Apple iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro review: A tale of two iPhones
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Video (and a word on Dolby Vision)
Dolby Vision, a pretty big deal
Video has always been a strong suit of iPhones – there’s a reason why almost all late-night talk show hosts turned to iPhones to record their shows during pandemic – and it’s a highlight of this year’s iPhones.
Just take a look at the short video I’ve taken above. It's sharp and the colours are bright and natural. What's notable also is how colours are managed even as I exit the shaded walkway and enter the garden in bright sun. Stabilisation is noteworthy too, so hand-held shots are manageable as long as you remember to slow down.
Apple also added a new feature called Night mode Time-lapse, which is exactly what you think it is, a time-lapse video that takes advantage of Night mode technology for better visuals. Local photographer Darren Soh (@darrensohphoto) was kind enough to share a video that he took demonstrating this new feature and it could open up doors to some really cinematic-feeling videos. He has more on his Facebook and Instagram pages.
The headline feature is, of course, Dolby Vision, which I will get into later. But first, it’s worth reminding people that all of the rear-facing cameras of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro can shoot up to 4K 60fps with extended dynamic range. And even at 4K 60fps, you can get image stabilisation with the wide cameras. Even the front-facing camera can shoot at 4K 60fps with stabilisation – though turning on extended dynamic range limits it to 4K 30fps.
These might be largely the same as last year's iPhones but they are are things that most Android flagships still struggle to match, even if some models – like the Galaxy S20 and Galaxy Note20 – have made significant improvements in video and have included support for 8K recording. But Apple isn’t interested in increasing resolution. Instead, it wants to improve the quality of its video by boosting the quality of pixels that it captures.
Enter, Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision is an HDR (High Dynamic Range) format from Dolby and the new iPhones are capable of supporting this format because they can record videos in 10-bit colour – that’s 700 million colours. The result is much more vivid scenes. The iPhone 12 Pro can shoot in Dolby Vision up to 4K 60fps while Apple is limiting the iPhone 12 to 4K 30fps. Both phone’s front-facing cameras can shoot in Dolby Vision too at 4K 30 fps.
Apple says these are the first devices in the world to be able to capture, edit, and share Dolby Vision. That sounds incredible but I’m no video expert, so I asked local director Chai Yee Wei of Mocha Chai Laboratories what does the existing workflow for making Dolby Vision videos look like and why is Apple’s announcement such a big deal.
He told me that HDR is about improving the quality of pixels by widening the contrast between the brightest whites and deepest blacks. The result should be more realistic and life-like. To do that, video files have to be encoded with light data so that the display knows how to correctly render the scene. HDR10, the most common HDR format, optimises this data for the entire video. You don’t have to be a video expert to know that this isn’t ideal because if the video has wildly varying scenes, the light data won’t be accurate.
Dolby Vision is different because it encodes this light data for every single frame. And to create Dolby Vision videos now is a time-consuming and expensive process. This, Yee Wei said, to put it briefly, requires a license from Dolby, a high-end camera rig, and a powerful system to put it all together. And now, Apple is doing all of this on a phone. What used to take so many devices and money is now being done in real-time on a phone. Not only that, users are able to edit on device too. It’s amazing.
As impressive as all this is, there's a problem. The problem with Dolby Vision videos is that viewing it requires the device to support Dolby Vision. And right now, that’s not a very long list (usually limited to flagship-class phones and OLED TVs). Furthermore, if you want to share it online, the video-sharing service needs to support it too. And currently, YouTube, the world’s largest video-sharing platform, doesn’t, and neither does Facebook. Ultimately, what this means is that for most users is that the gorgeous Dolby Vision videos that you take right now are likely going to be only for personal consumption. That said, with the new iPhones now supporting Dolby Vision capture, I won’t be surprised to see platforms like YouTube and Facebook following suit. For professionals, however, the new iPhones open up filming opportunities and give you options.
