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.
Without the expensive gear, the iPhone looks considerably downgraded compared to better source equipment. I had a Canon 5DII the day it was released and within a week some friends and I had a music video entered into a festival, and within a year, two short films, all done without any extra lighting or equipment - including gimbals. The source camera and lenses were good enough - and the look was amazing compared to camcorders - to achieve this.
Forgetting "shoots" and professional lighting, the iPhone isn't going to have the massive range of other equipment, and when you're spending literally thousands of pounds on studio time, lighting hire, operator costs, etc etc, are you really going to pick up and shoot on an iPhone when you've got a Black Magic or Sony or Canon at hand? Unless you're being paid by Apple?
I get that it's viable but there really is a lot of road between viable and superlative.
To be fair, the iPhone is not a camera, its a smart phone with a camera. There is no question that a DSLR with an interchangeable lens will beat out iPhone.
> The source camera and lenses were good enough - and the look was amazing compared to camcorders - to achieve this.
I would bet that the camera and lenses used didn't do the heavy lifting there, the selection of the location, the time of day, and the direction from the DP did. An expensive lighting setup isn't a requirement for a good image but good lighting is. Whether its natural or artificial is up to the DP.
The minimum viable quality you need for a project depends on the needs of the shoot.
> Forgetting "shoots" and professional lighting, the iPhone isn't going to have the massive range of other equipment, and when you're spending literally thousands of pounds on studio time, lighting hire, operator costs, etc etc, are you really going to pick up and shoot on an iPhone when you've got a Black Magic or Sony or Canon at hand? Unless you're being paid by Apple?
Of course not! I don't think anyone thinks the iPhone 15 is replacing the main camera on a shoot with a proper budget. But could the iPhone 15 be an additional camera for specialty shots or experimentation? Absolutely. For instance, if I'm shooting an unscripted scene with two people talking alone and I can mount my phone for a passable wide shot that can roll the whole time, giving me flexibility to shoot both individuals without losing coverage, then that's a huge value add.
I think in cases like that and in cases where people want to experiment without buying into a camera system, the iPhone becomes elevated beyond being just a mobile camera.
> I get that it's viable but there really is a lot of road between viable and superlative.
Totally agree, however I don't think I argued that. From my perspective, a viable camera is a viable camera for a job. The iPhone 15 seems viable from my viewing and it lives in my pocket while every other viable camera does not. That to me is the impressive feat. iPhone not living up to a proper DSLR is expected.
The new Olivia Rodrigo music video/ad was shot on an iPhone. And it shows. Even on 4k, there's blurriness, color balance issues, and noticeable artifacts that just aren't present on videos shot with a proper video camera (i.e., the commercials airing right before and after).
Yes, the iPhone can be used as a video camera. The same way that a camcorder can be used as a video camera. And neither of them are anywhere close to professional-level quality without a lot of extra work and equipment: you actually need more expensive equipment than you would with an expensive camera (and this other equipment usually costs a multiple of what a good camera would cost).
All of Jet Lag The Game and DankPods are shot on iPhone and they look fine. It doesn’t look like some ultra high quality movie production but they also don’t stand out particularly looking bad, it’s completely fine for the content m
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?
> Or did this process cause a bunch more pain and hassle to deal with the iPhone as the source camera?
Did you read/skim the article because that's the focal point of the whole piece and discussions taking place in the videos. The whole thing is touting how easy the pros were able to slot this in and do their normal workflows on top.
> Is there actually a compelling reason to use an iPhone for this type of work over the various alternatives?
I'd guess cost is the big one, and the fact this will be in your pocket already for a lot of people.
I read the part where the people who were paid to use the iPhone 15 to film their videos told the company paying them lots of money to do that they enjoyed using it to film those specific videos.
And then I noticed that those same professionals went right back to using regular video cameras for their next shoots. (See e.g., Olivia Rodrigo...who shot 1 music video with an iPhone 15 because Apple paid $$$ for to do it and went right back to using regular video equipment for everything else. Also Sodenberg, for an earlier version of the iPhone, who uses regular video equipment after that brief, well-funded experiment.)
Well, the misleading thing is that Apple's implication is "you too can make videos that look like this with just the phone in your pocket" (emphasis mine).
> the pros were able to slot this in and do their normal workflows
Because you can't do it with "just the phone in your pocket". You can do it with the $50-100K of equipment you see on that page, just using the phone as the camera, one small part of the process. (Not to denigrate the camera's role - I am a photographer, though not a videographer, so I appreciate the importance).
I think the best comparison for the iPhone is looking at DSLRs that do not shoot RAW but do shoot in Log. The workflow out of iPhone compared to say, an a7s, should be relatively similar, aside from the differences in sensor capabilities such as color depth, dynamic range, ect.
I can see a lot of potential use of the iPhone 15 as on hand as a "deploy anytime, anywhere" B-Cam. For the editor, having that B-Cam to cut away to is invaluable and for small shoots or tight schedules, slapping the iPhone 15 on a cheap tripod is at the right level of convenience to give that a shot.
You can rent an EOS C700 and 6 CN-E lenses for $2000/week. RED for not much more.
If you're making a tiny budget indie, you already have similar caliber equipment. You're not renting high end ARRI and Panavision optics.
I love that you can make good video with such small equipment. I just think if you're doing something like this, optimizing for "well, let's buy an iPhone" over the benefits of traditional cameras is odd, even for a smaller scale production.
Frankly, I think, "show us what you can do with an iPhone and a small gimbal, a couple of basic continuous lights, even if it doesn't look as good as this production" would have given a better view of the capabilities and potential.
If you don't have any of those alternatives in the first place.
The Best Food Review Show Ever went to Egypt for a series and the authorities impounded their video equipment and wouldn't let the team access the equipment until they left Egypt. Sunny, the host, was super frustrated but stated that the default was buying a few iPhones and filming the whole show through those devices.
The phone itself looks like a pretty insignificant portion of the total equipment cost. Why would you use an iPhone instead of an full camera at that point?
This is not some low-budget video, it’s a high-end production.
If you have that kind of budget, your producer probably won’t care if you’re using an iPhone or a Sony FX-3(0) or even a rented “real” cinema camera like a Sony Venice or an Arri
This seems to be more like people doing software development on their laptop vs at a desk with large monitor, a proper keyboard and ergonomics.
(on a tangent, there are no osha-approved laptops, they are not ergonomic. To work for hours, you should have a proper body posture. You should be looking forward at the screen with your head balanced on your neck, not up or down. there is also posture for arms, wrists, shoulders, etc.)
The compelling reason for Apple is to show off their phone. Other than that, I can't imagine the workflow on set is more effective. However, maybe the team enjoyed the process simply from the novelty and challenge of it.
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.
Apple is showing that an iPhone Pro can be used by _professionals_ to replace their existing camera. It’s not trying to replace an entire studio (yet). That would be like expecting a new centrifuge machine to replace an entire lab of equipment. Nobody expects an average user to compete with professionals, even if they were given a $20k RED camera.
So I think the important question is though, if you had spent thousands on dollars on a camera would those lights still be required?
If the answer is yes, then the feat is still an important one.
I know that some lights would still be required, but I honesty don't know the answer if they needed additional lights to compensate or if they could have gotten away with less.
Yes the lights are very important. Lighting is more than just about “how much light there is”.
Important considerations include where the light is coming from, how diffuse it is, and its color.
Lights (or flashes for photography) get used even outdoors. Amateur outdoor headshots usually give the subject racoon eyes since the eyes are sunken in versus the eyebrows. Pros will get light on the face to get rid of that.
> If the answer is yes, then the feat is still an important one.
I can recommend watching the Better Call Saul DVD documentary, they regularly have the lead lighting guy answering questions in there. The tl;dr was to me that yes, you definetely need additional lighting, even if your camera has a massive, light sensitive sensor.
I don't think anyone expects an iPhone to compete with a top of the line Arri 65 or other IMAX enabled cameras when it comes to low light performance (the sensor on these is huge after all), but the intro shot with Apple Park shows that it's possible.
Maybe don't try to reenact a shooting of Barry Lyndon on an iPhone, but for nearly everything else it seems to work just fine.
The answer is no, and that's exactly what "The Creator" showed. High end cameras today are good enough that you can shoot entire blockbusters with only a single light or even with only available light.
But it's not so much to compensate, just to ensure that your shot is lit the way you want, without the weird hard shadows and background-brighter-than-foreground problems that occur in your average space that hasn't been specifically lit for film/TV.
I think what this shows is that it's capable of being used at all for pro-level work. No, I don't have all the nice gear that Apple has, but I can have the same camera.
It's similar to how they show MacBook Pro users making movies, doing AI work, processing huge datasets, etc. The message is that I don't need to do all those things. But if I did, the computer would be good enough to do them.
In the context of the iPhone's camera, I'm not going to shoot an ad on one, but it's clearly going to be good enough to take pictures of my vacation.
> but it's clearly going to be good enough to take pictures of my vacation.
Is that clear? Even ignoring the form factor, I expect you would be quite disappointed casually shooting your vacation on a camera typically used on these types of shoots.
Like siblings comments have mentioned, the gear has always been part of the game. Before I was in software I did low budget videography. Lighting, audio, set equipment, editing, and the little bits that add extra quality have always been part of a good production. There are hacks to make equipment or repurpose things for the same effect as the expensive and nice hardware you’re seeing.
One of the most common hacked together items is a steady cam rig. The simplest version is made from a couple iron pipes and an appropriate screw for your camera mount.
> worth of equipment that makes it hard for the average user to replicate similar quality.
Define quality. What I take away from the documentation is that you can replace iPhone's in workflows that would have traditionally used a heavy and expensive film grade camera. The gimbals, rigs and software used the video are actually quite normal for professional video shoots and you'd see them in use with more expensive cameras as well.
That's always been part of the prosumer equation; kit to go around the digital lynchpin. It's the void Digidesign/Avid filled with the mbox series back when.
Consumer --> Prosumer --> Pro
Aka tacit endorsement of the incumbent 'way things be.'
Also interestingly, shot with the Blackmagic app. Not sure if they also used Davinci or FCP. But if they would have used FCP, I guess they would have mentioned it?
you can likely jerry rig a cart and attach a tripod to it, not expensive, bottom line is that it is possible with the iPhone to film something like that.
“a great deal of fancy equipment — from drones, gimbals, dollies, industrial set lighting, and other recording accessories — is still required to make iPhone footage look this good.”
But that’s just a standard requirement to make stuff look that good.
Slap a cheap lens on an Alexa and light like an amateur and you will get a subpar video-result with the only redeeming factor being the sensor.
And sure, the sensor (or medium) does matter, but production design and good lighting can be used to make almost any camera look great. I don’t think thhere’s anything wrong with that.
Steven Soderberg shot a movie some years ago on an earlier iphone. Some of the shots were truly terrific because of attention to the above.
You can copy or emulate a lot of high-end/cinematic/filmic looks quite affordably.
For light you need output + size of light source, easily attainable on a budget.
Good audio solutions also exist for reasonable $$.
What you pay the most for when using expensive equpiment is more features related to interconmectedness and lifting some of the work in post-production, and durability. But it does not nescessarily translate to better images than what can be achieved by even bedroom-indie filmmakers
You can be skeptical of it like the Verge or impressed by it like some in these comments, but either way it's good that Apple is showing you exactly what that means in practice.
The transparency here is welcome and both Google and Apple should do something similar when it comes to the photographs they show off when rolling out new phones. They shouldn't show a photo in those keynotes without also showing exactly what it took to get those photos out of those phones.
The first party camera is designed to be operated by every human being on the planet. Redesigning it to accommodate highend workflows makes as much sense as redesigning a $50,000 cinema camera to accommodate parents who want to record their kid's soccer game.
I believe it could be designed in a way to accommodate both user groups. I don't mind another app but they've always been paid (while writing this I checked and turns out Blackmagic camera is free, awesome!)
I was honestly curious about that myself, I have generally just used the stock one but I am now curious if that one works better or has some better features.
One of the big advantages to the Blackmagic Camera app is that you can shoot Apple Log into an H.265 container rather than ProRes, saving huge amounts of storage space.
It also has far better features for exposure, focus peaking, etc. It's the same UI which is in Blackmagic's actual cameras.
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?
If you watch the video, you can see that they have a big rig with like a gimbal and external controllers and screens. So it's not "just an iPhone" but it's also not a $50k+ pro camera body.
Look at pretty much any one of the pictures in the article for your answer.
No professional camera, iPhone or not, isn't in a rig/harness/on a trolley etc. That's for pan/tilt/push in/pull out. For controlling camera settings/zoom/focus, the article says they are using Blackmagic Camera.
Readit News
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.
Forgetting "shoots" and professional lighting, the iPhone isn't going to have the massive range of other equipment, and when you're spending literally thousands of pounds on studio time, lighting hire, operator costs, etc etc, are you really going to pick up and shoot on an iPhone when you've got a Black Magic or Sony or Canon at hand? Unless you're being paid by Apple?
I get that it's viable but there really is a lot of road between viable and superlative.
> The source camera and lenses were good enough - and the look was amazing compared to camcorders - to achieve this.
I would bet that the camera and lenses used didn't do the heavy lifting there, the selection of the location, the time of day, and the direction from the DP did. An expensive lighting setup isn't a requirement for a good image but good lighting is. Whether its natural or artificial is up to the DP.
The minimum viable quality you need for a project depends on the needs of the shoot.
> Forgetting "shoots" and professional lighting, the iPhone isn't going to have the massive range of other equipment, and when you're spending literally thousands of pounds on studio time, lighting hire, operator costs, etc etc, are you really going to pick up and shoot on an iPhone when you've got a Black Magic or Sony or Canon at hand? Unless you're being paid by Apple?
Of course not! I don't think anyone thinks the iPhone 15 is replacing the main camera on a shoot with a proper budget. But could the iPhone 15 be an additional camera for specialty shots or experimentation? Absolutely. For instance, if I'm shooting an unscripted scene with two people talking alone and I can mount my phone for a passable wide shot that can roll the whole time, giving me flexibility to shoot both individuals without losing coverage, then that's a huge value add.
I think in cases like that and in cases where people want to experiment without buying into a camera system, the iPhone becomes elevated beyond being just a mobile camera.
> I get that it's viable but there really is a lot of road between viable and superlative.
Totally agree, however I don't think I argued that. From my perspective, a viable camera is a viable camera for a job. The iPhone 15 seems viable from my viewing and it lives in my pocket while every other viable camera does not. That to me is the impressive feat. iPhone not living up to a proper DSLR is expected.
Yes, the iPhone can be used as a video camera. The same way that a camcorder can be used as a video camera. And neither of them are anywhere close to professional-level quality without a lot of extra work and equipment: you actually need more expensive equipment than you would with an expensive camera (and this other equipment usually costs a multiple of what a good camera would cost).
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?
Did you read/skim the article because that's the focal point of the whole piece and discussions taking place in the videos. The whole thing is touting how easy the pros were able to slot this in and do their normal workflows on top.
> Is there actually a compelling reason to use an iPhone for this type of work over the various alternatives?
I'd guess cost is the big one, and the fact this will be in your pocket already for a lot of people.
And then I noticed that those same professionals went right back to using regular video cameras for their next shoots. (See e.g., Olivia Rodrigo...who shot 1 music video with an iPhone 15 because Apple paid $$$ for to do it and went right back to using regular video equipment for everything else. Also Sodenberg, for an earlier version of the iPhone, who uses regular video equipment after that brief, well-funded experiment.)
> the pros were able to slot this in and do their normal workflows
Because you can't do it with "just the phone in your pocket". You can do it with the $50-100K of equipment you see on that page, just using the phone as the camera, one small part of the process. (Not to denigrate the camera's role - I am a photographer, though not a videographer, so I appreciate the importance).
I'll do better next time.
They always do this. The question was if this is what really happened.
For major studios? Of course not.
For tiny-budget indie films, student films, YouTube comedy webseries, and the like? Hugely.
I can see a lot of potential use of the iPhone 15 as on hand as a "deploy anytime, anywhere" B-Cam. For the editor, having that B-Cam to cut away to is invaluable and for small shoots or tight schedules, slapping the iPhone 15 on a cheap tripod is at the right level of convenience to give that a shot.
There's easily $100K of equipment on that page.
You can rent an EOS C700 and 6 CN-E lenses for $2000/week. RED for not much more.
If you're making a tiny budget indie, you already have similar caliber equipment. You're not renting high end ARRI and Panavision optics.
I love that you can make good video with such small equipment. I just think if you're doing something like this, optimizing for "well, let's buy an iPhone" over the benefits of traditional cameras is odd, even for a smaller scale production.
Frankly, I think, "show us what you can do with an iPhone and a small gimbal, a couple of basic continuous lights, even if it doesn't look as good as this production" would have given a better view of the capabilities and potential.
The Best Food Review Show Ever went to Egypt for a series and the authorities impounded their video equipment and wouldn't let the team access the equipment until they left Egypt. Sunny, the host, was super frustrated but stated that the default was buying a few iPhones and filming the whole show through those devices.
I believe this is the series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-PgumHXWVo
Ie go to your producer and say hey Apple did this. We can do it
Being serious - there's no point in doing that, because it requires ton of additional, janky equipment and ton of extra job in the post production.
See: https://youtu.be/OkPter7MC1I?si=Enx7IAFzNHfOPrBW
This is just marketing stunt. No idea why anybody cares.
This is not some low-budget video, it’s a high-end production.
If you have that kind of budget, your producer probably won’t care if you’re using an iPhone or a Sony FX-3(0) or even a rented “real” cinema camera like a Sony Venice or an Arri
And that movie had a lot of night scenes too. I can only imagine how much the situation has improved.
(on a tangent, there are no osha-approved laptops, they are not ergonomic. To work for hours, you should have a proper body posture. You should be looking forward at the screen with your head balanced on your neck, not up or down. there is also posture for arms, wrists, shoulders, etc.)
It still looks strictly worse than an equivalently priced $1000 camera+lens when directed, lit, operated, and edited by professionals.
If the answer is yes, then the feat is still an important one.
I know that some lights would still be required, but I honesty don't know the answer if they needed additional lights to compensate or if they could have gotten away with less.
Important considerations include where the light is coming from, how diffuse it is, and its color.
Lights (or flashes for photography) get used even outdoors. Amateur outdoor headshots usually give the subject racoon eyes since the eyes are sunken in versus the eyebrows. Pros will get light on the face to get rid of that.
I can recommend watching the Better Call Saul DVD documentary, they regularly have the lead lighting guy answering questions in there. The tl;dr was to me that yes, you definetely need additional lighting, even if your camera has a massive, light sensitive sensor.
I don't think anyone expects an iPhone to compete with a top of the line Arri 65 or other IMAX enabled cameras when it comes to low light performance (the sensor on these is huge after all), but the intro shot with Apple Park shows that it's possible.
Maybe don't try to reenact a shooting of Barry Lyndon on an iPhone, but for nearly everything else it seems to work just fine.
You couldn't do that with an iPhone.
But it's not so much to compensate, just to ensure that your shot is lit the way you want, without the weird hard shadows and background-brighter-than-foreground problems that occur in your average space that hasn't been specifically lit for film/TV.
It's similar to how they show MacBook Pro users making movies, doing AI work, processing huge datasets, etc. The message is that I don't need to do all those things. But if I did, the computer would be good enough to do them.
In the context of the iPhone's camera, I'm not going to shoot an ad on one, but it's clearly going to be good enough to take pictures of my vacation.
Is that clear? Even ignoring the form factor, I expect you would be quite disappointed casually shooting your vacation on a camera typically used on these types of shoots.
One of the most common hacked together items is a steady cam rig. The simplest version is made from a couple iron pipes and an appropriate screw for your camera mount.
Define quality. What I take away from the documentation is that you can replace iPhone's in workflows that would have traditionally used a heavy and expensive film grade camera. The gimbals, rigs and software used the video are actually quite normal for professional video shoots and you'd see them in use with more expensive cameras as well.
Consumer --> Prosumer --> Pro
Aka tacit endorsement of the incumbent 'way things be.'
Apple has massively reduced the barrier to entry.
But that’s just a standard requirement to make stuff look that good.
Slap a cheap lens on an Alexa and light like an amateur and you will get a subpar video-result with the only redeeming factor being the sensor.
And sure, the sensor (or medium) does matter, but production design and good lighting can be used to make almost any camera look great. I don’t think thhere’s anything wrong with that.
Steven Soderberg shot a movie some years ago on an earlier iphone. Some of the shots were truly terrific because of attention to the above.
You can copy or emulate a lot of high-end/cinematic/filmic looks quite affordably. For light you need output + size of light source, easily attainable on a budget. Good audio solutions also exist for reasonable $$. What you pay the most for when using expensive equpiment is more features related to interconmectedness and lifting some of the work in post-production, and durability. But it does not nescessarily translate to better images than what can be achieved by even bedroom-indie filmmakers
The transparency here is welcome and both Google and Apple should do something similar when it comes to the photographs they show off when rolling out new phones. They shouldn't show a photo in those keynotes without also showing exactly what it took to get those photos out of those phones.
Apple was always going to use that equipment. It's needed for all decent video production work.
What they've shown is that you can skip the Red Camera and use an iPhone instead.
Historically, this has meant for the Mac.
But it also includes iPhone.
It also has far better features for exposure, focus peaking, etc. It's the same UI which is in Blackmagic's actual cameras.
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?
No professional camera, iPhone or not, isn't in a rig/harness/on a trolley etc. That's for pan/tilt/push in/pull out. For controlling camera settings/zoom/focus, the article says they are using Blackmagic Camera.