iPhone 15 Pro | 5 Ways This Phone Changes The Way You Tell Stories
The new iPhone brings some quality of life features that could completely change how you tell stories with your Smartphone!
It’s Apple Keynote day - one of my favorite days of the year! It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Apple’s phones, so I always love seeing what new features they’re going to announce. Specifically, I always want to know what they’re going to do with the photography and filmmaking side of things. Today I’m going to talk through five of the things that will change how you use your Smartphone to tell stories.
USB-C
USB-C finally comes to the iPhone. While the lighting cable had it’s day, it’s been holding the phone back for a few years now. Why’s this significant? Well, besides the fact that now I can finally use one wire to charge all of my devices, it opens up the opportunity to pull footage from your phone quickly. While USB-C remains at 2.0 speeds on the iPhone, the iPhone Pro improves things by speeding it up to USB 3.0 speeds. Finally.
Why’s this significant? While you can easily edit on your phone, sometimes it’s nice to sit down at a computer and edit your story. Problem is, it’s slow to transfer over your footage. ESPECIALLY if you filmed ProRes video. With the update to USB 3.0, you can finally transfer your video at 2013 speeds.
External Hard Drive Support
Filming on your phone takes up a bunch of space - once again - ESPECIALLY if you’re filming in ProRes. The iPhone 15 Pro allows you to plug in an external hard drive and record your video footage to that drive. Additionally, this unlocks ProRes at 60fps, so you can shoot some nice slow motion footage at full quality. ProRes can often be overkill for videos, but the option to utilize an external hard drive makes it much more appealing. Plus, talk about ease of transferring over to another device to edit. Just plug in the drive and you’re already able to work with that footage!
Focal Lengths
Both the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro introduce some improvements to how it handles the focal lengths of each lens. The main camera on each are a 48 megapixel camera, which is great for photography. It becomes more appealing for video because this means that the camera can crop into that camera and give you a few extra focal lengths while not adding additional lenses. The main lens now can operate at 24mm, 28mm, and 35mm without any major quality hit. So even if you go for the iPhone 15, you now have four focal lengths to film at. This helps because it means you can quickly grab different shots while filming an event, allowing you to grab a wide shot, medium shot, and then grab a few closeups without needing to change too much. Meanwhile, the iPhone 15 Pro brings another improvement to the filmmaking world…
Periscope Lens
The periscope lens has been rumored for years. I’m not about to talk through the science of how it works, but the fact that you now have a 5x telephoto lens on your smartphone, giving you effectively a 135mm lens, is insane. It’s just another tool to grab a variety of shots, though you’ll want to be careful as the more zoomed in the lens, the harder it is to keep the shot stable. The phone does add in a ton of stabilization, so it’ll be interesting to see how much it offsets the movements of your hands, but this focal length may be best used with a tripod, monopod, or other stabilization method. Regardless, I can’t wait to test it out and put it through the paces!
Action Button
Finally, the iPhone 15 Pro brings a small change that makes the phone even better as a filmmaking tool. You now have an Action Button that you can set to open the camera, so that means you can open the camera even quicker and easier. It’s a subtle addition, but anything that speeds up the process is a win. I’d love to see Apple add shortcut support to this button, so then you could use it to open something like FilmicPro or CinemaP3, but the native application is a great tool!
BONUS: AirDrop Improvements
While not an improvement to the iPhone itself, iOS 17 introduces an update to AirDrop when transferring to another device on your account. Instead of needing to keep the devices right next to each other for the duration of your transfer, you can now initiate the transfer and finish it via the world wide web. AirDrop was previously my preferred way to transfer over video, due to the USB 2.0 speeds being so slow, but you’d need to keep the devices awake and near each other. This was pretty frustrating at times, because if you got distracted then suddenly you’d need to start all over. While they haven’t announced when these improvements will officially go live, it promises to make the process much more painless.
The iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro are once again, just tools to help you in telling your story. You can tell effective stories with an iPhone X or SE, but it’s always exciting to look at the updates in new phones for when you eventually decide to upgrade. As always, though, remember that it’s not about the gear, it’s about the story!
