One of the new iPhone 15 Pro features is somewhat niche but incredibly useful to video enthusiasts using their iPhone as a B-camera or C-camera: You can shoot directly to an SSD.
But a reviewer learned of one problem the hard way: If your cable doesn’t support USB 3 speeds, the iPhone won’t warn you – it will simply drop frames. Lots and lots of frames …
The ability to shoot 4K ProRes video at 60fps was one of the new features yesterday highlighted to us by filmmaker Joey Helms, when talking to us about his stunning iPhone 15 Pro cinematic video footage.
Being able to now record in this professional grade video codec at 60 frames per seconds is certainly a nice update, allowing you to slow down the footage in post and give it slight slow motion effect while retaining fidelity of the ProRes codec.
Doing so does, of course, eat up storage at a terrifying rate – but Apple has a solution to this. The shiny new USB C port supports USB 3 speeds, which is fast enough to allow real-time transfer of 4K/60fps ProRes video. So the phone allows you to plug in a portable USB 3 SSD, and capture direct to that.
This is an approach many video pros and enthusiasts take with other cameras, like the BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, for example. Not only does it free you from worrying about internal storage, but it’s super-convenient at the end of a shoot to simply plug the drive directly into your Mac.
But the USB-C cable mess means that you need to ensure you’re using the right cable for the job: one that supports USB 3 speeds. If you use a slow cable on something like a BlackMagic camera, it will warn you that it’s not keeping up and is having to drop frames.
But as John Gruber highlighted, The Verge’s Becca Farsace learned the hard way that the iPhone 15 Pro doesn’t – it just drops lots and lots of frames.
She attempted to shoot 4K/60 ProRes video, recording directly to an external SSD over USB, but she inadvertently did so using a USB-C cable that doesn’t support USB 3 data transfer speeds, so the footage was captured at a terribly low frame rate. The first problem is that USB-C cables are a confusing mess when it comes to data transfer and high speed charging capabilities. The second problem: the Camera app gave her no warning or indication that the connection to the SSD wasn’t fast enough.
You can see the truly unusable result below.
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