The iPhone 17 Pro packs a powerful video setup with a trio of cameras, large image sensors (for a phone), ProRes raw codecs and Log color profiles for advanced editing. It makes the phone one of the most powerful and dependable video shooters among today’s smartphones.
Apple often boasts about famous directors using the iPhone to shoot films and music videos. The company even records its event videos for new products with the iPhone.
But is the iPhone really good enough at shooting video to replace a traditional cinema camera? To see how good the iPhone 17 Pro is for professional use, I gave it a proper test.
I put together a video shoot where I pitted the $1,000 iPhone against a full professional cinema camera rig, worth thousands of dollars, to see just how well Apple’s phone can hold its own. I planned a video production at my favorite coffee roaster in Edinburgh, called Santu, which is based in a stunning building that I knew would look amazing on camera.
To give both cameras the best chance, I worked with Director of Photography Cal Hallows, who has been responsible for production on major shoots around the world, working with brands including Aston Martin, the BBC, IBM and Hilton Hotels.
Here’s what happened.
Our filming equipment
We didn’t use any external lenses with the iPhone; instead, we relied on either the built-in main, ultrawide or telephoto options. I shot my footage using the BlackMagic Camera app. I had a Crucial X10 external SSD since I was recording in Apple’s ProRes raw codec, which creates large files.
I also had a variable neutral density filter to achieve a consistent shutter speed. For some shots, I used Moment’s SuperCage to help give me a better grip — and therefore smoother footage. But for other shots, I just used the phone by itself to make it easier to get into tight spaces. More on that later.
The BlackMagic camera, when fully rigged up, was massive and weighed a lot. It meant we had to be more selective over which shots we used it for.
The iPhone’s competition was the $3,300 BlackMagic Pyxis 6K. It’s a professional cinema camera with a full-frame 6K resolution image sensor and raw video capabilities. I paired that with some stunning pro cine lenses, including a set of Arles Primes, the XTract Probe lens from DZO Film and a couple of choice cine primes from Sigma. It’s a formidable and pricey setup for any cinematographer.
The shoot day
We shot over the course of a single day. I’d already created a rough storyboard of the shots I wanted to get, which helped me plan my angles and lens choices. I wanted to try and replicate some angles directly with both cameras.
I love this angle and the great reveal as the door is opened and light hits the coffee bags. While this is a screenshot from the BlackMagic’s footage, the iPhone’s image looks just as good.
This shot of the store room being opened (above), for example — was a lovely scene, and I didn’t see much difference in quality between the iPhone’s video and the BlackMagic’s. This was the case with a few of the scenes we replicated. Apple’s ProRes raw codec on the iPhone provided a lot of scope for adjusting the color, allowing us to create beautiful color grades that looked every bit as striking as footage from the Blackmagic camera.
Sure, you could tell that they were different, but I couldn’t honestly say if one was better than the other.
The iPhone’s main camera was too narrow for this scene, and the ultrawide was too wide, resulting in a light stand — and another employee — being visible along the edge of the frame.
Other shots were more difficult to replicate. I love this low-angle of the roastery owner, Washington, pulling his trolley through the scene. On the iPhone, the main lens wasn’t wide enough to capture everything we wanted but switching to the ultrawide was too much the other way and we ended up having spare gear and other people in the frame.
This made several shots a challenge to replicate as the fixed zoom ranges of the iPhone simply didn’t translate to the same fields of view offered by our lenses on the BlackMagic camera. As a result, getting the right framing for shots from the iPhone was trickier than I expected. But focal length wasn’t the only reason using “real” lenses was better.
The wide apertures of the DZO Film cine prime lenses allowed us to get some beautiful background bokeh on shots like this.
The DZO Arles Primes are awesome cinema lenses that offer wide apertures that allowed us to shoot with gorgeous natural bokeh. We used this to our advantage on several shots where we really wanted the subject to be isolated against an out-of-focus background.
Secret weapons
That was especially the case when we used our secret weapon: the DZO Films Xtract probe lens. This bizarre-looking, long, thin lens gives both a wide-angle perspective coupled with a close focusing distance.
The iPhone’s footage (right) is almost entirely in focus meaning that background elements are clearly visible and are quite distracting. Using the DZO Film probe lens on the BlackMagic camera (left) allowed those background details to simply fall out of focus, keeping the attention solely on the subject.
I loved using the probe lens for this shot, particularly where we’ve focused on exactly where Washington was using the bean grinder. I tried to replicate it on the iPhone using the close-focusing ultrawide lens and the shot looks good, but it lacks the visual sophistication that I can get from a big, professional camera. Especially because the lack of background blur makes it easier to see distracting background items stored under the counter that are otherwise “hidden” in the blur on the main camera.
But the iPhone has its own secret weapon, too. Its size. The tiny dimensions of the iPhone — even with a filter and the SSD crudely taped to it — is so small that we were able to get shots that we simply couldn’t have achieved with the big cinema camera.
The iPhone’s small size meant it was possible to clamp it to one of the bean cooler’s arms — something I couldn’t have done with the big camera and lens. I monitored the footage using SmallRig’s wireless iPhone monitor.
In particular, this shot, where I rigged the iPhone to an arm inside the cooling machine so that it travelled around as the beans were churned. I love this shot — and a top-down view I shot of the arms turning beneath. Both angles give this incredible energy to the film and I think they are my favourite scenes of the whole production. It wasn’t easy to see the phone screen in these positions but SmallRig’s wireless iPhone monitor made it much easier to get my angles just right. Trying to rig up a large, heavy camera and lens to get the same shots was simply out of the question.
How well did the iPhone compare?
I’m really impressed with both cameras on this project, but my expert Director of Photography, Cal, had some thoughts, too.
“The thing I really found with the iPhone,” Cal explained, “was simply the creative freedom to get shots that I’d have never had time to set up. There’s only so long in a day and only so long you have access to filming locations or actors, so the fact that you can just grab your iPhone and get these shots is amazing.”
The range of DZO Film primes we had for the cinema camera gave us great flexibility on the day.
“I have used my iPhone on professional shoots before. One time in particular was when I was driving away from set and I saw this great sunset. If I’d have spent time rigging up my regular camera, I’d have missed the sunset. So I shot it on my phone and the client loved it — it ended up being the final shot of the film. At the end of the day, a good shot is a good shot and it doesn’t matter what you shot it with,” said Cal.
So was it all good for the iPhone?
“The depth of field and the overall look of the cinema lenses still come out on top — you’re just not going to get that on a phone,” explained Cal. “When it came to grading the footage, I had to use a lot of little workarounds to get the iPhones to match. The quality quickly started to fall apart in certain challenging scenes that just weren’t a problem with the BlackMagic.”
So it’s not a total win for the iPhone, but then, I never expected it to be. The iPhone was never going to replace the pro camera on this shoot, but it instead allowed us to augment our video with shots that we would otherwise never have gotten.
I love the creative angles we found using just the phone, and while Cal struggled to balance its colors as easily, the footage does fit in nicely with the rest of the video and makes it more dynamic and engaging as a result.
Director of Photography Cal Hallows, seen here pushed inside a coffee store room setting up the camera for a shot. Bless him.
And that’s not to say the shots we didn’t use from it weren’t good. I’m actually impressed with how the iPhone handled most of the things we threw at it.
So don’t assume that if you want to get into filmmaking, you need to drop tens of thousands on a pro cinema camera and a set of cine primes. Your iPhone has everything you need to get started, and it’ll let you flex your creativity much more easily.
Our days of shooting, editing and grading have proven that the iPhone isn’t yet ready to be the only camera you need on a professional set. But mix its small size in with your other cameras, and then you’ve got yourself a truly powerful production setup.
