like PRND and turn signals)
- pitkali 3y ago
  I don't know. If I were a pro like that, I would just have a dongle for that headphone jack. It would probably also have a better DAC than iPhones ever had.
dist-epoch 3y ago
A big factor in buying a "pro" camera is controls. It's really difficult changing the focus in a controlled way while shooting with a phone. While in theory you can imagine Apple giving you API control for that and hooking it with an external focus pulling device, it's still a sub-optimal solution.
crazygringo 3y ago
Cell phones already killed compact point-and-shoots with their small lenses. But DSLR's with their large lenses aren't going anywhere, because physics. If you want to capture high-quality footage under low light conditions, or work with a variety of lenses, the tiny aperture on a phone is never going to be enough.
- positus 3y ago
  The RICOH GRIII/GRIIIx is still alive and kickin'. Really nice sensor, super sharp lens, and small enough to fit into a pocket. I don't really use my iPhone camera anymore.
  - Samin100 3y ago
    Agreed. I keep my iPhone in my right pocket and my Ricoh GRIIIx in my left pocket whenever I go out. It’s such a fantastic camera given its size, especially with the APSC sensor in such a compact body. I also have a Sony A7C but I haven’t used it since getting the Ricoh. Being pocketable is a massive factor in how much I use a camera.
tambourine_man 3y ago
They owned the editing market with Final Cut and completely dropped the ball with Final Cut X. To the point they had to start selling the old version back. Then Premiere came back from the ashes and took the throne. One of the most glaring mistakes Apple did to its Pro market. And they did quite a few.
- steve1977 3y ago
  I think FCP is still quite popular in the „YouTuber“ market and it seems Apple also targets their marketing a bit more towards it.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    It is. It’s just that it’s a fraction of what it used to be. They grabbed most of AVID’s and Premiere’s share. And then Final Cut X happened, or iMovie Pro, as some depreciatively called it
btown 3y ago
Setting aside the existing pro video pipeline... it's for this reason that if I were Meta, I'd be terrified about what Apple does next, from the perspective of photorealistic capture for VR/AR applications. Even if the next-gen Oculus had parity with Apple Vision Pro in how vividly they could display VR/AR content - and I doubt this is the case - only Apple (perhaps among any company in the world) can mirror that with a battle-tested supply pipeline for creating pro-level video capture equipment and for integrating those sensors into consumer devices at scale. While I'd leave the branding to better minds than my own, I'm bullish about Apple's ability to make an "iPad Vision Pro" that has two cameras at eye distance apart as well as laser rangefinding. That would allow for binocular Apple Log capture, and with the advent of Gaussian splatting for point cloud rendering, and increasingly better generative AI for inferring colors/textures of occluded points in the point cloud, you could have professionally color-graded interactive scenes. All that's missing is better ergonomics for this workflow in DaVinci Resolve etc., and one imagines Apple's war chest could go a long way towards incentivizing this. Apple products will be where high-quality VR content is created, proofed, and consumed. They're not rushing because nobody else has a hope of being close.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > Apple products will be where high-quality VR content is created, proofed, and consumed Eh... I think this is a bit like claiming "Apple hardware will be where high-quality video games are created, proofed and consumed" in the 90s. You'd be right given the circumstantial evidence, but the industry doesn't really want to play ball. Besides AppleTV and Apple Arcade, I don't think Apple has a huge constituent of VR developers the same way they did for Apps. Simply building the infrastructure won't be enough. And plus, I don't think your argument rules out a world where Vision Pro is used for recording and Quests are used for content consumption. Unless Apple intends to reinvent the wheel again for 3D video, nothing should stop it from being playable (or at least portable) on other platforms. For most people, the $3,000 price difference will probably not be worth the recording capabilities (especially if they already own an iPhone). Anything could happen, I guess. Even if you're entirely right though, I don't think Content Creation will be the killer app you think it is. Games and video moves millions of units; productivity and capture are both unproven features poised to reprise Hololens' failure.
starky 3y ago
I don't see this as a high risk. Rather adding log just increases the choices for different types of filmmaking and adding it to the professional workflow. The iPhone hasn't killed the professional stills camera market, instead many photographers have implemented it as a supplemental tool into their work where a larger camera is not suitable. At the end of the day, a professional camera with good glass and a larger sensor gives you much more control of an artistic vision, and better performance in challenging imaging conditions. I've never seen a cellphone camera that gets anywhere near the image quality I can get from my mirrorless camera in still images. This is likely to be even more apparent in video production due to how the cameras are used.

mrtksn 3y ago

Well, Apple seems very cozy with blackmagic design but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to be sherlocked. Apple already has offerings in all these categories, it’s just that the markets are different and will stay different some time more because of workflows and laws of nature but the laws of nature don’t seem as safe anymore. Currently, the best editing software for social media appears to be CapCut as its ease of use for the power it provides is miles ahead of anything else.

novok 3y ago

The market for 'actual' pro & prosumer cameras and such is pretty tiny. I think they'll be pretty safe for quite a long time. But they have pro video editing features! Yes, but it's a subfeature of their general platform, so they can 'count that low' for a hardware feature like that, that will also be useful for their entire userbase since everyone takes videos with their hardware and watches video on their devices anyway.

sbierwagen 3y ago

Cell phones already killed standalone cameras: https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/03/Camera-Sales-Decline.png https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/wp-content/uploads/sit... This is just the mop-up operation. The only products left are going to be super-telephotos for live sports (sales: a hundred a year, if that?) and 4K+ IMAX digital cine cameras.

quenix 3y ago
Looks like they killed cameras with built-in lenses. Cameras with interchangeable lesnes, which would've been used by the pros, have kept their market share identical if not grown a bit.
ClikeX 3y ago
They killed consumer point and shoots, not professional interchangeable lens cameras.
MarkMarine 3y ago
For taking photos and sharing them in the digital only space, sure I’ll buy that for the regular consumer. Making prints will expose all the small sensor flaws that exist quite quickly. I know it gets better every year but I used my phone camera (14 pro) to capture a few important shots that I would do anything to go back and had on a full frame sensor or film for.
- foobarian 3y ago
  I hate pixel peeping on phone photos. Have a 13 Pro Max and it has a really weird mushy postprocessed look. I always bring an oldschool Nikon DSLR with me when I care about getting some nice shots.
  - mwest217 3y ago
    Using a third party app and capturing native raw photos helps avoid that mushy post processed look. It trades it off for more noise, but the trade off is worth it imo. Halide is my app of choice but there are a number of good ones.
canbus 3y ago
maybe for the average consumer. but how many professional photographers do you see using an iPhone? sensor size matters for low-light stuff too. sure, an iPhone can do a pretty good job at taking several pictures over say a 2s. exposure, but there _will_ be artifacts in the shot as there isn't physically enough light to form a legible image regardless of post-processing. this is just one of many reasons why digital cameras are NOT at the brink of collapse yet.

drra 3y ago

Cinema is safe from the optics point of view as achieving some of the effects of large sensor + large lens is impossible with a phone size camera. But Apple has it cracked and they could easily crush that market. They have a great sensor with enough resolution per inch, great dynamic range, ability to produce lenses with super low defects and have enough processing power. Sensor wise ~100 megapixels should be enough to replicate fine grain of a good movie film and iPhone 15 sensor's dynamic range of 12-14 stops is on par with film already.

kuschku 3y ago
Apple doesn't build sensors. Sony builds the sensors for Apple. https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1602516736145858561 https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1602516736145858561 And it turns out, Sony already has significantly better sensors in their cinema cameras than what they sell to Apple, which is why almost half of Oscar and Emmy nominations are filmed on Sony Venice. Even the low end of their camera line is extremely capable, e.g. the FX3 which shot The Creator. Apple is far away from actually competing in that market.
- asimpletune 3y ago
  Just wanted to clarify for others that FX3 is the low end of their cinema line, not their camera line.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
You're contradicting yourself : can they compete with large sensors + big lenses or not ?

m463 3y ago

I think what is terrifying is that they're better enough to kill the details. Sort of a contrived example... you're a pro and let's say you NEED a headphone jack, but apple just killed headphone jacks. But more indirectly, they killed the lower volume, higher margin folks with alternatives that offer a headphone jack, and maybe even XLR headphones and microphones. An analogy might be tesla giving you a 90% better car experience, except they have killed off the dashboard. (now they've killed control stalks like PRND and turn signals)

pitkali 3y ago
I don't know. If I were a pro like that, I would just have a dongle for that headphone jack. It would probably also have a better DAC than iPhones ever had.

dist-epoch 3y ago

A big factor in buying a "pro" camera is controls. It's really difficult changing the focus in a controlled way while shooting with a phone. While in theory you can imagine Apple giving you API control for that and hooking it with an external focus pulling device, it's still a sub-optimal solution.

crazygringo 3y ago

Cell phones already killed compact point-and-shoots with their small lenses. But DSLR's with their large lenses aren't going anywhere, because physics. If you want to capture high-quality footage under low light conditions, or work with a variety of lenses, the tiny aperture on a phone is never going to be enough.

positus 3y ago
The RICOH GRIII/GRIIIx is still alive and kickin'. Really nice sensor, super sharp lens, and small enough to fit into a pocket. I don't really use my iPhone camera anymore.
- Samin100 3y ago
  Agreed. I keep my iPhone in my right pocket and my Ricoh GRIIIx in my left pocket whenever I go out. It’s such a fantastic camera given its size, especially with the APSC sensor in such a compact body. I also have a Sony A7C but I haven’t used it since getting the Ricoh. Being pocketable is a massive factor in how much I use a camera.

tambourine_man 3y ago

They owned the editing market with Final Cut and completely dropped the ball with Final Cut X. To the point they had to start selling the old version back. Then Premiere came back from the ashes and took the throne. One of the most glaring mistakes Apple did to its Pro market. And they did quite a few.

steve1977 3y ago
I think FCP is still quite popular in the „YouTuber“ market and it seems Apple also targets their marketing a bit more towards it.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  It is. It’s just that it’s a fraction of what it used to be. They grabbed most of AVID’s and Premiere’s share. And then Final Cut X happened, or iMovie Pro, as some depreciatively called it

btown 3y ago

Setting aside the existing pro video pipeline... it's for this reason that if I were Meta, I'd be terrified about what Apple does next, from the perspective of photorealistic capture for VR/AR applications. Even if the next-gen Oculus had parity with Apple Vision Pro in how vividly they could display VR/AR content - and I doubt this is the case - only Apple (perhaps among any company in the world) can mirror that with a battle-tested supply pipeline for creating pro-level video capture equipment and for integrating those sensors into consumer devices at scale. While I'd leave the branding to better minds than my own, I'm bullish about Apple's ability to make an "iPad Vision Pro" that has two cameras at eye distance apart as well as laser rangefinding. That would allow for binocular Apple Log capture, and with the advent of Gaussian splatting for point cloud rendering, and increasingly better generative AI for inferring colors/textures of occluded points in the point cloud, you could have professionally color-graded interactive scenes. All that's missing is better ergonomics for this workflow in DaVinci Resolve etc., and one imagines Apple's war chest could go a long way towards incentivizing this. Apple products will be where high-quality VR content is created, proofed, and consumed. They're not rushing because nobody else has a hope of being close.

smoldesu 3y ago
> Apple products will be where high-quality VR content is created, proofed, and consumed Eh... I think this is a bit like claiming "Apple hardware will be where high-quality video games are created, proofed and consumed" in the 90s. You'd be right given the circumstantial evidence, but the industry doesn't really want to play ball. Besides AppleTV and Apple Arcade, I don't think Apple has a huge constituent of VR developers the same way they did for Apps. Simply building the infrastructure won't be enough. And plus, I don't think your argument rules out a world where Vision Pro is used for recording and Quests are used for content consumption. Unless Apple intends to reinvent the wheel again for 3D video, nothing should stop it from being playable (or at least portable) on other platforms. For most people, the $3,000 price difference will probably not be worth the recording capabilities (especially if they already own an iPhone). Anything could happen, I guess. Even if you're entirely right though, I don't think Content Creation will be the killer app you think it is. Games and video moves millions of units; productivity and capture are both unproven features poised to reprise Hololens' failure.

starky 3y ago

I don't see this as a high risk. Rather adding log just increases the choices for different types of filmmaking and adding it to the professional workflow. The iPhone hasn't killed the professional stills camera market, instead many photographers have implemented it as a supplemental tool into their work where a larger camera is not suitable. At the end of the day, a professional camera with good glass and a larger sensor gives you much more control of an artistic vision, and better performance in challenging imaging conditions. I've never seen a cellphone camera that gets anywhere near the image quality I can get from my mirrorless camera in still images. This is likely to be even more apparent in video production due to how the cameras are used.