7 ms·

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 tryin

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.

threeseed 3y ago
> 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.
- ska 3y ago
  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).
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    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.
    - ska 3y ago
      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.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      > 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.
  - whyenot 3y ago
    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.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    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.
  - Aurornis 3y ago
    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.
    - amluto 3y ago
      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.)
    - ska 3y ago
      “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.
  - tjmc 3y ago
    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.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      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.
- WillPostForFood 3y ago
  https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2023/10/behind-the-scenes-at-scary-fast-apples-keynote-event-shot-on-iphone/article/Apple-Shot-on-iPhone-customized-SpaceCam-rig_big.jpg.large.jpg 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.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    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.
    - seec 3y ago
      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.
    - kbf 3y ago
      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…
ghaff 3y ago
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.
- matwood 3y ago
  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.
willsmith72 3y ago
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.
- kergonath 3y ago
  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.
  - user_7832 3y ago
    > 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.
    - astrange 3y ago
      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 :)
tshaddox 3y ago
> 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.
- user_7832 3y ago
  > 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.)
  - gumby 3y ago
    Yes, but did you make the edit with an iphone?
    - philistine 3y ago
      The behind the scenes video had lavish scenes of the editor working on the footage shot on iPhone ... with Adobe Premiere.
happytiger 3y ago
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.
- 20after4 3y ago
  I thought that everything apple does is PR (well mostly, everything else is a secret)
dimask 3y ago
> "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.
notatoad 3y ago
>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.
fsckboy 3y ago
> "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)
Zanni 3y ago
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.

threeseed 3y ago

> 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.

ska 3y ago
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).
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  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.
  - ska 3y ago
    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.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > 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.
- whyenot 3y ago
  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.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  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.
- Aurornis 3y ago
  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.
  - amluto 3y ago
    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.)
  - ska 3y ago
    “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.
- tjmc 3y ago
  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.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    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.
WillPostForFood 3y ago
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2023/10/behind-the-scenes-at-scary-fast-apples-keynote-event-shot-on-iphone/article/Apple-Shot-on-iPhone-customized-SpaceCam-rig_big.jpg.large.jpg 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.
- threeseed 3y ago
  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.
  - seec 3y ago
    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.
  - kbf 3y ago
    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…

ghaff 3y ago

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.

matwood 3y ago
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.

willsmith72 3y ago

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.

kergonath 3y ago
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.
- user_7832 3y ago
  > 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.
  - astrange 3y ago
    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 :)

tshaddox 3y ago

> 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.

user_7832 3y ago
> 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.)
- gumby 3y ago
  Yes, but did you make the edit with an iphone?
  - philistine 3y ago
    The behind the scenes video had lavish scenes of the editor working on the footage shot on iPhone ... with Adobe Premiere.

happytiger 3y ago

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.

20after4 3y ago
I thought that everything apple does is PR (well mostly, everything else is a secret)

dimask 3y ago

> "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.

notatoad 3y ago

>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.

fsckboy 3y ago

> "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)

Zanni 3y ago

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.