The iPhone Keynote – Apple Being Cheap

Reading Time: 4 minutes
Recently Apple shot its entire keynote on their most expensive mobile phone. Whilst this sounds fantastic and empowering, it isn't. In my eyes this is a marketing gimmick and a sad commentary on the state of video production today.

Video as Art

Video is an art. Video is a creative pursuit. If you use an iphone to film a keynote then you do show that the cameras are high quality. This is available at a cost of 1750 CHF for the 1 terabyte iphone 15 Pro Max. That's a lot of money for a phone that you can't drop, without breaking the front or back pieces of glass. That's 1750 CHF for a camera where you can't swap the battery if you run out of juice. That's 1750 CHF for a camera that doesn't have a proper lense on the front.

For clarity, for me a proper lens is one that has several bits of glass to provide an excellent image, as well as some zooming ability, to frame the shot as we want it to be, without having to walk backwards or forwards to get the image that we want.

Limited Shot Value Control

My individual frustration with iphone video is that we are limited by the zoom. We have one or two shot values, and the rest is digital. We're not zooming into the shot we want. We're cropping pixels, to give the illusion of a zoom. When we look at the result we see how awful the image quality is.

With a broadcast lens we can frame the shot as we want, without moving the camera. Imagine filming a conference where the camera has to be in the seat right in front of the speaker, rather than several meters away. With a broadcast camera you can cover an entire room with two or three cameras placed strategically.

As we see with the Apple Keynote they use 1700 CHF iPhone Pro Max cameras with rigs costing tens of thousands of dollars each. This isn't grass roots production. This isn't minimalism. This is absurd.

And there's more. A few years ago I was asked "Would it be possible to film the High Commissioner walking from this room to that room?" and I said yes, but the aim was to do it for less money. My solution was to use an iphone on a DJI Osmo 3 streaming via Skype or a similar tool. It worked well. It was minimalist.

Maximalism

What Apple did was maximalist, as the name of the phone implies. The notion that we can film high quality video with mobile phones is not new and this has more to do with the switch from analogue to digital, than with the mobile phones made by a specific brand.

Analog Versus Digital

When people were filming with VHS, Hi8 and similar formats the signal was analag and upscaling it to broadcast quality was a challenge. Amateur video looked like amateur video. With the arrival of DV, DVCAM, DVCPro and other formats the ability to film high quality video with more affordable cameras became an ordinary part of life. If we're shooting for broadcast then we need one image quality, and if we're shooting for the web we need, or at least needed another image quality.

With MPEG-4, H.264, H.265 and future formats the image quality that smaller and smaller devices could get increased. Mobile phone video has been good enough for broadcast for years now. Even in-built laptop cameras have been good enough for broadcast for years.

The advantage of Digital video, as opposed to analogue video is that generation loss is almost inexistent. You can film, edit, edit again, and theoretically there is no loss from generation to generation.

Why Not Use the iPhone SE?

If Apple had shot the keynote with the iPhone SE, and pushed that forward, then it would be worthwhile, because they would have used the most affordable solution, rather than the most absurdly priced.

"We used our highest spec phone to film this" is nothing special. "We used the iPhone SE" would have been really interesting. Shooting with minimal rigs would have been more interesting too. Using film grade rigs with the most expensive iPhone is not noteworthy. It's absurd.

More than absurd, it's simple marketing. "If you buy our most expensive camera you can do the same". That's just stating the obvious.

Other Options

You can get the Sony A7 II for from 1200 CHF onwards and you can get the Blackmagic cinema camera for 1100 CHF. there are cheaper options that will provide cinematic quality at a lower price.

If you're wondering why I look at the one terabyte phone, rather than the 256 and 512 options the reason is simple. Video files are large, and if you take a smaller capacity phone, once you fill it, you will be stuck waiting for data files to transfer from the internal memory to an external device. With professional cameras you might record to two cards simultaneously and they are can be hot swapped if you write from one whilst swapping the second. You don't have that option with the iPhone Pro Max.

If the battery dies production stops, if the phone's memory is full, production stops. If you want another shot value you need to move the entire camera rig to set up again. An iPhone is interesting, when it's about minimalism, rather than maximums.

And Finally

I took a few seconds to scrub through the footage and the "shot on iphone" bits are just pieces to camera. Broadcast journalists have been doing this for year, but without a million dollar budget. I love the idea of using an iPhone to shoot video, when a bigger camera is too heavy, or not practical, but I don't want people to forget the beauty of using broadcast quality cameras that give camera operators more control on what they're shooting.

For all of the fuss that the event was shot on iphones I saw a lot of CG, animations and more. I think people made a big fuss about very little.