Blackmagic turns the latest iPhone into a professional cinema camera

Anyone considering upgrading to a new iPhone this year may have noticed that the current offerings start at about $1000, but balloon to an absolutely wild high-end of $3800.

And that most expensive model isn’t plated in gold or encrusted with diamonds – it’s the same as the $2200 iPhone 17 Pro Max, except it has a massive 2TB of storage on board, 10 times the amount of the starting model. And you may be asking: is there anyone who needs that?

The Blackmagic Camera ProDock leverages new features in the iPhone 17 Pro to connect and sync with other production hardware.

Yes, it turns out there is. It can be easy to forget that – in addition to helping people to connect, with the internet and all kinds of content – modern smartphones are also tools of trade and creative enterprise. That’s why Apple spent time during its reveal event last week talking about genlock and ProRes RAW, video camera terms that most people have never heard of and don’t care about. And it’s why the iPhone comes in 2TB.

Also during the event, the company spent a few seconds showing a new accessory that could be a game-changer for iPhone-loving videographers, and which is the result of many months of secret work at the Melbourne-based cinema technology company Blackmagic Design.

“The cameras on the phones have been getting better and better. So a few years ago, we took the software from our high-end cameras and copied it down into an app called Blackmagic Camera,” said the company’s founder and chief executive Grant Petty.

“But the problem is, if you’re actually trying to use it like a professional camera, it doesn’t have all the connections. It’s got USB. So our ProDock is a way of breaking out all the connectivity.”

Blackmagic Design founder Grant Petty said the new dock was a bridge between smartphone cinematography and high-end production.

You can think of the Blackmagic Camera ProDock as kind of like those USB-C docks that can give a MacBook Air Ethernet or HDMI ports, except it gives the iPhone the kind of ports you’d find on a professional movie camera.

That includes 3.5mm stereo inputs and outputs, timecode and genlock ports to perfectly synchronise footage from multiple cameras, HDMI into a monitor, and extra USB-C ports for solid state storage. Paired with the new features in the iPhone 17 Pro, it helps match the hardware and software of a high-end cinema camera.

Of course, between the $500 ProDock, the $3800 phone, and the rigging you’re going to need to connect them and manage extra accessories such as microphones, the whole setup is going to end up costing more than the most basic Blackmagic cinema camera, which starts at $1700. But Petty said the idea was that creators were using their phones alone to record content anyway, and the ProDock was a little extra bridge to integrate it into bigger setups when needed.

“You’ve already got the phone in your pocket, that’s the point. You can pull it out and use Blackmagic Camera to do cinematic shooting. We even have a mode where you can hold the phone vertically but still do letterbox,” he said, pointing out that this could also be handy for TV production and broadcast news.

The Blackmagic Camera app is designed to enable the same experience on iPhone as on the company’s cinema cameras.

“Let’s say you’re at a protest march and the media is getting attacked. It means you can be there, right in the middle of things, nobody has any idea you’re with a broadcaster, and you’re capturing really high quality.”

So if you’re planning to shoot primarily on your phone, but there are also situations where you’ll be on a set where you need to plug into a monitor or sync with other cameras, putting the ProDock in your kit instead of an entire professional camera could be an option.

The Blackmagic Camera app also syncs to the cloud so it can easily work with computers running the company’s DaVinci Resolve software, which is an industry standard for editing. Footage uploads even as it’s being recorded, meaning an editor might only be 30 seconds behind the content being created somewhere else in the world.

Loading

Petty said that the idea of making the app and DaVinci Resolve free was to support a new generation of filmmakers and content creators, even if they can’t afford massive cameras and rigs, and that allowing full-scale production on a smartphone was part of that.

“At some point, you might start to go, ‘OK, well now I want bigger lenses, I want larger sensors, I’ll get a full camera’. But the good thing from our point of view is it’s the same software on the phone [as on the high-end devices], so once you’ve learned one, you know the other,” he said.

“But it also depends how portable you need to be. And if you don’t really want to be seen in public with a larger camera, the phone’s a great option.”

This is not the first time Blackmagic has been featured at a major Apple reveal event, as the company had been a major support of Mac for many years before it brought its camera software to iPhone.

Petty said it was an interesting experience building hardware for a phone that had yet to be revealed, and that Apple would only discuss under the strictest secrecy. He said the team referred to it as “flying in formation in a cloud”. Hopefully, when they came out into the clear sky, they would find they were side by side with Apple.

“The trick is to have literally only a couple of people on the project. We had one person taking pictures, a couple of engineers. People that Apple had worked with before, so they trust [them], but at the same time, a large part of the company has no idea what’s going on,” he said.

“Apple might say: ‘Can you add this feature? Can you do that? We need this.’ And we actually don’t know what the end product Apple’s going to ship … but they’re testing it all on their end, and you work it out.”

Most Viewed in Technology

Loading