Using The iPhone 12 Pro Max As A Cinema Camera?! WOAH!

[Music] [Music] oh that's pretty cool wait was this in there the whole time [Music] so so jumping right in here i gotta say absolutely worth the wait now i know the design of phones whether it's rounded edges or squared off edges is pretty subjective but for me the iphone 4 4s 5 5s all those phones were the best iphone designs of all time and i am so excited and so happy that they brought back the squared edges now if you're new here and you haven't seen any of my videos before you should know that i am coming from the iphone 10s max and so i never even had the 11 so this is actually a huge jump for me talking about battery another huge improvement one thing that i forgot about while not upgrading every year is the fact that over the two year time frame your battery starts to dwindle way faster and so with my 10s max i was charging at least two or three times on a normal day in the full two days that i've had this i've easily gotten over six hours of screen on time definitely could cross over that seven hour mark if i wanted to i remember everyone talking last year on the 11s how good the battery was and this is apparently around the same and so i'm happy to be part of that group with really solid battery now can't say the same for all the 12 mini owners out there sorry mom the speakers and mics also sound really good on here if you have basically a brand new phone from last year may not be a huge difference but if you're coming from a couple years older and your phone is not in perfect condition these sound great and also here's a quick little sound clip from earlier today that i didn't think i was going to grab but it may be useful depending on where you live all right so that's enough about the general phone that's not what this video is all about let's jump into talking about video i've been waiting for this phone for so long i wanted to do something special and so we are going to basically go through three different steps of testing we're going to talk about the stock camera app with its old hdr dolby vision 10-bit colors we're going to talk about third-party apps primarily filmic pro and then we're going to talk about this insane rig by beastgrip which basically turns your phone into a nice depth of field mirrorless dslr cinema camera looking s thing the reason i'm kind of sounding weird right now is because it's not perfect but we're going to get into it now real quick before i start showing sample footage i want to point out that pretty much every clip you see here unless marked otherwise was shot using the wide the regular main sensor of the 12 pro max i did this because the other two lenses are pretty much like uh the 12 pro so keep that in mind while watching all the sample footage all right so the stock app we've all heard the news by now it's got dolby vision it's got 10-bit color and especially when you're viewing it on the phone itself with a dolby vision screen it looks incredible it's vibrant but natural colors if you're a long time follower of the channel and you know that a couple months ago i did the note 20 ultra that was a beast of a camera as well and i loved it but samsung tends to go a little heavy on the saturation for my taste you may love it it's totally great fantastic phone i'm not bashing on it by any means but for my subjective taste i like the much new more neutral natural colors that the iphone is producing you can color correct this stuff way further than i thought now the big issue right now with the stock footage that you get if you turn on hdr aka the dolby vision is when you're viewing the footage not on the phone screen itself now if you text it or upload it to social media it's basically going to auto convert it to a normal sdr image that's going to look pretty much normal to anyone viewing it but if you want to go in and be a little taste maker yourself then you can actually like airdrop it for example to a mac and i threw it up in davinci resolve and here's where it gets interesting because first you got to set up your project in a hdr format you can see the settings that i use on the davinci resolve project here if you want to copy it this gets you a pretty solid base but the highlights are very high you have so much information to work with because again it's 10 bit color and i found that you can really push this image and especially with davinci resolve 17's hdr primary controls it's pretty incredible what you can do with some of these shots but this is a huge butt that was my biggest reasoning for creating my last iphone video with the 12 pro where i said kind of disappointed is the fact that these pro line of cameras don't have any pro settings at all i don't know why that i especially an ex-apple employee or anyone else should expect differently from apple they're the ones to go no no no i know how to make a good image just take what i give you just take what i give you and it's going to be great and most the time especially for the average person absolutely true but if i'm buying the pro phone i want some pro modes again the samsung galaxy note 20 ultra amazing pro features the sony xperia one mark ii the stock like basic camera app kind of sucks but the pro camera app was the best software for any smartphone camera that i've ever seen or used but no here we get a little checkbox for hdr we get to choose our resolution our frame rate and i guess codec but one thing that no one else really talks about but i love talking about is bitrate besides color bit depth like 8 bit and 10 bit the bit rate the amount of data that's actually being written to the footage and to the memory card is a huge deciding factor of the final quality image you get for example what you're seeing right now for my black magic pocket 6k has like 1.6 gigabits per second data rate i actually found out recently how to uh check footage for bitrate really neat trick all you have to do is open up any video in quicktime and hit command i you know get all the video information including the bit rate data rate is also what it's called turns out iphones use a variable bitrate which isn't anything new the saddening part is just how low it actually is if you shoot at 4k 24 then it's going to produce around a 24 megabit per second data rate if you're shooting at 60 it's around 60 megabit per second and quite interestingly is for all low light footage it does boost it up to around 110 megabits per second but apple obviously has found an incredible way to optimize the sharpness the noise reduction the contrast the processing skin tones all of that stuff their computational photography and filmmaking is insane and i'm not downplaying that by any stretch of the imagination i would not have guessed that what you're seeing right now is 24 megabit per second data rate and still have that much push and pull in post-production for color correcting but one of my favorite places to go shoe is this wooded area here this is where you can start to see the difference when using filmic pro or other third-party apps you see in filmic pro you can turn the bitrate up to extreme the extreme is up to 140 megabits per second so way higher than the base data rates and even higher than the low light i can only imagine how much better and how much more data you would have to work with if they just allowed you to turn that on by default or kept it as default now the other thing that filmic pro has is the log v2 now log of course is just shooting in a flatter profile so it's gonna be less contrast less saturated and it gives you much more room in post this is not something you shoot in and then just send off to your buddy this is something that you're shooting with the intent to edit and stylize the way you want and honestly i begged forever that apple would create some sort of pro mode with a log but honestly the dolby vision footage is so flexible that i don't even care for that all i want is higher bit rate like just make a pro mode i get for most people you want lower bit rates because that means smaller files uh takes up less room you'd have less people complaining about their phones filling up but again some sort of pro mode that just is like hey here's an extreme bit rate here's you don't even have to call bitrate come up with some fancy apple term for it you love doing that can you tell i feel defeated here so apple if you're listening please if you can just unlock and give us the higher bit rates for a pro mode or something that'd be awesome and for our final setup here let's talk beast grip so first this is the beast pro cage again they make phone specific cases if you want the reason i got the universal is because i make these phone videos all the time so i wanted something that can fit pretty much every phone out there so you just lift that up so i'll put i'll slide it down so now i can see the lens uh fully fits in that circle here but if i wanted to use a different one you have two more thumb screws right here and you can move this up or down as necessary and again you can move these thumb screws in and out as well as the move the phone you still full access to all of your charging ports you have a hot shoe right here comes with another hot shoe adapter the next thing here everything you see here is basically three parts so you have the cage and then you have the rails and dof adapter support and then you have the actual dof adapter so you can buy all of these separately or together as a bundle for a little discount nice little thumb screw in there so now that we got it on there i'm going to loosen this which allows me to oop i forgot i'm going to loosen the cage on it as well and so now with the dof adapter ring loosened they usually recommend having this which is your lens release kind of facing outwards so if you have that perfectly level kind of this way then the entire adapter should be level as well and now take your lens of choice i'm going to be using my 45 millimeter irix lens you should always have lens support just like you have on the dof adapter this isn't b script this is just a very generic lens sport system i already have and i'm also using a follow focus all right the reason i like the fall focus system here is obviously one it's nice because the rails got in the way of me focusing from underneath and so now it gives me basically two grips so on the left hand side i have my focus but i'm also holding it steadier and you have the nice uh grip from the case over here alright so why would you use this thing its sole purpose is to add depth of field and so i really like that on their website they literally list out all of the limitations straight up front and i can tell you after using it for a couple weeks all these limitations are one completely accurate and very honest for example if you're shooting a wide scene and you want to like look at a whole landscape don't use this it is meant to focus on a subject in the middle of the frame and have pretty much soft edges almost looking like a vintage lens so you're going to notice some major softening here this thing does not get tack sharp but honestly one of my favorite use cases that i love this adapter for is fixing the god awful lens flares that iphones have that's right it's still gonna flare but instead of being like a little speck orb that just like awkwardly shoots around like a little ufo on the screen now in most scenarios it actually looks like a real cinematic lens flare and so while the image is softer i think we all can agree that shots like this look more cinematic than a shot like this and if you're curious about the beast grip and all their accessories and stuff obviously they'll be linked down in the description below so what are my final thoughts here i started seeing a lot of comments talking about like chill man it's just a phone why are you trying to act like it's a cinema camera or comparable to a dslr or anything like that i know that no phone in existence can compare to a cinema camera i make these sort of videos for two reasons one because it's fun just to see how close in certain situations you can get a phone camera to a real camera and two best of all i have gotten a bunch of comments from people who their phone is their primary camera for whatever reason and a lot of them want to be content creators themselves they start youtube channels and you start with what you have so i'm happy to share tips that allow people to get the full use out of their phone to give the best videos possible and so even if just five people actually use some of these tips and make better videos that's reason enough for me to keep making them so if you want my summary the iphone 12 pro max is a fantastic camera i'm going to say subjectively that it is my favorite video mobile phone camera ever the note 20 ultra definitely has better software with the pro mode but in terms of the final image look i just prefer the iphones if you guys want me to compare the two let me know also know down in the comments below because i think that would be a really fun head dead competition there and with the pro max version having the bigger sensor on the wide angle i think is definitely noticeable over the regular 12 pro i noticed much better detail and it was much better lighting in low light situations as well as you get a much more natural depth of field even without using the beast grip adapter so when i'm filming myself kind of in vlog mode or filming other people it doesn't look as much like the computational blurring the background computer stuff that all phones are doing nowadays and yeah that's my take on the iphone 12 pro max let me know what you guys think down below and also let me know what phone i should do a video like this next got a ton of content coming for you guys in the next couple of weeks and hopefully way longer than that so don't forget to get subscribed and like this video if it was worth your time see you guys in the next video

Channel: michael tobin

Views: 493,049

Rating: 4.8136392 out of 5

Keywords: iphone 12 pro max, iphone 12 pro camera, iphone 12 mini, iphone 12 pro max camera, iphone 12 pro max case, iphone 12 pro max dolby vision, iphone 12 camera, iphone 12 pro cinematic, iphone 12 pro review, iphone 12 pro max vs iphone 12 pro, iphone 12 pro max vs xs max, iphone 12 pro max review, iphone 12 pro max camera test, iphone 12 pro max video test, apple iphone 12 pro, samsung galaxy note 20 ultra, note 20 ultra vs iphone 12 pro max, beastgrip dof adapter mk2

Id: tz0p7wX3k_Y

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Somewhere, Christopher Nolan sheds a tear.

[u/Deckard2022]

Tarantino dies, spins in his grave, comes back to life and vomits uncontrollably for 30mins

[u/adamlaceless]

Does anyone know which brand the phone/watch dock is near the beginning?

[u/mikeypod]

What's going on here... just spamming us with your video?

[u/Mongoose49]

You talk about bitrate without talking about compression, which is stupid, cause a high compression file might have a low bitrate but be much better quality than a low compression file with an insanely high bitrate.

[u/TheJoo52]

Marketing hype is marketing hype. This footage looks great for a phone but nobody is going to be shooting anything for the big screen on it.

[u/tyler_durden999]

Does anyone know what model speakers are those? Next to his monitor? Looks pretty cool

[u/whtrbt8]

I would say this is a pretty good video run down of using the iPhone 12 Pro Max under 14.3 beta to get Dolby Vision and higher bit rate via Filmic pro. It’s also nice to see a cage and adapted cinema lens in order to fix the crazy blue laser flare on the iPhone. Until Apple gives us a bare sensor camera, this issue won’t get fixed. I’m not saying the iPhone isn’t a good filming tool, it’s just that it can’t be the only tool in use because of its limitations.

[u/RussianVole]

I’m not exactly as blow away by the 12 Pro video as I was hoping to be.

1080p by default was annoying to find out and correct.

And when you begin recording a 4K video, you’re locked at the camera [ultra wide/ wide/ tele] you were at when you began, unlike 1080p which offers switching between cameras during recording.