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Comment by WillPostForFood | Hacker News Reader

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2023/10/behind-the-sce...

iPhone, knowledge, skill, another half million in fancy equipment, and you are good to go!

Seriously though, there was an astounding amount of cool gear in the behind the scenes. If it was just a guy shooting handheld iPhone using his skill and knowledge, that's one thing. It seems to be a different value proposition to take all the equipment, and crew, from a multi million dollar production company, and just swap the camera for an iPhone. It is extremely impressive quality demonstration, but not clearly accessible to the typical iPhone purchaser.

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There is an astounding amount of cool gear. None of it is mandatory.

You will be surprised what a DJI gimbal, duct tape and house hold objects could accomplish.

The limiting factor is now very much creativity and passion.

I was just on a poorly planned shoot where the iPhone saved us. The camera we used was too big and heavy to actually get the camera movements we had planned. We had just gotten a new DJI phone gimbal to test and we ended up using it with the iPhone. This was on a green screen stage so we didn’t want character from the lens or a shallow depth of field. All the shots were within the focal range of the phone too. I’m guessing about 70% of the final shots were shot on the phone. And because it’s LOG and ProRes, the footage fits right into the pipeline. Now even though we shot on a phone, we didn’t turn off the lights or send the actors home so maybe that’s cheating…

Sure, a company milking its customer with a Pro laptop starting with 8GB of RAM to save at best 20$ per unit is willing to pay up to a million dollar of gear "just because". No no no, totally unnecessary. Apple apologists should really listen to themselves, like seriously.

My takeaway from the article was that most of that gear either wasn't necessary or was only necessary because of Apple's specific self-imposed production requirements. And also due to the fact that they just hired a production team like they always do for these things, but this time they had them slap the iphone into the usual equipment in place of their regular camera.

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