A few weeks ago I wrote about my photographic block on a trip to Edinburgh. Despite the beautiful city and the fantastic drive there, I could not motivate myself to get my Fuji camera out of its bag. The upshot of that little trip is that I shot everything I wanted on my aging iPhone 11 Pro.
The images that I took on that trip are not award winning bangers. They will not end up anywhere near my portfolio, however, I liked them. Taking them boosted my creativity, allowed me to shoot more freely and get shots that I might not have got a larger camera out for.
That got me thinking, could I shoot an entire video stock trip on an iPhone. I shot stock video on the iPhone 11 Pro during a trip to Istanbul in 2020. However whilst usable, it was nowhere near the quality of the Fuji cameras that I also took with me. Things have changed since 2020 though. Let me explain.
The Quiet Revolution
Some years the iPhone makes a big generational jump, others, a small one. 2023’s release of the iPhone 15 Pro was pretty subdued. There were not really any groundbreaking things added, the cameras were similar to the 14 series, the design much the same as was the screen. Nothing too much to get excited about.
Except there was, for videographers. Quietly and without any great fanfare Apple slipped Log in to their video capabilities. The previous generations had had the Prores codec as an alternative to .mov, however the combination of Prores and Log, opened enormous possibilities. There was one other thing that enabled those possibilities, but more of that later. First of all let’s look at why Log is so important.
A Flat Profile With Little Contrast
That doesn’t sound groundbreaking does it? However Log can be looked at as a video version of a RAW stills image. It is a very flat looking video file, but within that file there is a much increased dynamic range and importantly, no sharpening.
For a long time, iPhone and other smartphone video output has alway looked over sharpened. Because this is happening at the capture stage there is very little that we can do to take the edge off of that sharpening. A sharp image simply looks too video, it doesn’t have that fabled cinematic look.
Removing the sharpening allows us to add it in later as needed. The flat profile allows editors to manipulate the video much better, adding contrast and colour grades to suit the look of the film. Whilst not exactly like a true Raw – some post processing is done, Log files are much more capable than those with a colour and contrast curve baked in.
On the other side of the same coin is Prores. This is a video codec, in other words similar to Jpeg or Tiff. It defines how much the video file is compressed. Prores has several different iterations, however all of them are much less compressed than .mp4 or .mov. Again they are similar in practice to a RAW file in that they provide much more data in the video file making it much more malleable.
There’s One More Thing
Anyone that shoots RAW will know two things. They are big files and they can take a lot of time to record to an SD card. If you have tried to shoot wildlife or sports in RAW with a slow card, you will know the problem. The buffer fills up and the camera stops shooting.
This is where the third and perhaps most important addition to the iPhone 15 Pro comes in. It has USB-C 3.2. That means you can attach an SSD to it and record these huge, highly detailed video files directly to it.
That’s a game changer, shooting Prores, Log to the phone’s internal drive, would pretty much wipe out the memory space in a few minutes. Now we can attach an ultra fast hard drive and shoot for hours without worrying about space. The added bonus is that we can attach that SSD to our laptop and edit straight away. No need for convoluted file transfers.
So I Got One
As I mentioned at the top, my iPhone 11 Pro was beginning to show its age. I had been contemplating a new phone for a while. Because we are nearing the end of the iPhone 15 Pro’s “year as the flagship” there were good contract deals to be had. So I took one up and landed myself a base level, 128GB version.
The great thing is that I did not have to spend a huge sum of money to kit it out as a high quality video camera. I had a 1TB Samsung T5 SSD. I had various mounts and brackets. The only investment I made was a Neewer case which allowed me to attach a 67mm variable ND filter – that, I also already had.
The week I got the phone, Apple released Final Cut Camera, an app to fully utilize the power of Log and Prores. That was free, however I found that the Blackmagic camera app had much more “professional” functionality and so preferred using that. Incidentally, that’s also free.
The iPhone 15 Pro in Use
Once I kitted out the iPhone, I took it for a test video shoot in the beautiful city of Durham. Like my time shooting stills in Edinburgh with an iPhone, shooting video was a revelation. I found myself taking shots of multiple scenes that I would not even consider shooting with a larger camera.
Everything was shot handheld yet the iPhone’s stabilization was so good, it often felt like the camera was on a gimbal. Getting home the 10bit 422 Log footage was clean, clear and graded beautifully. IS the footage better than my X-H2, probably not, if I were to shoot Prores on the Fuji. However, that requires me to purchase a much faster CF Express card and not a regular SD card. Shooting to the regular SD confines me to h.265 which is massively more compressed than Prores. As it stands, for my setup and in decent light, the iPhone is on a par if not above the Fuji X-H2.
There is another aspect though. To get smooth, professional looking footage from the Fujifilm, you need to use a tripod or a gimbal. Tripods are cumbersome and ungainly, gimbals, whilst allowing for amazingly smooth footage, require constant rebalancing even if you slightly xoom your lens. They can also get very heavy after a while.
I have been very impressed with both the video and still quality from the iPhone 15 Pro. With stills you can shoot Apple RAW which is a version of DNG. The files are very good in decent light but start to show their limitations in low light. They are, unsurprisingly, a little way off the output of my Fujis.
The real test will come in September. I am planning to do a 5 week video stock shoot in Asia with only my iPhone for video. It will allow me to move and create much more freely, a real bonus in the heat and humidity of that part of the world.
My only concession will be for stills photography. I will take either my X-H2 or GFX50s with one lens to satisfy my desire for the best quality in stills. Those shots will be more thought out and pre planned than my video stock shoot. For the video shooting I want to be able to cover as much as possible in a relatively short time. For that, my iPhone rig is going to be ideal.
1 Comment
Am retired . Love photography.
Would love to go on a trip with you and be your second camera.