Apple Reveals What 'Shot on iPhone 15' Really Means

The iPhone 15 Pro has Apple’s most advanced camera setup ever, and the company was keen to show it off in its most recent product announcement. The “Scary Fast” event saw the reveal of new Macbook Pros with Apple’s new M3 ARM chip, but the event itself was also a vehicle to promote the iPhone. Apple shot the entire thing with an iPhone 15 Pro Max, but the company’s behind-the-scenes video puts that claim in a new light. In addition to the phone, Apple used thousands of dollars worth of equipment and a team of professional videographers and editors. So, don’t expect your videos to look this good.

Apple made a big deal of the iPhone 15 Pro’s cameras when announcing the phone several months back. The base model iPhone 15 still has just two camera sensors (a wide-angle and ultrawide), and the Pro adds a 5x telephoto. The primary and ultrawide sensors are also more capable on the Pro phone, collecting more light for faster captures.

When you whip out your phone to shoot a video, you’re most likely holding it in your hand. While optical and electronic stabilization have come a long way, you’ll never be able to replicate the smoothness of the custom SpaceCam rig seen above. Apple also used gimbal mounts and drones to capture some shots for Scary Fast.

The stability of a shot is one of the things that makes it look professional, but even the smoothest sweep won’t matter if you can’t see anything. Apple events also use professional subject lighting designed by experts to bring out details and minimize shadows. The lighting rigs Apple uses are mounted to a motorized cart so they can be moved and adjusted throughout the production. These are the same lights Apple uses when shooting with professional cameras—it just swapped in an iPhone.

And then there are the people. Apple notes that it has production specialists Jeff Wozniak and Jon Carr on staff, who worked on projects like Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar, and Iron Man 2. The videos were colored by Stefan Sonnenfeld, a veteran of Stranger Things, The Equalizer 3, and Fast X. “It’s pretty amazing how you can put this in the hands of someone who’s a professional director and they don’t have to change their equipment — they don’t have to change any of the things that they always do,” says Carr.

All of this is interesting and certainly not a bad thing for the iPhone. Professionals can do pro-level things with the camera on this smartphone—we’ve come a long way from the 2MP fixed-focus sensor on the original iPhone. However, this is not the way anyone who purchases the iPhone 15 Pro will shoot videos. You probably won’t have a custom gimbal mount for cinematic shots, a $5,000 studio light, or a small army of expert cinematographers. Most people won’t even bother to shoot with ProRes Apple Log encoding, let alone connect an external drive to shoot multiple takes and surpass the phone’s storage limit. This doesn’t prove the iPhone Pro is the best video camera for consumers, but it does prove that it can be used to do professional work. In this way, at least, it lives up to the name.