iPhone Diary: For one video project, my iPhone was the perfect camera

I may have just taken delivery of my shiny new iPhone 15 Pro Max, but I do get to write one last diary post about its predecessor, before it gets unceremoniously packaged up to be sent back to Apple.

Not content with one time-consuming hobby – Argentine tango – I attempted to add another: amateur filmmaking. The latter didn’t get too far, as it struggled to compete for my time and attention (I’ve so far managed just two micro-shorts, totaling all of three-and-a-half minutes), but I did get to combine the two in one project …

The project emerged from the convergence of two different desires. On the filmmaking side, I was keen to try my hand at a short documentary. The key advice I read on this was to ensure the topic is one that interests you a lot, else you’ll never see it through. Check.

On the dance side, there’s a shortage of men in tango*, and I wanted to create a short doc that would allow dancers to share what they love about tango. While the film itself is gender-neutral, my goal is to try to create additional exposure for it with predominantly male audiences – 9to5Mac readers being one of those, of course.

*There’s a whole bigger conversation about the traditional roles in tango, and how this is changing – but while changes in the traditions are part of the solution, bringing more men into tango is definitely a much-needed second element.

The format of the documentary is a dozen interviews shot in my apartment, supplemented by B-roll of the same people dancing in milongas (social dance events).

You can watch the video here, and then I’ll talk about why the iPhone was the perfect camera.

The great equipment debate

There’s an evergreen debate in photography and videography about the importance or otherwise of the equipment used.

One side argues that Hollywood studios wouldn’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on cinema cameras if they could get the same results with iPhones.

The other side argues that it’s the photographer who matters, not the hardware, and point to excellent short films made with smartphones.

As is often the case, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Those “shot on iPhone” films are typically shot using rigs that allow the phone to be hooked up to far more expensive lenses. You can buy adapters that let you use DSLR lenses with your iPhone, and the same principle can allow the use of cinema lenses too.

On a more mundane level, it’s a debate I’ve been having with myself, as I plan a return to a more minimalist lifestyle (another story for another day). Do I keep my BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera rig, or could I get decent enough results with a semi-pocketable Sony ZV-1 and an iPhone?

I decided to use the project to put this to the test, using the Sony for the interviews, and my iPhone 14 Pro Max for the dance footage.

I won’t dig into my rumination on the Sony, partly because it isn’t wildly relevant here, and partly because my jury is still somewhat out: The ZV-1 did a decent job, but delving into arcane and unrelated menus to adjust the simplest and most complementary of settings was a real pain compared to the haven of logic and simplicity, which is the BlackMagic user interface, even when using custom buttons and menus. The BMPCC 4K’s ability to shoot direct to SSD also relieves storage anxiety, and smooths workflow.

But whichever camera I’d used for the interview footage, there was only really one choice for the dance footage: my iPhone.

The dance footage was shot guerilla style. My original idea – to get all the interviewees and dance partners together in one place at one time, and shoot in a hired dance studio – proved wildly impractical. With conflicting schedules, especially over the summer holidays, it was hard enough to schedule interviews and dance shoots with one person at a time, let alone 12!

That meant shooting the footage at public dance events. That’s no problem from either a legal or privacy perspective: It’s the norm for organizers to shoot video, either for livestreaming or later sharing on social media, so everyone in the room understands they may appear in public video footage. It’s also common for dancers to shoot their own videos while the sitting out dances, also typically shared online.

But at the same time, using any kind of “proper” camera – let alone a full-on BlackMagic rig – would have attracted unwanted attention. It would, for sure, have resulted in people staring at the camera.

Shooting with an iPhone, though? Everyone does that, and nobody gives you a second glance.

I also shot in 4K for 1080p output, purely to have some framing flexibility. This came in very handy for two of the shoots, where I needed to crop someone out of the frame, either because they were doing something distracting, or looked unhappy about being in shot.

It did mean accepting the technical limitations

Of course, the iPhone does come with some limitations.

Most notably, I couldn’t get the degree of depth of field control I’d have ideally liked. After proudly launching Cinematic Video at the iPhone 13 keynote, Apple went very, very quiet about it!

My own tests at the time showed that it had promise, but was nowhere near ready for primetime. I was still pretty excited about it at the time, because I remembered how bad Portrait Mode was when first launched, and that’s improved dramatically since then.

I’d expected similar progress with Cinematic Video – but nope, when I tested it again in the summer, its performance didn’t seem to have improved at all. The glitches were just too distracting for real-life use, and in some low-light conditions it simply refused to play at all.

My guess is that not enough people cared about it, and Apple has essentially abandoned the feature in all but name.

The second issue was noise. Shooting in low light meant that some of the dance footage was noisier than I’d have liked, and Final Cut’s noise-reduction didn’t perform particularly well in this amateur’s hands.

However, I didn’t find this bad enough to be distracting. Indeed, the iPhone 14 Pro Max performs way better than most smartphone cameras in this regard, so people are used to looking at way worse noise in these sorts of environments.

Not to mention my own

As with my previous filmmaking projects, I learned a lot along the way – including what not to do next time. Shooting the interviews against a shiny white background, for example, it had seemed sensible to wear a white shirt to minimize my reflection – but nope!

I also used a mix of daylight and video lighting, but the variations in natural lighting as clouds passed in front of the sun – and color temperature changes as the sun set – meant I would have been far better off closing all the blinds and using only artificial lights and reflectors.

Belt-and-braces approach

For the interviews, I set up the iPhone on a second tripod, mostly to have a second, wider view, for visual variety. In the end, I didn’t use any of that footage, as I was only using very short clips of the actual interview footage. But it also served as a backup camera, as I could have cropped in from 4K to 1080p to match the framing of the main camera. That too proved unnecessary, thankfully.

I did, though, have good reason to be glad of my belt-and-braces approach on the audio side. There was one interview where I could hear clicking, and couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. It turned out to be the interviewee’s hair hitting the lavalier mic as she turned her head with expansive gestures. I’d used a standalone sound recorder as backup, and was able to swap out the audio for that.

Looking forward to testing the iPhone 15 Pro Max

I’ve of course already started testing out the photo and video capabilities of my iPhone 15 Pro Max, and will share some results shortly. But in the meantime, thanks iPhone 14 Pro Max – you were a star.

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