Where's Andy? Hello?
It appears that Andy is out on an on-location shoot.
Who's gonna help me shoot this video? So if I want to make a Mac Address video, I'm on my own.
Where are the cameras? I'm gonna have to take in the mall.
Oh, look a camera!
So what can I shoot with? It does support ProRes.
iPhones are the best smartphones for shooting video,
but they're no proper video camera, which has built-in ND filters, loads of buttons and controls,
as well as audio inputs. So if I want to do this in any way properly,
I'm gonna need some things.
What I have here are some mounts for putting the iPhone on a tripod,
a very underrated use case, or you could use something like this DigiOM5,
which is a gimbal to make smooth handheld shots.
Audio is another really important part of shooting a video on an iPhone,
and so you're gonna need some sort of external microphone
to help up the production game. You could use something like this Rode microphone
and hook it up through a dongle.
Also, there's the app. You can use the camera app and it'll shoot in ProRes,
but you have no control over white balance or audio or anything like that.
An app that many people recommend is Filmic Pro.
What equipment I use depends on the type of shot I'm making.
Perhaps the easiest example to make would be using this DigiOSmo image stabilizer.
I'm ready to shoot something, something. What do I have to shoot again?
The camera updates to the iPhone 13 are mighty impressive.
The wide camera lets in more light with an f1.5 aperture.
The telephoto lens zooms farther now at three times,
which might be a bit too much. And the ultra-wide now has autofocus,
which can pull incredibly close macros. It's why the module is now so big that it spends halfway across the back of a small 13 Pro,
and it makes these models so heavy too. Nevertheless, put together, these three lenses offer the perfect variety of focal lengths
for shooting quick video sequences. But this is still a phone,
and having to faff with a touchscreen to adjust controls and start video feels a little unnatural.
And don't forget those apps. Filmic Pro can be a bit of a fickle app.
I've had it not save files on occasion, but it does give you a lot of control,
like pulling a smooth rack focus.
Perhaps the most compelling reason to shoot professionally with an iPhone is the discretion.
If, unlike me, you stay away from sturdy looking tripods and microphones,
people will think you're just another influencer making a TikTok or YouTube video.
Ingesting footage, meaning getting it off a phone and into a computer,
is the big weakness to Apple's professional camera workflow on the iPhone 13 Pro.
Because in 2021, the iPhone, through lightning, does not support USB 3 speeds.
That's right, this iPhone Pro can only quickly transfer files using technology from 20 years ago.
If you have network storage like we do here, you can try and get faster speeds through Wi-Fi,
but that's unlikely, because in my test, it took almost four times longer.
So hopefully all this extra data is worth it. Because there's only one person for whom ProRes actually matters, the editor, Hoffman.
My expectation is too high. If you were to give me a blind test, I wouldn't be able to tell,
unless I really have to pixel peep, and that's the issue. Especially with the substantial amount of storage that you need for ProRes,
it makes it a lot more expensive. Just look at this chart to see the bitrate differences over other professional codecs we use here at LMG.
At 700 megabits per second, the tiny iPhone records a massive output.
One of the benefits you get is with color resolution.
ProRes has a 422 chroma subsampling.
That means you get one color pixel for every two black and white pixels.
The HEVC codec has half the color resolution, with color spread over four black and white pixels.
I was surprised by how nice the color looks when you're shooting under office lights.
I was able to correct it and give it a lot more natural look.
It's not all perfect though, because despite the increases in color resolution,
when we intentionally shot some footage with the wrong white balance, we couldn't fix it.
It just doesn't want to balance even when I click the white swatch right here.
Just a little disappointed, but it is a very extreme test.
The next benefit comes with motion and performance.
ProRes is what's known as an intra-frame codec.
This means that every frame is written as a whole entire frame.
That's different from the video you're watching right now, which is encoded using an inter-frame codec.
These codecs contain a long group of pictures from which only the changes in the group are actually saved.
It's very efficient, but also very hard to edit,
because any cuts you make require the computer to do intensive calculations just to show the frame.
So ProRes is so much easier to edit with.
One thing I have noticed so far is that Premiere hasn't crashed.
What? Not a single time.
There is no need to restart Premiere to get things working again.
Everything has just been smooth in full resolution.
In a professional editing environment, that's a pretty big deal, because Premiere always crashes.
ProRes on the iPhone 13 Pro doesn't bring the huge quality increase I was hoping for,
but it does mean that you're getting the absolute highest quality the phone can give,
which kind of shows that there are limits to these lenses, sensors, and expectations.
But in a professional environment like ours here at LMG,
we might need to use an iPhone to shoot in a tight space, or because we need to be discreet.
And when we use it, we'll shoot in ProRes, because why not?
We can. Also, what I learned in this piece is that I really hate self-shooting.
It's really anxiety inducing a royal pain and takes so much longer just to get the shot.
It really makes me appreciate having a shooter.
Andy, you're back!
I missed you so much! Shooting on my own is so hard.
Don't leave me again. I really did miss Andy.
Oh, it looks like Hoffman has edited the video and we can watch it now.
Well, let's see how this iPhone video turned out.
Where's Andy? Hello? Thanks for filming this Mac Address.
You're welcome. If you think that Andy should shoot Mac Address videos from here on out, give this video a like.
And if you think I'm better off without him, why not subscribe?
Now, I'm curious how long it took you to figure out that this video was being filmed a little bit differently.
Put your answer in the comments below.