Dolby Vision Recording

Another feature that clearly sets apart the iPhone 12 Pro as a tool for hardcore professionals is the introduction this year of native Dolby Vision HDR video recording.

It’s a feature that’s perhaps hard for the layperson to appreciate, but Apple did a great job here of presenting how much of a game changer this has the potential to become, since it’s the first camera to support direct recording in Dolby Vision HDR — in other words, 10-bit HDR recording with the ability to capture 700 million colours.

Apple says that 60 times more colours than the iPhone camera could capture before, and it all appears to be thanks to the power of the A14 SoC’s image signal processor, which can crunch through every single frame of video — even 4K 60fps video — in realtime to create it in Dolby Vision.

As Apple explained, before today creating Dolby Vision video required a professional studio lab and expensive equipment to edit, analyze, and re-encode the video. The iPhone 12 Pro will not only capture and create Dolby Vision content in real-time, but the Photos app will even allow these videos to be edited and regenerated into Dolby Vision on the fly, once again thanks to the power that’s contained in the A14.

For serious videographers, this really puts the “Pro” in the iPhone 12 Pro, considering that it’s now possible to handle an entire end-to-end professional video workflow, from capturing and editing to watching and sharing, especially with 5G support now making it even easier to share 4K HDR videos from the field.