from Hacker News

Apple’s keynote event shot on iPhone and edited on Mac

by ayoreis on 10/31/23, 4:32 PM with 146 comments

  • by zavertnik on 10/31/23, 6:46 PM

    A lot of people here are bringing up all of the expensive gear surrounding the iPhone that helped give it the professional look. This isn't unique to iPhone as a sensor.

    I work in TV and have spent a great deal of time on set shooting. The only time I've ever relied entirely on the camera's sensor and lens for a high quality image is shooting outside, and even then that requires adjustments, such as facing away from the sun, moving away from contrasty shadows, ect.

    Outside of documentaries, every other shoot will have a great deal of time, effort, and money spent on lighting and set design to elevate what is being shot. For scripted projects/films, an even smaller % of shots will be shot with the raw, available light/environment.

    What Apple did with the iPhone 15 proved that the iPhone can be used in a professional setting without being the on set bottle neck. For example, a short film shoot which had it's budget blown entirely on renting an Alexa will be bottle necked by the lack of lighting for the scene. Similarly, a short film which had its budget blown entirely on renting lights will be bottle necked if its shot on an iPhone 4.

    The goal is balance and for smaller productions, that balance is found in budgeting. If anyone on set has an iPhone 15 Pro in their pocket, the shoot suddenly has a viable second camera-- maybe its not good enough for the entire shoot, but its surely going to be good enough as a B-Cam or even as an A-Cam in certain scenarios where a smaller form factor is required to get the shot.

    I don't think Apple is sugar coating their demonstration here with all the expensive toys being used in parallel with the iPhone. The use of these tools in parallel with the iPhone IS the demonstration.

    Like any good video, if its shot correctly and edited correctly, you won't have an easy time visually identifying what sensor is being used.

  • by SirMaster on 10/31/23, 5:42 PM

    I don't think many people were really wondering if this sort of thing "could" be done.

    IMO that's not the important question.

    The question is, did the people who filmed and created the video with the iPhone hardware actually enjoy this process / workflow? Or did this process cause a bunch more pain and hassle to deal with the iPhone as the source camera?

    Compared to some alternative they could have used.

    Is there actually a compelling reason to use an iPhone for this type of work over the various alternatives?

  • by joshmanders on 10/31/23, 4:44 PM

    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.

  • by NelsonMinar on 10/31/23, 5:01 PM

    See also a more skeptical take, emphasizing all the expensive studio equipment involved: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/31/23940060/apple-event-sho...

  • by ayoreis on 10/31/23, 4:52 PM

    Interesting that they used the Blackmagic Camera app instead of their own, maybe it's finally time for an upgrade to the default one.

  • by cglong on 10/31/23, 5:02 PM

    A lot of people were asking why yesterday's keynote wasn't just a press release instead. I wonder if this was the actual point of the presentation.

  • by MarkusWandel on 10/31/23, 5:30 PM

    Genuine question, since I'm not part of the Apple ecosystem and my smartphones tend to be from the low end of the range.

    Even my humble one takes great pictures and video, but the touch-screen UI is really limiting. Whereas professional movie camera work has smooth pan/zoom work that, at least until now, was done with appropriate controls. Do professionals using a slab phone have external pan/tilt/zoom/focus rigs that they can plug in as an accessory, or do they have to do all that via the touchscreen UI?

  • by spacedcowboy on 10/31/23, 5:03 PM

    Vincent is an awesome guy - I met him when I was a manager on Aperture, and sweet-talked him into being my wedding photographer.

  • by y04nn on 10/31/23, 5:58 PM

    A major problem with telephone cameras, including the iPhone (not sure for the last model), is that they suffer from very notable reflections of light [1] which are very distracting. Dealing with this on a set must not be easy.

    [1]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251977011

  • by masto on 10/31/23, 5:56 PM

    I think that explains why they did this one at night and it had that same annoyingly dark look as modern streaming shows. "Look, our phone makes it possible for the best DPs and colorists in the world to produce the same unwatchable dimness as they could with cameras costing orders of magnitude more!"

  • by kuschku on 10/31/23, 5:32 PM

    I'd love to see what they did to work around the framerate issues. iPhones record in variable framerate (they just encode one frame, once that's fully encoded read the next frame and repeat). This leads to fps varying by up to ±10%, which causes a lot of issues with most editing software.

  • by Tepix on 10/31/23, 6:05 PM

    The iPhone 15 Pro Max costs more than 1400€. You can get a nice "real" video camera for that money! Now, the iPhone has the advantage of being always available (without all the pro gear that Apple used). But in the case of a production like this, that's not relevant.

    My guess is that most upcoming filmmakers on a budget will continue to other options such as Blackmagic cameras.

  • by TimTheTinker on 10/31/23, 5:11 PM

    Since editing tools weren't mentioned, I suspect they must have used DaVinci Resolve or similar, instead of Final Cut Pro and Motion.

  • by ggoo on 10/31/23, 4:44 PM

    What did they shoot the behind the scenes with though?

  • by eigenvalue on 10/31/23, 5:28 PM

    “The production was advised by Apple’s Jon Carr, a Pro Workflow video specialist whose credits include Top Gun: Maverick and Terminator: Dark Fate, and Jeff Wozniak, who has worked on productions including Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Avatar, and Iron Man 2.”

    I can’t even imagine how annoying it must be for that guy to be working with Apple on stuff with the last name Wozniak and to have everyone whispering around him “is he related to Steve??”. It’s an uncommon enough name that it’s not an unreasonable supposition.

    I bet people are really nice to him just in case!

  • by kaugesaar on 10/31/23, 6:23 PM

    Good on them for walking the walk. But I genuinely believe you could, with that equipment, get the same footage with a 10-year-old dslr-camera and its stock lens for just a few hundred bucks.

  • by alberth on 10/31/23, 5:28 PM

    0m 39sec

    This is definitely a nitpick…

    Presuming they also shoot this behind the scenes video with an iPhone as well, the video quality is out-of-focus for the individual on the right at 0m39s.

    Look how the right side of their face is fuzzy, not well defined.

    https://ibb.co/xLKZkQ8

    As an aside, I do appreciate Apple bringing Pro-Level functionality to the masses.

  • by neilv on 10/31/23, 5:18 PM

    "Yeah, uh, we're just gonna crop out the SpaceCam logo. The doomscroller surveillance handheld is the star here."

  • by RomanPushkin on 10/31/23, 4:45 PM

    I wish somebody can tell me what was wrong with the video being shot on iPhone, is it visible for a professional eye that it is iPhone? I was always told that the lens and matrix size is everything. Have things changed dramatically since the time you could only make a good shot on a full-frame DSLR?

  • by t0bia_s on 10/31/23, 6:46 PM

    So you have professional set with high tech tools like cranes, gimbals, LED panels... And shoot on iPhone.

    Why this doesn't make any sense?

  • by tambourine_man on 10/31/23, 7:10 PM

    While watching the presentation, I found the faces a bit too sharp, but I was watching on a different, newer screen, which I imagined had a higher pixel density than the one I'm used to everyday.

    But I just checked and the difference is neglectable (224 vs 218 ppi), so my guess is the over-sharpening of the iPhone.

    Not that it was bad, just different enough to be noticeable.

  • by flakiness on 10/31/23, 4:52 PM

    This is a super impressive tech-demo. Not practical for us consumers (who don't have expensive pro-level equipment surrounding the phone-camera), and not meaningful for professionals (who would just use a normal camera), but it is still a pure technical achievement that deserves a look and a cheer.

  • by inparen on 10/31/23, 5:28 PM

    Is this really that big deal ? Soderberg already shot two movies on iPhone.

  • by GoToRO on 10/31/23, 7:57 PM

    The iphones have horrible lens flares. The editing is a necessity.

  • by kart23 on 10/31/23, 5:47 PM

    okay apple, take your wallpaper photos on iphone also.

  • by hnburnsy on 10/31/23, 5:39 PM

    -1 for Apple for using a third party app to capture the footage. I dont have an iphone so how do they control the camera app without touching the screen?

  • by rconti on 10/31/23, 4:47 PM

    > the preferred smartphone for creative pros and filmmakers.

    Upon reading that, I immediately looked at the domain of the source. I know, I should be in this habit BEFORE reading anything, but still.

  • by _factor on 10/31/23, 4:44 PM

    This could have been accomplished with an iPhone 8 years ago. For a keynote that 99.9% of the population will watch on YouTube, what is this trying to prove? It's an interesting demonstration, that's about it.