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.