iPhone 15 pro max vs 30 000 cinema camer

So I finally got my hands on the new iPhone 15 Pro Max. And while I wasn't overly impressed with the new iPhone this year as this one's basically the exact same phone as my iPhone 14 Pro Max, there was one feature that I've been just so excited to finally test out myself. Shooting on log on an iPhone has been a dream of mine for quite some time now. I've shot on other phones in the past that have had log and the results were incredible. Since then, I've always been so curious to know what it would be like on the iPhone. iPhones have had incredible footage for a while now and as good as they look, it still just looks like iPhone footage, which isn't a bad thing. The footage looks great, but it's just so obvious that it's filmed on a phone. For certain projects, I don't want to just throw in random iPhone clips. I want all the footage to kind of blend together. So by shooting on log, I'm able to color correct my footage with the same LUTs that I'm using on the rest of my video to help keep everything consistent. There's also plenty of times where I just want to capture some cinematic B-roll. Maybe it's a long hike where I only need a clip or two and I don't even know if I really need the footage. I can easily get by with just bringing my phone instead of my whole camera bag. It's also much more discreet and public. I find myself filming a lot in airports and other public places. And while it's not the biggest deal in the world, when you whip out a camera, everyone seems to stop and stare at you. Plus with my little Peak Design phone case tripod, it makes filming out in the go so much easier and efficient. I can just set this thing up anywhere in little tight places and capture footage without setting up a tripod or having my camera and mic everywhere. It's just so much more low profile and easy to use while you're running and gunning. By the way, this isn't sponsored. I just absolutely love this thing and use it all the time. However, this video is sponsored by me. My online course. Vertical Video Pro was designed to help people take their side hustles, passion projects, and small businesses to new heights by leveraging the power of social media. I'm so passionate about helping people chase their dreams and that was the biggest reason for me to make this course in the first place. It's a perfect course to give you the motivation, knowledge, and confidence needed to take your short form content to the next level. With the new year ahead of us, it really is the perfect time to invest in yourself and start 2024 off with a bang. I'll put everything you need to know about the course in the description box below. So if that's something that you're interested in, definitely check it out. So is the iPhone 15 Pro Max going to take over and become my main camera? Absolutely not. Listen, if this is the only camera you have, then you have more than enough. The footage you can get with this phone is literally better than the footage that I got with my first professional camera. With that said, it still doesn't compete with all the features on my main cameras. I say main cameras because I shoot 90% of my photography. I'm a Canon R5 and 90% of my videos on a Canon C70. But on that note, it's still crazy to see just how far phones have come. So I thought it'd be fun to put the iPhone 15 Pro Max up against a $30,000 cinema camera and just review the footage to see how similar they look. We did this last year with the iPhone 14 Pro Max on cinematic mode. So I'm really curious to see how much better log is going to look from cinematic mode. Because honestly, I really haven't used cinematic mode since then. It just hasn't been a feature that I've really enjoyed using. So I'm really curious to see how log footage looks because that is a feature that I see myself using all the time. In fact, I've only had this phone for like a week now and I've already shot so much log footage on it. So yeah, let's go ahead and head out and see what this phone can do. Well, the first thing you notice is just how much lighter and easier it is to carry the phone than it is a huge cinema camera like this. Luckily, it's a sunny day out today. There's not a cloud in the sky. So it should be a pretty fair comparison. The lighting won't change at all. Action 3, 2, 1. Nice and slow. Looking around. To make this comparison as fair as possible, we're also shooting everything on 24 millimeters because that's the native focal length on our iPhone. By the way, I'm not using any third-party camera apps or anything. Everything that we're going to be filming today is coming straight from the iPhone camera app. So one benefit with the iPhone 15 Pro Max though is that it has in-camera stabilization. So I can bump around a lot more and have that footage look so smooth. I actually personally like the handheld feel of cameras when it's more jerky and jittery. But a lot of people just want smooth footage. 3, 2, 1. Okay, so the first thing I noticed right off the bat is just how much more difficult it is to edit the iPhone footage versus the cinema camera. Which to be fair, I am using professional cinema camera LUTs and I'm not using iPhone LUTs. So even though we shot both on LOG, that doesn't mean that all LOGs are created equal. A $30,000 cinema camera is going to have a LOG that looks and works a lot different than an iPhone LOG. The LOG on the iPhone still did look great. It was just a little bit harder to get the colors the way I wanted them to. For the sake of this comparison, I tried to make all the footage look as similar as I possibly could. But I definitely had to adjust the hue of some of the colors. It looks much more yellow in the iPhone clip and it looks much more golden brown in the cinema camera footage. Another thing I noticed is that the cinema camera looks more cinematic. The shot of Allie's hand going through the grass is a perfect example. I just feel like the cinema camera just looks like a dream. It looks like a movie and the iPhone still looks great, but it has a much more sharp contrasty look. I prefer my footage to look soft and nostalgic and cinematic. On the flip side though, as I suspected, the iPhone stabilization is so much better than the cinema cameras. Just look at these shots running through the field. It honestly looks like I have the iPhone on a gimbal. It's that stable. There really is so many different pros and cons to each. You know, the iPhone has better stabilization. It's so much easier to whip out and film something. Lighter to carry. I can take this with me literally anywhere. And the cinema camera definitely has a more cinematic look and feel to it. But at the same time, is it worth sacrificing that mobility we have with the phone to get a little bit better looking footage? And of course, that's going to always be changing depending on which project you're working on and what you need to prioritize. But definitely let me know what you guys think. So what's the point of this video? It's not to nitpick every shot and start a war in the comment section. It's to prove a point that the barrier to entry for filmmaking is becoming a lot easier. So what does that mean as a filmmaker? It means that the tools we're using are becoming a lot less important and how we use those tools are becoming much more important. How well can you tell a story? Can you compose your shots in a way that makes people feel something? What's going to make you stand out from the rest? The most successful filmmakers are not going to be the ones that have the fanciest gear anymore. They're going to be the ones that can take whatever gear they're handed and make something worth sharing.