iPhone 13 Pro Max Cinematic Mode - Testing with Sandmarc Film Rig

**The iPhone 13 Cinematic Mode: A Game-Changer for Filmmakers and Enthusiasts**

As we delved into our experience with the iPhone 13's cinematic mode, it became apparent that this feature is not going to revolutionize filmmaking overnight. While it does offer some impressive capabilities, such as focus effects and other AI-driven tools, it still has its limitations.

One of the main criticisms leveled against the iPhone 13's cinematic mode was its inability to produce high-quality footage without significant editing. The camera's sensor, no matter how advanced, is only so good, and relying solely on the phone's capabilities can result in subpar footage. However, this limitation does not mean that the cinematic mode is useless. Instead, it serves as a useful tool for filmmakers who want to create professional-looking content without breaking the bank.

In our tests, we found that the iPhone 13's cinematic mode was capable of producing some impressive results, particularly when combined with the phone's advanced AI tools. The feature allows users to apply exposure curves and other grading effects to enhance the look and feel of their footage. However, these effects are not as sophisticated as those found in dedicated film cameras or professional editing software.

**The Art of Grading**

When it comes to grading footage, the iPhone 13's cinematic mode offers some useful tools, but it is not a substitute for human expertise. While AI-driven grading effects can be useful for quick, low-stakes productions, they lack the nuance and creativity of human editors. To truly achieve professional-looking results, filmmakers need to learn how to grade footage by hand.

Our team experimented with applying exposure curves and other grading effects to our iPhone 13 footage, and we were surprised at just how much of a difference it made. However, we also realized that the results were not quite as polished as those achieved on dedicated film cameras or in professional editing suites.

**The Future of Film Making**

So what does the future hold for filmmakers who want to create high-quality content using their iPhones? While the iPhone 13's cinematic mode is not a panacea, it does offer some exciting possibilities. For example, its advanced AI tools can be used to automate certain aspects of post-production, freeing up editors to focus on more creative tasks.

We also saw how the feature can be used to create quick proof-of-concept videos for clients or collaborators. By using the iPhone 13's cinematic mode, filmmakers can string together a rough cut in just a few hours, which can then serve as a starting point for further refinement and editing.

**The Verdict**

In conclusion, while the iPhone 13's cinematic mode has its limitations, it is still a useful tool for filmmakers who want to create professional-looking content without breaking the bank. By combining this feature with other advanced AI tools and learning how to grade footage by hand, filmmakers can unlock a wide range of creative possibilities.

However, it is essential to have realistic expectations about what this feature can achieve. It will not turn you into a master filmmaker overnight, but it can serve as a valuable assistant in the creative process. As always, we encourage our readers to share their experiences and opinions on this feature, and we look forward to seeing how they use the iPhone 13's cinematic mode in their own filmmaking endeavors.

**Full Disclosure**

As with all our reviews, we want to emphasize that our experience with the iPhone 13's cinematic mode was made possible by a generous gift from Sandmark goodies. We are grateful for their support and appreciate the opportunity to share our thoughts on this exciting feature.

In the interest of full disclosure, please note that we have not received any compensation or payment for our review of this feature. Our opinions are entirely genuine, and we strive to provide unbiased and informative content for our readers.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're going to check out the cinematography mode on the iphone 13 pro max although pete i think you should probably find some better eye candy for your film it's slim pickings pete i imagine you're really excited to try this new cinematography mode i've been aching to do i did a little bit while we were away on holiday but i i really want to do something kind of a bit more polished i think this is going to turn you into the next martin scorsese based on all of apple's promo material undoubtedly excellent yeah and uh to help us out with this san marco have kindly sent us over some gadgets to help us with the filming what is that that is the film rig okay so you can pop your your iphone in the bracket there there is a bracket that comes out here if you want to sort of put microphones on and all sorts of things so if you're serious about filming with an iphone that's probably quite a useful tool to have they also sent us the pro case did you want to pop that one on your phone oh okay can't help but notice there's some threads here yeah so this is how you attach their accessory lenses so you can get some different looks with your your filming awesome and they didn't send any though so it is just the case um what they did send though and you will like this pete this is the motion dolly so this is quite a neat device so it you can trundles across the table there you're going to like this you can also change the angle so that you can ah go inside i like it and what i like about this is you've got a standard screw thread here so with a bit of bracketry you could put a small camera on there there's also an adapter for gopro or insta360 and you've got this stretchy bracket for your phone excellent so pete you're obviously going to want to put your iphone 13 pro max into cinematic mode yep now i haven't got a 13 pro max i don't know much about this i assume it's going to be dci 4k 24 frames per second and didn't apple say that prores is supported on the iphone 13 yeah yeah so you're thinking about something that will achieve a really filmic look aren't you yeah yeah well the iphone 13 pro does all of those things but not in cinematic mode okay so what is it uh it's 30 frames per second about 1080p okay so it's 1080p that's not the end of the world is it um obviously it's got a decent sensor in there it's going to be down resin should be a nice picture but obviously you can change the frame rate though no it's 30 frames per second so what about us here in the uk and indeed like half of the rest of the world that have a 50 hertz electricity supply well i guess we'll find that won't we so with light so if you're not used to filming uh your lights might flicker if you're using a frame rate that's not a multiple of the frequency of the electricity if i explain that very well probably not but here in the uk like many other countries in the world where 50 hertz so that means you need to have 50 frames per second 25 frames per second you can get away with 24 frames per second and if you're in the united states and the other half of the world that uses 60 hertz electric then 30 frames per second makes sense 60 120 and of course 24 is a multiple so that works yeah but what you're saying is it's tied to 30 frames per second and you can't change it correct all i can change is the and i'm going to deploy the air quotes here the f-stop because of course it's not a real f-stop it's not using any lens um to do that depth of field depth of field is using ai to do that same as it did for the portrait mode that was introduced a while back i'd be interested to see what that looks like and you can adjust the exposure okay so everything else is automatic so you can change your shutter then no i don't think so so you won't be getting the film look with the 180 degree shutter then it would appear not and that's because of course it's going to now vary the rate of the shutter to stop the lights from flickering yes so i imagine that a cinematic mode would give you full creative control of the filming process but what you're saying is that you've got to hand over creative control to the chip inside your iphone it does look like that i mean i do get some of that back if i go to edit it because obviously it's not doing it's not recording the depth of field that's done by ai so i can adjust it afterwards but full creative control no interesting okay so to make this uh even more interesting we're gonna we're gonna go outside in fact we're gonna use a few locations around our offices here and uh erin who's sat behind the camera over there is going to model for us as i said it's slim picking sorry i'm going to also film but i'm going to use this what is that that is a panasonic hc x 1500 i think i bought that right it's a camcorder this isn't really a comparison between a camcorder and an iphone it's just what i'm going to use to document what we're doing today and when we've done that we'll come back in here and we'll offload our footage which should be amusing and edit it so we're downstairs in our office and this is actually a really challenging environment because there are windows all down the outside it's really bright sunshine today so going from inside to outside is going to be challenging interesting to see how the iphone copes with that definitely i know i'll need to use nd filters with the camcorder we've got aaron set up over here in the background so we're ready to start our first shot and you're going to be using the the san marco film rig for this and i'm going to also do the dolly so i'm going to try the same shot with both tools to see which gives me the result i want cool let's give it a go okay so what i'm doing here is unlocking the auto focus to aaron's face so that when i pull from the pillar to give that sense of motion it doesn't really the pillars basically going to stay in out of focus now i'm going to try and do the same shot with the dolly so pete how are you finding using a dolly well it's super smooth when you put it on the right surface but i'm finding it really difficult to get the speed consistent particularly when you're starting the shot and sometimes creatively you want to start the shot knowing that you want the focus on something that isn't in shot straight away but you can't do that in cinematic mode on the iphone interesting well i have a solution for the speed control thing okay which is to use a rubber band have you got a rubber band no i said how we going on we've done some of the external shots so they're in walking how are you finding the sand mark film rig i'm actually really um really pleased with the the results of it uh you're getting very smooth motion because you've got enough leverage on here that you just don't get with a with the phone yeah much easier than holding a phone well yeah because first of all you've got these really handy grips and you're also not worried about touching something on the screen or something that's going to interrupt the filming so i have to say i was a bit skeptical when you showed me this at first but so far it's really good and there's a lot of shots that i'm able to do with this that i thought i'd need the dolly for because of that smoothness and with the digital stabilization in the phone as well we're getting some good results okay so we're going to try now to do some dolly shots outside but of course the dolly has tiny little wheels and what we've got here is a really hard surface so we're going to need to bring a table out or something to use it yeah we are and i'm also going to do a tracking shot first which i'm not going to use the dolly for i'm going to try this and try running along while not running strolling alongside aaron as i film it so we'll see how that goes excellent let's give it a try something else that's probably worth mentioning is compared to traditional filmmaking where everything's screwed in and locked down and lots of setup is required you've obviously got the the flippy clamp here which makes it really easy to switch between dolly and rig and yeah sometimes you flick the wrong setting on the phone and you go into the wrong mode so you have to be watching for that but it's a quick process compared to what is actually a laborious process of true cinematic filmmaking which this is not so that was fun pete and we're back now in the studio we have a cup of coffee or half a cup of coffee if we're honest thanks erin did you spit in this one okay you can always tell because it's a bit stringy great um pete you were worried about battery life because your phone obviously is on the screen's got to be turned up too bright because we are outdoors how's your battery doing yeah i probably got about halfway through a battery halfway through a battery yeah i think so i was about 70 percent i was down to about i put it on charge now but it was a down down to about 25 so just under 45 and we're probably recording for about what an hour and a half i would say so yeah okay so here's the fun bit now we just uh need to offload our footage now of course i've just been documenting everything with the camcorder so i'll just pop the sd card out and um i'll i'll put it straight into my mac here okay i'll copy the footage off so that's me done okay i'm gonna over to you all right okay well i'm gonna try and use airdrop to do this um in fairness we already know that is the fastest way to get the footage off the phone you could try cabling it up but lightning is going to be slower than airdrop that's quite a lot of footage yeah yeah there's there's there's a good 20 hours of erin's face there so mine's already done three gig yeah mine's still preparing four gig still preparing how many gig have you done now six and a half okay just whilst this is going pete can you imagine a professional cinematographer wanting to sit around and wait for their iphone to prepare the airdrop like this no of course there is something else to think about i i haven't done any post editing on my phone yet so there were some shots where the autofocus wasn't where i wanted it to be but in reality what i'm going to do is identify those shots on my laptop and if i then need to reconfigure them and re-import them i'll do it that way because that's another thing i can't see a cinematographer doing reviewing footage on the phone no and then editing it no 28 gig still preparing so that hasn't even copied yet no it's still preparing what is it doing when it's preparing i wonder if it's stripping out the components that are iphone specific like the ai so it's it's actually rendering it could be rendering i'm going to import my footage now into davinci resolve okay you you you fill your boots i'll um i'll wait oh that now now you're air dropping peak right you ready except accept save to downloads finished that was that was 30 seconds wasn't it how much data is it 1.49 gig so i had 50 plus gigabytes of 4k footage and i copied it off the sd card and it took three minutes you had to process all your footage and you end up with one and a half gig of data and that whole process took twice as long to get onto your machine yes okay so we've done some rough edits of the material that we shot and let's just walk through the process and figure out whether we think the iphone is really a cinematic device you know could a professional cinematographer or videographer use the iphone to shoot good quality video no interesting because i think the video that it shoots looks alright and that's the point it looks all right and actually for a youtube channel or for you know a student or even for some you know amateur film productions i think i think it could could be could be used needs a bit of preparation though to get the quality of shots that you want for those kind of projects i think absolutely you know things that you you can't get away from if you really want the quality to be decent even with amateur things like lighting things like um consistency making sure people aren't in shock because you just don't have enough control over the settings especially when you're in cinematic mode i mean there are other apps that you can put on your iphone there are if you just want to shoot video with your iphone so we're not for a moment saying that shooting video with an iphone is a bad idea i think it makes a lot of sense if you're starting out in youtube rather than going and investing in loads of camera gear uh what i noticed about the footage uh coming off of this just as a general point i feel it came in slightly over exposed and we'll see what we can do with the with the grade at the end so i was expecting to come into this saying actually what we did was unusable it was hard work and i want to do it again and actually i've changed my mind on all of those things so first of all i was expecting to make much more use of the dolly than i did i was expecting that to be the really useful tool at the things that sam mark sent us but i have to say it was this so that that made a genuine difference to the filming process so if you are serious about filming on iphone we definitely give that a thumbs up and absolutely it is it doesn't feel when you look at it it doesn't seem like it would make that much difference but it gives you so much more stability you're not worried about hitting the controls or sometimes you have to hold the camera really awkwardly whereas with this it's just much much better so that was really good we even surmised that you could fit the dolly to it so you have it like this and then when you want to do a shot like that if you're looking for really quick production you could pop it down and then use the dolly you could you would need an adapter that isn't included with that but you would but you could cheap and cheerful on amazon so there's lots of stuff you could do with that the dolly of course i think this is a fantastic tool and i'm going to be using this for getting b-roll on the channel right here one of the other things i found about this is that because you have to mount it on the surface if you're doing out outdoor shots particularly to keep the surface smooth is that you were then running into the surface so there were some shots where i've had to compromise on how i wanted to edit the very short video i did with everything you do with filming there's always compromises and trying to to do any kind of serious production on an iphone there's always going to be compromises but what i will say is that it was really good fun i really enjoyed it and i think you could produce some some passable material on it there were some occasions some of the scenes at the bench where you could quick clearly see it was struggling to separate the subject from the background so there was some so this is the ring this is the depth of field effect around here you particularly have have an issue there's this just it's very difficult to cut out hair you know and to create that artificial if you're a skilled designer and as you can see on uh lucas hair here it's just it's not able to do the job and it's it's a a major tell because of course if we'd have taken a full-frame camera out there obviously we'd have needed some nd filters because of how bright it was but you could have had the aperture wide open and you could have done that with the lens and it would just look so much better well one of the other shots a shot i've got here of when we were pulling aaron out of the building and i was walking backwards a couple of things with that as well i was so focused on keeping aaron in shot and not falling over the eagle eyed of you will spot dave in the background filming the footage and i've deliberately kept that in because i just wanted to show that because of that and the lights i missed him in in that and we were trying to be really careful with that kind of thing that's just one of the problems generally when you're going from dark to light or light to dark it takes your eyes a moment to adjust it takes the camera even longer to adjust and we thought initially when we looked at the footage on the as you were doing it you were really impressed with how it was i have to say the iphone handled that beautifully but obviously now i've ingested it and looked at it maybe not so good not but that said still impressive because on this camera here i had to manually select an nd filter as we went outside and you didn't have to do that on your iphone and it's a fairly good transition and let's be fair as well here most cameras don't have an automatic variable nd filter so it's not an indictment of the the iphone that's just one of the challenges generally about filming and uh as we did the outdoor shots we also tried doing some tracking didn't we so erin walks down past our office building you you walked alongside and tracked her yeah i was quite pleased with that for an amateur yeah i did a quick try with the camcorder which has optical stabilization but it's not not like that you know you'd need a gimbal yeah with a with a traditional camera to get the same effect but of course the iphone is doing that by cropping in and that actually can be a good thing when you're doing the stabilization because you get that amazing effect but there are times when you miss something as we've discussed or you just physically can't do it but you think that's fine i can correct that in the edit you don't have that luxury when you're shooting cinematic with the iphone so having a larger 4k frame would allow you to crop in on certain things if i'm putting up a 4k video onto youtube then we'll shoot at 6k but of course if we're outputting 1080 we shoot at 4k and you essentially have four 1080p frames so when you do crop in a bit it means you can shoot everything with one camera you can crop in on individuals yeah so i'll be interested you know we've done a rough edit here i'll be interested to see how how tom can polish that up with a bit of grading uh perhaps some some exposure curves for some dealing with that transition shot you can probably get it quite smooth i would think yeah so just talking about the grade i mean what comes off of the iphone i mean i sort of in my mind i thought with the cinematography mode or cinematic mode i should say the way apple uh sold it at the event you know when they launched the iphone of course they had a professional director lighting kit actors stages everything all set up so it looked filmic yes but you shouldn't assume that the footage that you get from this looks in any way filmic straight off of the iphone because it doesn't doesn't no you know there's only so far you can you can go with it i i think what we'll do with the grade we won't get too creative with it in this video i mean the important thing to say of course is that we're shooting at 25 frames per second which is what we always shoot at for the channel and of course this is locked to 30 frames per second so what you see in this video is not really a true representation of the quality tell you what we could do though we could put the uh the final edited version on the podcast channel at 30 frames per second so that people can see the end product yeah so we'll do that so if you want a pixel peep a bit and check that out we'll we'll link to it in the description and put a link up there as well so you can go and watch that but finish watching this video first i guess please so overall is an experience you know we've we've been possibly a little bit critical of this feature without even testing ourselves but uh i all of the things that we were critical about are perfectly true aren't they this is this is not going to turn you into into scorsese no camera purchase will and having great ai tools to do focus effects and other things it it's nice it's not as good as a real thing and it still isn't going to turn you into some super creative artistic person but it was good fun and if you've got an iphone 13 and you want to have a go at it and you you know get get yourself something like this that that made as much difference i would say it's a cinematic mode yeah so i will just say thanks to some art for sending those over now um as always we have to do full disclosure they sent them over to us without charge but we're completely free to give our honest opinion on these things um so our honest opinion of this film rig is a great piece of kit yeah i'll be i'll be using it again for sure i like that and the dolly i think the dolly is very useful in a studio setting i can see me using this um but i think that you got better shots for this particular project you got better shots with the with this rig definitely uh the dolly is very cool though um the case well we can't really comment on that because we we didn't have any lenses to attach to it so i'm not really sure why we got sent that but you know it looks nice yeah it doesn't it's well made feels good in the hand would you use the cinematic mode or if you were filming with your iphone using this kit would you not just do it at the normal in the normal mode depends what i was what the output the intended outcome was i think i would now that i've played with it i would use the cinematic mode for certain things what do you think it makes easier i'll tell you where it might be quite good if you're a professional editor you're doing things for for clients and you want to basically put together almost like a proof of concept if you went to the clients you went took one of these you could go through and very quickly string something together i mean this has taken us less than an hour you could put a proof of concept together before you then go for a full shoot with all the equipment so that could be a good application for it so um yeah i think i think that's a wrap isn't it i think so so we'll put some links to the sandmark goodies in the description if you want to pick up some of those thanks again so much for sending those over i hope you enjoyed this look i hope it was useful for you if you've been sort of thinking and you're on the edge about whether you should upgrade to the next iphone or whether it's actually going to serve a purpose for video maybe we've answered some of your questions maybe we've just posed a whole lot more i'll be interested to see your comments absolutely as always thanks for watching thanks for your shares your likes your subs see you again soon for some more geekery cheerio youtoday we're going to check out the cinematography mode on the iphone 13 pro max although pete i think you should probably find some better eye candy for your film it's slim pickings pete i imagine you're really excited to try this new cinematography mode i've been aching to do i did a little bit while we were away on holiday but i i really want to do something kind of a bit more polished i think this is going to turn you into the next martin scorsese based on all of apple's promo material undoubtedly excellent yeah and uh to help us out with this san marco have kindly sent us over some gadgets to help us with the filming what is that that is the film rig okay so you can pop your your iphone in the bracket there there is a bracket that comes out here if you want to sort of put microphones on and all sorts of things so if you're serious about filming with an iphone that's probably quite a useful tool to have they also sent us the pro case did you want to pop that one on your phone oh okay can't help but notice there's some threads here yeah so this is how you attach their accessory lenses so you can get some different looks with your your filming awesome and they didn't send any though so it is just the case um what they did send though and you will like this pete this is the motion dolly so this is quite a neat device so it you can trundles across the table there you're going to like this you can also change the angle so that you can ah go inside i like it and what i like about this is you've got a standard screw thread here so with a bit of bracketry you could put a small camera on there there's also an adapter for gopro or insta360 and you've got this stretchy bracket for your phone excellent so pete you're obviously going to want to put your iphone 13 pro max into cinematic mode yep now i haven't got a 13 pro max i don't know much about this i assume it's going to be dci 4k 24 frames per second and didn't apple say that prores is supported on the iphone 13 yeah yeah so you're thinking about something that will achieve a really filmic look aren't you yeah yeah well the iphone 13 pro does all of those things but not in cinematic mode okay so what is it uh it's 30 frames per second about 1080p okay so it's 1080p that's not the end of the world is it um obviously it's got a decent sensor in there it's going to be down resin should be a nice picture but obviously you can change the frame rate though no it's 30 frames per second so what about us here in the uk and indeed like half of the rest of the world that have a 50 hertz electricity supply well i guess we'll find that won't we so with light so if you're not used to filming uh your lights might flicker if you're using a frame rate that's not a multiple of the frequency of the electricity if i explain that very well probably not but here in the uk like many other countries in the world where 50 hertz so that means you need to have 50 frames per second 25 frames per second you can get away with 24 frames per second and if you're in the united states and the other half of the world that uses 60 hertz electric then 30 frames per second makes sense 60 120 and of course 24 is a multiple so that works yeah but what you're saying is it's tied to 30 frames per second and you can't change it correct all i can change is the and i'm going to deploy the air quotes here the f-stop because of course it's not a real f-stop it's not using any lens um to do that depth of field depth of field is using ai to do that same as it did for the portrait mode that was introduced a while back i'd be interested to see what that looks like and you can adjust the exposure okay so everything else is automatic so you can change your shutter then no i don't think so so you won't be getting the film look with the 180 degree shutter then it would appear not and that's because of course it's going to now vary the rate of the shutter to stop the lights from flickering yes so i imagine that a cinematic mode would give you full creative control of the filming process but what you're saying is that you've got to hand over creative control to the chip inside your iphone it does look like that i mean i do get some of that back if i go to edit it because obviously it's not doing it's not recording the depth of field that's done by ai so i can adjust it afterwards but full creative control no interesting okay so to make this uh even more interesting we're gonna we're gonna go outside in fact we're gonna use a few locations around our offices here and uh erin who's sat behind the camera over there is going to model for us as i said it's slim picking sorry i'm going to also film but i'm going to use this what is that that is a panasonic hc x 1500 i think i bought that right it's a camcorder this isn't really a comparison between a camcorder and an iphone it's just what i'm going to use to document what we're doing today and when we've done that we'll come back in here and we'll offload our footage which should be amusing and edit it so we're downstairs in our office and this is actually a really challenging environment because there are windows all down the outside it's really bright sunshine today so going from inside to outside is going to be challenging interesting to see how the iphone copes with that definitely i know i'll need to use nd filters with the camcorder we've got aaron set up over here in the background so we're ready to start our first shot and you're going to be using the the san marco film rig for this and i'm going to also do the dolly so i'm going to try the same shot with both tools to see which gives me the result i want cool let's give it a go okay so what i'm doing here is unlocking the auto focus to aaron's face so that when i pull from the pillar to give that sense of motion it doesn't really the pillars basically going to stay in out of focus now i'm going to try and do the same shot with the dolly so pete how are you finding using a dolly well it's super smooth when you put it on the right surface but i'm finding it really difficult to get the speed consistent particularly when you're starting the shot and sometimes creatively you want to start the shot knowing that you want the focus on something that isn't in shot straight away but you can't do that in cinematic mode on the iphone interesting well i have a solution for the speed control thing okay which is to use a rubber band have you got a rubber band no i said how we going on we've done some of the external shots so they're in walking how are you finding the sand mark film rig i'm actually really um really pleased with the the results of it uh you're getting very smooth motion because you've got enough leverage on here that you just don't get with a with the phone yeah much easier than holding a phone well yeah because first of all you've got these really handy grips and you're also not worried about touching something on the screen or something that's going to interrupt the filming so i have to say i was a bit skeptical when you showed me this at first but so far it's really good and there's a lot of shots that i'm able to do with this that i thought i'd need the dolly for because of that smoothness and with the digital stabilization in the phone as well we're getting some good results okay so we're going to try now to do some dolly shots outside but of course the dolly has tiny little wheels and what we've got here is a really hard surface so we're going to need to bring a table out or something to use it yeah we are and i'm also going to do a tracking shot first which i'm not going to use the dolly for i'm going to try this and try running along while not running strolling alongside aaron as i film it so we'll see how that goes excellent let's give it a try something else that's probably worth mentioning is compared to traditional filmmaking where everything's screwed in and locked down and lots of setup is required you've obviously got the the flippy clamp here which makes it really easy to switch between dolly and rig and yeah sometimes you flick the wrong setting on the phone and you go into the wrong mode so you have to be watching for that but it's a quick process compared to what is actually a laborious process of true cinematic filmmaking which this is not so that was fun pete and we're back now in the studio we have a cup of coffee or half a cup of coffee if we're honest thanks erin did you spit in this one okay you can always tell because it's a bit stringy great um pete you were worried about battery life because your phone obviously is on the screen's got to be turned up too bright because we are outdoors how's your battery doing yeah i probably got about halfway through a battery halfway through a battery yeah i think so i was about 70 percent i was down to about i put it on charge now but it was a down down to about 25 so just under 45 and we're probably recording for about what an hour and a half i would say so yeah okay so here's the fun bit now we just uh need to offload our footage now of course i've just been documenting everything with the camcorder so i'll just pop the sd card out and um i'll i'll put it straight into my mac here okay i'll copy the footage off so that's me done okay i'm gonna over to you all right okay well i'm gonna try and use airdrop to do this um in fairness we already know that is the fastest way to get the footage off the phone you could try cabling it up but lightning is going to be slower than airdrop that's quite a lot of footage yeah yeah there's there's there's a good 20 hours of erin's face there so mine's already done three gig yeah mine's still preparing four gig still preparing how many gig have you done now six and a half okay just whilst this is going pete can you imagine a professional cinematographer wanting to sit around and wait for their iphone to prepare the airdrop like this no of course there is something else to think about i i haven't done any post editing on my phone yet so there were some shots where the autofocus wasn't where i wanted it to be but in reality what i'm going to do is identify those shots on my laptop and if i then need to reconfigure them and re-import them i'll do it that way because that's another thing i can't see a cinematographer doing reviewing footage on the phone no and then editing it no 28 gig still preparing so that hasn't even copied yet no it's still preparing what is it doing when it's preparing i wonder if it's stripping out the components that are iphone specific like the ai so it's it's actually rendering it could be rendering i'm going to import my footage now into davinci resolve okay you you you fill your boots i'll um i'll wait oh that now now you're air dropping peak right you ready except accept save to downloads finished that was that was 30 seconds wasn't it how much data is it 1.49 gig so i had 50 plus gigabytes of 4k footage and i copied it off the sd card and it took three minutes you had to process all your footage and you end up with one and a half gig of data and that whole process took twice as long to get onto your machine yes okay so we've done some rough edits of the material that we shot and let's just walk through the process and figure out whether we think the iphone is really a cinematic device you know could a professional cinematographer or videographer use the iphone to shoot good quality video no interesting because i think the video that it shoots looks alright and that's the point it looks all right and actually for a youtube channel or for you know a student or even for some you know amateur film productions i think i think it could could be could be used needs a bit of preparation though to get the quality of shots that you want for those kind of projects i think absolutely you know things that you you can't get away from if you really want the quality to be decent even with amateur things like lighting things like um consistency making sure people aren't in shock because you just don't have enough control over the settings especially when you're in cinematic mode i mean there are other apps that you can put on your iphone there are if you just want to shoot video with your iphone so we're not for a moment saying that shooting video with an iphone is a bad idea i think it makes a lot of sense if you're starting out in youtube rather than going and investing in loads of camera gear uh what i noticed about the footage uh coming off of this just as a general point i feel it came in slightly over exposed and we'll see what we can do with the with the grade at the end so i was expecting to come into this saying actually what we did was unusable it was hard work and i want to do it again and actually i've changed my mind on all of those things so first of all i was expecting to make much more use of the dolly than i did i was expecting that to be the really useful tool at the things that sam mark sent us but i have to say it was this so that that made a genuine difference to the filming process so if you are serious about filming on iphone we definitely give that a thumbs up and absolutely it is it doesn't feel when you look at it it doesn't seem like it would make that much difference but it gives you so much more stability you're not worried about hitting the controls or sometimes you have to hold the camera really awkwardly whereas with this it's just much much better so that was really good we even surmised that you could fit the dolly to it so you have it like this and then when you want to do a shot like that if you're looking for really quick production you could pop it down and then use the dolly you could you would need an adapter that isn't included with that but you would but you could cheap and cheerful on amazon so there's lots of stuff you could do with that the dolly of course i think this is a fantastic tool and i'm going to be using this for getting b-roll on the channel right here one of the other things i found about this is that because you have to mount it on the surface if you're doing out outdoor shots particularly to keep the surface smooth is that you were then running into the surface so there were some shots where i've had to compromise on how i wanted to edit the very short video i did with everything you do with filming there's always compromises and trying to to do any kind of serious production on an iphone there's always going to be compromises but what i will say is that it was really good fun i really enjoyed it and i think you could produce some some passable material on it there were some occasions some of the scenes at the bench where you could quick clearly see it was struggling to separate the subject from the background so there was some so this is the ring this is the depth of field effect around here you particularly have have an issue there's this just it's very difficult to cut out hair you know and to create that artificial if you're a skilled designer and as you can see on uh lucas hair here it's just it's not able to do the job and it's it's a a major tell because of course if we'd have taken a full-frame camera out there obviously we'd have needed some nd filters because of how bright it was but you could have had the aperture wide open and you could have done that with the lens and it would just look so much better well one of the other shots a shot i've got here of when we were pulling aaron out of the building and i was walking backwards a couple of things with that as well i was so focused on keeping aaron in shot and not falling over the eagle eyed of you will spot dave in the background filming the footage and i've deliberately kept that in because i just wanted to show that because of that and the lights i missed him in in that and we were trying to be really careful with that kind of thing that's just one of the problems generally when you're going from dark to light or light to dark it takes your eyes a moment to adjust it takes the camera even longer to adjust and we thought initially when we looked at the footage on the as you were doing it you were really impressed with how it was i have to say the iphone handled that beautifully but obviously now i've ingested it and looked at it maybe not so good not but that said still impressive because on this camera here i had to manually select an nd filter as we went outside and you didn't have to do that on your iphone and it's a fairly good transition and let's be fair as well here most cameras don't have an automatic variable nd filter so it's not an indictment of the the iphone that's just one of the challenges generally about filming and uh as we did the outdoor shots we also tried doing some tracking didn't we so erin walks down past our office building you you walked alongside and tracked her yeah i was quite pleased with that for an amateur yeah i did a quick try with the camcorder which has optical stabilization but it's not not like that you know you'd need a gimbal yeah with a with a traditional camera to get the same effect but of course the iphone is doing that by cropping in and that actually can be a good thing when you're doing the stabilization because you get that amazing effect but there are times when you miss something as we've discussed or you just physically can't do it but you think that's fine i can correct that in the edit you don't have that luxury when you're shooting cinematic with the iphone so having a larger 4k frame would allow you to crop in on certain things if i'm putting up a 4k video onto youtube then we'll shoot at 6k but of course if we're outputting 1080 we shoot at 4k and you essentially have four 1080p frames so when you do crop in a bit it means you can shoot everything with one camera you can crop in on individuals yeah so i'll be interested you know we've done a rough edit here i'll be interested to see how how tom can polish that up with a bit of grading uh perhaps some some exposure curves for some dealing with that transition shot you can probably get it quite smooth i would think yeah so just talking about the grade i mean what comes off of the iphone i mean i sort of in my mind i thought with the cinematography mode or cinematic mode i should say the way apple uh sold it at the event you know when they launched the iphone of course they had a professional director lighting kit actors stages everything all set up so it looked filmic yes but you shouldn't assume that the footage that you get from this looks in any way filmic straight off of the iphone because it doesn't doesn't no you know there's only so far you can you can go with it i i think what we'll do with the grade we won't get too creative with it in this video i mean the important thing to say of course is that we're shooting at 25 frames per second which is what we always shoot at for the channel and of course this is locked to 30 frames per second so what you see in this video is not really a true representation of the quality tell you what we could do though we could put the uh the final edited version on the podcast channel at 30 frames per second so that people can see the end product yeah so we'll do that so if you want a pixel peep a bit and check that out we'll we'll link to it in the description and put a link up there as well so you can go and watch that but finish watching this video first i guess please so overall is an experience you know we've we've been possibly a little bit critical of this feature without even testing ourselves but uh i all of the things that we were critical about are perfectly true aren't they this is this is not going to turn you into into scorsese no camera purchase will and having great ai tools to do focus effects and other things it it's nice it's not as good as a real thing and it still isn't going to turn you into some super creative artistic person but it was good fun and if you've got an iphone 13 and you want to have a go at it and you you know get get yourself something like this that that made as much difference i would say it's a cinematic mode yeah so i will just say thanks to some art for sending those over now um as always we have to do full disclosure they sent them over to us without charge but we're completely free to give our honest opinion on these things um so our honest opinion of this film rig is a great piece of kit yeah i'll be i'll be using it again for sure i like that and the dolly i think the dolly is very useful in a studio setting i can see me using this um but i think that you got better shots for this particular project you got better shots with the with this rig definitely uh the dolly is very cool though um the case well we can't really comment on that because we we didn't have any lenses to attach to it so i'm not really sure why we got sent that but you know it looks nice yeah it doesn't it's well made feels good in the hand would you use the cinematic mode or if you were filming with your iphone using this kit would you not just do it at the normal in the normal mode depends what i was what the output the intended outcome was i think i would now that i've played with it i would use the cinematic mode for certain things what do you think it makes easier i'll tell you where it might be quite good if you're a professional editor you're doing things for for clients and you want to basically put together almost like a proof of concept if you went to the clients you went took one of these you could go through and very quickly string something together i mean this has taken us less than an hour you could put a proof of concept together before you then go for a full shoot with all the equipment so that could be a good application for it so um yeah i think i think that's a wrap isn't it i think so so we'll put some links to the sandmark goodies in the description if you want to pick up some of those thanks again so much for sending those over i hope you enjoyed this look i hope it was useful for you if you've been sort of thinking and you're on the edge about whether you should upgrade to the next iphone or whether it's actually going to serve a purpose for video maybe we've answered some of your questions maybe we've just posed a whole lot more i'll be interested to see your comments absolutely as always thanks for watching thanks for your shares your likes your subs see you again soon for some more geekery cheerio you\n"