Shoot Dolby Vision HDR Videos

Apple’s iPhone unveilings almost always herald at least one or two major “firsts” when it comes to new technologies — or even just new approaches to existing ones — but this year Apple really blew the doors off with the announcement that its iPhone 12 lineup would now offer native Dolby Vision HDR Recording, with up to 700 million colours, thanks to the power of Apple’s newest A14 chip.

It’s easy for those who aren’t steeped in professional video production to miss how big of a deal this really is. The iPhone 12 isn’t just the first iPhone, or even the first smartphone, to support native Dolby Vision HDR recording. It’s the first camera in the world to offer this capability—this is something that even professional studio-quality cameras can’t yet accomplish. Up until now, rendering a video in Dolby Vision HDR required an expensive mirrorless camera capable of 10-bit recording combined with a complex post-production process of “grading” HDR footage on a professional workstation with an expensive HDR “reference” monitor.

With the iPhone 12, however, the staggering amount of computational power baked into the A14 chip means that the iPhone can actually capture and process the camera’s sensor data and add on the Dolby Vision metadata in real-time, as it’s recording the video footage.

While Apple showed off the new Dolby Vision HDR recording features during the unveiling of the iPhone 12 Pro, it turns out that it’s also available on the standard iPhone 12 too, albeit in a very slightly more limited fashion: iPhone 12 Pro users will be able to record Dolby Vision HDR in 4K at 60fps, while iPhone 12 users will be limited to a 30fps frame rate.