Gorgeous 4.2K Video of San Francisco Showcases the iPhone 17 Pro’s Capability
A filmmaker has put the new iPhone 17 Pro to the test and created a beautiful 4.2K short video of San Francisco, capturing amazing colors and dynamic range for a smartphone.
Film director Kirk Mihelakos shot the video in the Blackmagic Camera App and used the new capability to capture footage in ProRes RAW. Mihelakos says he color graded the video with his own Apple Log LUT.
The newly-launched iPhone 17 sees the addition of Open Gate, which Mihelakos employed to utilize the entire 4:3 image sensor (4,224 x 3,024 pixels). When recording in Open Gate, there is no image stabilization, so Mihelakos used a Sandmarc Creator Grip as well as a Sandmarc Motion Variable Filter to steady the shots.
Many people beneath Mihelakos’s video commented on how much they liked the 4:3 aspect ratio compared to 16:9, which has become commonplace. In his review of the iPhone 17 Pro, PetaPixel’s Jordan Drake says that Open Gate is extremely useful for shooting something and delivering video in a few different aspect ratios.
“The downside is it needs the full sensor recording to stabilize the video, so as soon as you click Open Gate on, you can see it is a tiny bit bouncy when it is handheld, and that’s because there is no stabilization when you’re recording ProRes RAW Open Gate,” Drake says.
Speaking about the new ProRes RAW format, Drake says the main benefit is being able to “dramatically alter the white balance and the exposure.” But he adds that it’s not a feature he frequently needs since “smartphone footage that doesn’t have expansive latitude anyway.”
If filmmakers want to shoot in ProRes RAW, then they need to use an external SSD to record the footage, as the iPhone does not support internal recording for the format. That said, it is possible to shoot 30 frames per second in Apple ProRes HQ and store the footage on the device, which now comes with a 2TB storage option.
While this level of quality may surprise those who aren’t familiar with the iPhone’s recording capability, the last couple of generations have provided incredibly flexible recording capability — basically, since the introduction of ProRes Log two generations ago. The footage is so good that PetaPixel has been filming segments of its YouTube videos with an iPhone, and it is so indistinguishable from the standard mirrorless cameras that no one has noticed.
