How Apple Created a Customized iPhone Digital camera for ‘F1’

You’ll be able to’t mount a cinema digital camera on a Formulation One race automobile. These nimble autos are constructed to express specs, and capturing racing footage from the driving force’s viewpoint isn’t so simple as slapping a GoPro on and calling it a day. That’s the problem Apple confronted after Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda, the director and cinematographer of the upcoming F1 Apple Authentic, wished to make use of actual POV racing footage within the movie.

In the event you’ve watched a Formulation One race currently, you have in all probability seen clips that present an angle from simply behind the cockpit, with the highest or aspect of the driving force’s helmet within the body. Captured by onboard cameras embedded within the automobile, the ensuing footage is designed for broadcast, utilizing particular colour areas and codecs. Changing it to match the look of the remainder of the F1 movie could be too difficult to be possible. As a substitute, Apple’s engineering workforce changed the published module with a digital camera composed of iPhone elements.

Customized Digital camera

The module seems to be nothing like an iPhone. It deliberately resembles the published digital camera module, and Apple even needed to match the burden in order that its model would not alter a automobile’s specs. The within, nevertheless, is totally totally different. (Apple gave us a peek throughout WWDC final week alongside an F1 automobile.)

On the coronary heart is an iPhone digital camera sensor powered by an A-series chip. Apple did not specify the precise sensor or chipset, however these have been used for just a few vehicles in actual F1 races all through the 2023 and 2024 seasons, so there’s an opportunity it was the identical A17 Professional and 48-megapixel major digital camera within the iPhone 15 Professional. It additionally contained an iPhone battery and a impartial density filter over the digital camera to cut back the sunshine coming into the lens, giving movie editors extra management over publicity.

Nobody expects an iPhone digital camera to carry out flawlessly at unimaginable speeds or excessive situations, so the engineering workforce needed to contemplate this issue. They examined the digital camera module to make sure it might endure excessive shock, vibrations, and warmth—it supposedly surpassed the specs supplied by Formulation One.

The module ran iOS however had a customized firmware for the digital camera. The movies have been captured in log format with Apple’s ProRes lossless video codec, delivering footage that appears flat however offers the editors rather more granular management to paint grade and match the visuals with the remainder of the movie. This tradition firmware inevitably led to 2 new options within the iPhone 15 Professional: log encoding and help for the Academy Coloration Encoding System (ACES) colour workflow.

Since there aren’t any radios within the module, a customized iPad app was the one method the filmmakers might make on-the-fly adjustments to the digital camera. As soon as linked by way of USB-C, they might modify issues like body price, publicity achieve, shutter angle, and white stability. That is additionally the place they’d hit file to begin or cease recording. The footage captured with the module is sprinkled all through the F1 movie.