"This is the iPhone footage?" That's a crew member's first reaction in Apple's two-minute look behind Scary Fast, the October 30, 2023 keynote for the M3 MacBook Pro and 24-inch iMac, and the answer is yes. Presenters, locations, and drone shots were all filmed on iPhone 15 Pro Max, per Apple's own write-up, with documentary director Brian Oakes running the shoot. The event's closing card had already said so.
The trio the crew keeps naming is ProRes, Apple Log, and USB-C. The phone recorded ProRes at up to 4K60 straight to an external drive over its 10Gbps port, with Apple Log holding the dynamic range for the grade. The colorist's line in the video is that Log is carte blanche for defining the look in post. One aside has the phone's USB-C out feeding 50 monitors on set. The editor's verdict is the one that travels.
You can treat it like you could an Alexa or a VENICE or anything like that.
What the two minutes skim past is the rest of the kit, which Apple lists in full: Beastgrip cages and rigs, a custom SpaceCam rig, the Blackmagic Camera app, Tentacle Sync for Bluetooth timecode, and the cranes, dollies, and drones any keynote shoot would carry. The thumbnail makes the point on its own, a phone caged inside a ring rig the size of a steering wheel. The crew's own summary is how not different the set felt, with low light as the hard part.
The part that transfers to a pocket is the trio: ProRes with Apple Log to a USB-C drive ships in the 15 Pro itself. iPhoners already carrying one own the sensor in this video. The crane, the cage, and the colorist are the rest of the budget.
