Blackmagic brings genlock to the iPhone 17 Pro, while Apple’s first ProRes RAW goes straight to your pocket...

[Django]

3 hours ago, kye said:

Interesting and thanks for sharing.  I hadn't heard the RAW was external only, I guess every new camera has its 'gotchas' in terms of combinations of features that do/don't work together.  

Mine arrived yesterday (Friday), which was a nice surprise as when I preordered it they predicted it wouldn't be delivered until Monday.  I got all the notifications etc, so it didn't just rock up with no warning though 🙂 

Odd that the sensor stabilisation isn't supported in RAW.  Is it IBIS or is it EIS?  If it's IBIS then I have no idea why it wouldn't be supported?

iPhones don’t have IBIS, no phone does AFAIK. What it uses is Apple’s sensor shift OIS which means the lens or sensor module physically moves, plus EIS which is electronic crop and warp. In normal video both work together.

When you switch to RAW or open gate, EIS is disabled because you are recording the entire sensor with no crop margin for digital stabilization. OIS still works but the footage looks a lot shakier since you are used to EIS doing most of the work.

This is pretty standard behavior across cameras that offer RAW or open gate.

As for no internal RAW recording, I don’t see it as a major inconvenience considering how quickly you’d fill up your storage (especially if you got the base models). Going SSD is definitely the right move.

[Django]

11 hours ago, MurtlandPhoto said:

The phone arrived today as expected and I've had a few minutes to play around with the camera. I shot a short test scene using ProRes RAW and ProRes 422 in the Blackmagic app. Here's a quick look at the footage with just Resolve's Apple Log 2 CST applied. Very first observations:
 

• Open gate is only available in RAW or RAW HQ
• RAW can only recorded to an external drive. I have a great Magsafe SSD that I use for this.
• Sensor stabilization is not available in either raw mode
• Resolve is super sluggish with the raw files unlike ProRes RAW or BRAW files from my S1ii. I hope this gets optimized
• The normal raw controls are there and the footage is very flexible as you'd expect
• I used Resolve's built in Apple Log 2 CST for the test

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97PPh276M4o

Sounds good! Would love to see some more tests with maybe more telephoto focal lengths to see how the bokeh looks and humans for skin tones and detail without Apples usual computational behavior. 
 

Would love to try this out myself at an Apple store but you obviously can’t plug-in an SSD to their tethered display units. I think you can do ProRes in log and then airdrop footage though so I might go check it today.

Particularly interested in what log2 brings vs their previous log. I assume better highlight retention, increased DR etc.
 

 

[kye]

Well, that was fun.  New phone has new colour space which requires updating Resolve which wouldn't install and required me to update MacOS.  Recording and then viewing the first clip took a lot longer than anticipated.

Here's some initial observations as I find my bearings.

Resolve 20.2 only has Apple Log 2 in the Colour Space, and only has Apple Log in the Gamma.

If we assume that BM and Apply both know what they're doing then that means that Apple Log 2 gets a new colour space but keeps the same gamma curve, and iPhone 15 and 16 users get an upgrade to Apple Log 2.

In the default camera app you only get Log and HDR (whatever that is) in Prores mode.  Not entirely sure what Prores flavour it is, but I'd guess HQ because the fine print in the settings to enable it says 1 minute of 4K 30p is 6GB which is 800Mbps (and would be 640Mbps for 24p) which is sightly lower than the 700 typically stated, but is definitely higher than the 471Mbps typically stated for 4K 24p Prores 422.

If you select Prores and Log, the image displayed is the log image..  no display conversion for you!

BM camera app gives tonnes more options.  I'll have to investigate that further, but last time I looked it seemed to only offer manual shooting, rather than the auto-everything that I need when shooting fast.

[ND64]

Lets acknowledge that ProResRAW is a shitty codec.

[Emanuel]

One of these days this community should just team up and send every new game-changer straight to @kye ; ) You’re priceless, mate :- )

[ND64]

I understand people are excited that we now have some flexibility to color grade our smartphone image like its a cine cam, but why you go so extreme? 😄

I call it "i can't see shit" contrast.

[kye]

Some initial testing using the default Apple Camera app.

I did some bitrate stress tests and got bitrates between 550-700Mbps so it looks like the default camera app is just using Prores HQ.  The bitrates for the stress-test and for static scenes were all within this range.

Latitude tests using the native Apple camera app, the 1x camera and 4K Prores Log mode.  How I tested was I started recording, then clicked and held in the middle of the image, then dragged down all the way to the bottom to progressively under-expose.  Then in post I found the frames that aligned nicely to -1, -2, and -3 stops of exposure.

Reference image - this is how the app decided to expose and WB.

These are the fully corrected images (-1 stops, -2 stops, and -3 stops):

These are the images without any corrections so you can see the relative exposures:

and these are the images that have had exposure corrected but not WB corrected:

My impressions were that these graded beautifully in post.  I've graded a variety of codecs (everything from 8-bit rec709 footage to "HLG" footage to GH7 V-Log to downloaded files from RED / ARRI / Sony) and these felt completely neutral and responded just how you'd expect without any colour shifts or strange tints or anything else.

I've seen enough tests from iPhone 15 and 16 to know that Apple are doing all kinds of crazy HDR shenanigans, but realistically this footage seems like it's really workable.  If I can pull images back from -3 stops to be basically identical then that means that whatever colour grading I'll have to do on a semi-reasonably exposed image will be just fine.

[kye]

7 hours ago, ND64 said:

I understand people are excited that we now have some flexibility to color grade our smartphone image like its a cine cam, but why you go so extreme? 😄

We've actually had quite a bit of flexibility to colour grade our smartphone images for basically a decade now, but the issue is that no-one shooting with their phone could be bothered to get off their asses and actually learn how Colour Management worked.

[ND64]

3 hours ago, kye said:

I can pull images back from -3 stops to be basically identical

There is almost no noise difference between the base and -3. If there would be no penalty for underexposure, thats not underexposure. Maybe it darkens the image without changing the exposure parameters while reporting otherwise. You can test that with a moving subject.

[kye]

4 hours ago, ND64 said:

There is almost no noise difference between the base and -3. If there would be no penalty for underexposure, thats not underexposure. Maybe it darkens the image without changing the exposure parameters while reporting otherwise. You can test that with a moving subject.

I'm not really sure what you're saying.

I pulled the clip into Resolve and brightened it by the certain number of stops I specified.  If it wasn't actually darker then it would have become too bright.

[ND64]

2 hours ago, kye said:

I'm not really sure what you're saying.

I pulled the clip into Resolve and brightened it by the certain number of stops I specified.  If it wasn't actually darker then it would have become too bright.

Then it should be a lot noisier, even with baked in NR. I guess Apple embedded a brightness map metadata, like they did for gain map in HDR Jpeg XL, so raw data stays intact but displayed darker in underexposure shot.