iPhone director Joey Helms, known for his cinematic city shots of each year's iPhone Pro models, says the iPhone 16 Pro isn't a big upgrade over last year's model.
He also answered questions about how he mounted an iPhone on a drone for aerial shots in this year's video …
Helms captured sample footage showing off the capabilities of the last three generations of iPhone Pro models:
- iPhone 14 Pro
- iPhone 15 Pro
- iPhone 16 Pro
iPhone 16 Pro Not a Big Upgrade
He said he finds the camera's control button too finicky and unreliable, so he only uses it for recording.
The audio mixing capabilities are “impressive” when you listen to the footage on your phone, but you notice the limitations when you listen more closely.
Once you put on headphones or use larger speakers, noise-canceling artifacts and judder become apparent. So net net, it's great for quick mobile editing and social posts, but no one will rely on an iPhone to record audio for any professional work just yet.
The only significant improvement he sees is the ability to shoot high-quality slow-motion footage at 120 fps, but he says this is of limited use in real life.
In my opinion, the only real improvement the 16-series makes from a filmmaking perspective is the ability to shoot 120 fps in 4K and ProRes LOG. That being said, 120 fps is a bit of an odd frame rate, as it's too slow for most footage, but not slow enough to get a true slow-motion effect. Either way, it's not a frame rate that many will use regularly, and from that perspective, upgrading from the 15 Pro to the 16 Pro isn't worth it for most.
He did note, however, that Apple appears to have improved SSD write reliability, with one caveat.
I've found that recording to an SSD (which I do by default when shooting ProRes LOG) is much more reliable than it was when the 15 Pro came out. Be careful though, format your SSD to ExFat before doing this. I had Mac OS Extended at first and ran into issues recording 120 fps 4K ProRes to an SSD where the camera app would partially freeze, not record anymore, and only a full restart would fix it. However, formatting the SSD to ExFat did the trick.
Drone footage with the iPhone 16 Pro
This year's footage featured a lot of drone footage, and Helms said he had a few questions about it.
We mounted the iPhone 16 Pro (not the Max, to keep the weight down) using a 3D printed mount on a custom iFlight Chimera 7in FPV drone. The drone was flown by professional drone pilot Sam Perez of Chicago.
The problems we encountered were twofold: 1) iPhones aren't very aerodynamic, and it acted like a sail on the drone. This made it difficult to get the split-S off the building.
2) Micro-vibrations from the drone combined with the phone's image stabilization caused it to wobble. Turning on Enhanced Stabilization made things worse, but it doesn't seem like you can turn off stabilization on the iPhone entirely.
Images: Joey Helms; iFlight
