iPhone filmmaker Joey Helms, noted for his cinematic city footage of each year’s iPhone Pro models, says that the iPhone 16 Pro is not a big upgrade from last year’s model.
He also answered questions about how he mounted the iPhone on a drone for the aerial shots in this year’s video …
Helms has shot sample footage showcasing the capabilities of the last three generations of iPhone Pro models:
iPhone 16 Pro not a big upgrade
He said that he finds the Camera Control button too finicky for him and not reliable, so his only use for it is to hit record.
The audio mix capability is “impressive” when you listen to the footage on a phone, but you notice the limitations when you listen more closely.
As soon as you have headphones on or use bigger speakers the noise cancelation artifacts and wobble becomes clear. So net net, it is cool for quick mobile edits and social posts but noone will yet rely on an iPhone to record sound for any professional work.
The only significant upgrade in his eyes us the ability to shoot high-quality 120fps slo-mo footage, but he says this is of limited real-life use.
In my opinion the only worthy upgrade in the 16 series from a filmmaking perspective is the ability to shoot 120fps in 4K and ProRes LOG. This said 120fps is somewhat an odd frame rate since it is too slow for most shots but not slow enough to get a real slow motion wow effect. Either way it is not a frame rate many will use regularly and from that perspective an upgrade from 15 Pro to 16 Pro is not worth it for most.
He did, though, notice that Apple seems to have improved the reliability of SSD recording, with one caveat.
I noticed that recording onto SSDs (which I do by default when shooting in ProRes LOG) is much more reliable compared to when the 15 Pro launched. Big watch out though, format the SSD to ExFat before. At first mine were Mac OS Extended and I ran into issues when recording 120fps in 4K ProRes to the SSD where the camera app partially froze, couldn’t record anymore, and only a full restart could fix it. Formatting the SSD to ExFat did the trick though.
Drone footage with the iPhone 16 Pro
This year’s footage included a lot of drone shots, and Helms said he’d had a number of questions about this.
We mounted the iPhone 16 Pro (not the Max to keep weight down) using a 3D printed mount to a custom-built iFlight Chimera 7in FPV drone. The drone was flown by professional drone pilot Sam Perez based out of Chicago.
The challenges we ran into were twofold: 1) iPhones are not very aerodynamic and it acted as a sail on the drone. This made split-S drops down a building more difficult.
2) The micro vibrations by the drone in combination with the image stabilisation on the phone led to wobbles. Switching of the enhanced stabilisation made it even worse, but it looks like you cannot fully turn off stabilisation on the iPhone.
Images: Joey Helms; iFlight
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