Shot on iphone and edited on Mac?
Apple teases mobile and PC competitors with use of its own products in Scary Fast
And just like that, Apple says "Boo!" to the rest of the mobile and PC world with a Halloween reveal that its eventful Scary Fast was reportedly shot on an iphone and edited on Mac. It was a brilliant trick move for Apple, and a treat to its loyal fans in the global mobile computing industry.
On the October 30 unveiling of the all-new Macbook Pro with the M3 family of chips and 24-inch imac with M3, Apple's website revealed that "all of the presenters, locations, and drone footage in the event were filmed using iphone 15 Pro Max" and led by documentary film director Brian Oakes, known for the award-winning Jim: The James Foley Story and Living with Lincoln.
Now, putting Apple's most celebrated device of 2023, in the thick of the blockbuster online livestream presentation of Scary Fast was a testament to the power of the iphone 15 Pro Max.
The iphone 15 Pro Max camera system is hailed currently as having the best video in a smartphone, with its quality rivaling those of professional video cameras. iphone 15 Pro Max can capture in Prores up to 4K60 fps to an external drive with Apple Log encoding, which allows even more detail to be preserved for post-production color grading. iphone 15 Pro and iphone 15 Pro Max are the first smartphones worldwide to support the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES), a global standard for color workflows.
“We were able to get the same complex shots with iphone 15 Pro Max,” said Oakes. “Everything is there to be an extension of someone’s vision or personality. The image quality of iphone definitely democratizes the access.”
The production was advised by Apple’s Jon Carr, a Pro Workflow video specialist whose credits include Top Gun: Maverick and Terminator: Dark Fate, and Jeff Wozniak, who has worked on productions including Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Avatar, and Iron Man 2.
Capturing footage with multiple iphone 15 Pro Max devices, the team utilized the integration between iphone 15 Pro, the Blackmagic Camera app, and Tentacle Sync, of the Apple ecosystem. Connected via Bluetooth, Tentacle Sync drives timecode and enables all devices on set — including Macs and preview screens — to be synced throughout the production. Beastgrip accessories, including cages and rigs, were also used during the production.
And the result, as many of us have already seen, was Scary Fast.