When Apple unveiled the iPhone 13 back in 2021, it made a huge deal over a headline new feature, Cinematic mode. This is the video equivalent of Portrait mode, allowing you to select a focus point and blur the background.
Portrait mode has improved dramatically in successive generations, but the same cannot be said of Cinematic mode. The company appears to have completely lost interest in the feature, and although that’s understandable in one way, I would argue it’s a big mistake …
Portrait mode just gets better
One of the most significant differences between a camera with a full-frame sensor and a smartphone with a tiny sensor is the ability to control depth of field. Put a wide aperture lens onto a full frame camera and you can achieve wafer-thin depth of field to really isolate the subject from the background. For example:
You can achieve similar if less dramatic effects with cameras with smaller sensors, but smartphone sensors are tiny in comparison, and one consequence is that almost everything will be in focus.
Portrait mode uses computational photography to simulate shallow depth of field. It uses a LiDAR sensor to measure the relative distance from the phone of different elements of the photo, and then processes that photo to apply an artificial blur to the more distant areas.
This was initially very crude, but Apple has continued to work on it with better and better performance over the years, including support for using it at night.
When viewed on an iPhone-sized screen, it’s honestly so good today that it can be hard to tell reality from simulation.
Cinematic mode has seemingly been forgotten
Apple seemed extremely excited about Cinematic mode back in 2021. The company shot a short film specifically to demo the capability, and it was incredibly impressive.
Of course, there’s a huge difference between shooting in a studio with a massive budget and complete control over your environment and real-world usage. When I put it to the test myself, I concluded that it wasn’t yet good enough even for amateur filmmaking, but that it was likely to improve dramatically, just as Portrait mode did.
Apple really should have called this a Beta. I think it didn’t because it wanted a headline feature for the iPhone 13, and this is it. But, it is in truth an early beta version. It tries very hard. It’s technically impressive. But it’s just nowhere good enough for real-life use.
However… the fact that it’s a beta version by any other name is also good news. I can still remember how bad the first version of Portrait Mode was, and how comparatively good it is now. We’ll of course see similar progress with Cinematic mode.
Unfortunately, that simply hasn’t happened. It is a little better today, and can work pretty well in ideal conditions, but it absolutely hasn’t seen anything like the same progression we saw with the still photography equivalent.
I can’t find any sign of Apple even mentioning the phrase in recent years. All the signs point to the company having completely abandoned development on it.
It’s understandable, but still a mistake
In one way, I can understand this, as it probably has very few users:
- Mass-market iPhone users neither know nor care about it
- Amateur filmmakers concluded it wasn’t good enough, so aren’t using it either
It wouldn’t be unreasonable for the company to conclude that interest in it is so low that it doesn’t justify the development resources needed to improve performance to the equivalent of today’s Portrait mode.
However … One of the very best things about the iPhone, in my view, is that it has encouraged people who may never have bought a dedicated camera in their lives to take an interest in photography. Similarly, having a reasonably capable camcorder in our pockets has given a sizable number of people an interest in videography and filmmaking.
A great many YouTubers who have gone on to achieve decent levels of success started out shooting on their iPhones. Indeed, some of them still do so today.
Putting resources into making the iPhone a more capable videography device would further accelerate this trend. It would allow more iPhone users to produce more professional-looking results, which is likely to encourage them further down the creative path.
Helping people express their creativity has always been one of Apple’s core values, irrespective of financial return. What’s important about Cinematic mode, in my view, is not how many people are using it today, but the number of people who would be using it if Apple continued to develop and promote it.
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