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.
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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.”
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