Is iPhone 15 Pro right for your video podcast? What to know before buying

Suppose you've been considering getting an iPhone 15 Pro for shooting a video podcast or any video content in general.

In that case, I'm going to share a few things in this video that will help you avoid some headaches and just make a more informed decision before you pull the trigger.

The first thing you're going to want to plan for is the actual storage that you have available.

Now, mine is the lowest one, which is 128 gigabytes, and typically that fills up very quickly if I'm just shooting straight to my phone.

So one of the cool things that's now available with the new USB C port inside of this is that you can use external hard drives, and in my case, an SSD drive.

So I've done a review about this SSD drive, the Samsung, before.

But I really highly recommend it, not just for storage, but also for shooting your content directly onto.

That way you can ensure that, “okay, it's not gonna just stop on you 15 minutes through the podcast.” Or, it's not gonna be a hassle to actually get this ginormous 4K file onto your computer for editing or for handing it off to your editor.

The other thing you're probably wondering is how this can allow you to shoot in the higher quality that Apple claims that you get access to, if you are shooting with an external drive.

The reason everybody went crazy over this is because it shoots log footage. So you can shoot raw footage that filmmakers would appreciate, and you can tweak it to very high levels in post-production.

You typically would not be able to do that if you are not using an external drive. The reason is that one minute of video that kind of footage is one gigabyte.

That's a lot of memory. So you need something like this, which is a two-terabyte external drive. I'm going to plug this into my iPhone.

So let's say that you've plugged the external drive into your phone already, but you're not seeing it come up in your camera because it should say USB C.

And so what you're going to do is hit settings. And then tap on the camera.

And you're going to see a series of settings I already have for myself.

But mainly what you're going to be looking for is formats.

So you're going to tap on formats and then you're going to scroll down to basically this area.

So I toggle these two things on.

So when you toggle on the pro raw and resolution control, you go over to the and you toggle on the prores. If you don't do that, it's still not going to shoot directly onto the drive, so I'm going to tap that.

And as soon as I tap that, you're going to see how it says max time. And it tells me the amount of time that's available on my SSD drive.

And you'll also notice how it says USB C at the bottom now versus if I have that toggled off, you're not going to see USB C anywhere.

And if you don't change the thing in the settings, like I showed, then you're not going to get that option.

So make sure you do that first.

The next thing to note is that when you're in cinematic mode, which is the mode that gives you kind of that blurry bokeh effect that's similar to maybe a digital camera with a nice lens, that footage is not shooting directly onto the camera an external drive.

It's going to go directly onto your phone.

You'll also notice that the second that I disconnect this, and I go back to the video to try to toggle on the ProRes HDR, it's not going to allow me to do that. It's going to give me this message. “It's not supported. Please plug in an external drive to be able to shoot like this.”

Now, the other thing I'm sure you're worried about is what is it like to connect the external drives of the T7 here and let it hang because for example, I was shooting a video that was standing up and I had this connected and it was just kind of dangling like that. And you see, you're probably wondering, is that okay? Will it disconnect?

Because a lot of hard drives would disconnect and be like, “oh, this cannot ejected properly.” But for whatever reason, the wire that they give the USBC to USBC with the Samsung T seven is pretty strong. It's sturdy. It does not actually like it was moving around a little bit, and it still did not disconnect the whole time.

I actually picked up the whole tripod and moved it to one or two areas just to test what that would do, and it did not have any interruption whatsoever.

Now of course, some people have come up with cool workarounds where like you can put the MagSafe thing on the back of this actually. And then you can connect it so it stays like that and it's not dangling around everywhere.

But, this is the thing that everybody's talking about that unlocks a whole new level of actually filming on your phone without it being a huge hassle.

One of the last things that you don't think about until you get it is that when you have this plugged in, you are not going to have space for another microphone or a charger to go in here.

So for example, let's say that I'm shooting social media content and I'm doing vertical stuff and I want to plug in a microphone that goes directly into here.

So this was a pretty nice option that I've been testing. I plug it in, and then I've got this wireless lav mic that I can use, and I get access to higher sound quality.

Now as you can see, this is stuffed up, and I can't rely on this actually working, but actually, I'm gonna try this in real-time and see if this works.

So connecting it through this external thing that's supposed to be a charging port is not giving me access. So as you can see, you need to plan for one thing to be majorly connected to this.

So if you're gonna be prioritizing, you know, just sound and you want high-quality sound, you're maybe shooting a one-minute video, it's not gonna be like 20 minutes long, then you can shoot directly onto your phone, you can plug in this little microphone, and now you have a high-quality audio source.

But yes, you are now using storage on your phone.

Let's say that you want access to the high-quality video, ProRes, but you also want to be able to shoot directly onto a drive, make it headache-free, and save your storage. Then you're going to be sacrificing the audio that you can plug in, and you want to plan for another audio source to be able to do that.

Whether it's another microphone, or me plugging this into my laptop, or something like that.

Now there is a workaround if you need to charge it.

You could use, like, one of these MagSafe chargers to charge it. Do that, but it's just too much while you're filming to prepare for that.

So one of the things you just want to make sure is that your phone is charged to 100%. And as the years go by, that's one of the challenges you're going to run into.

As your battery degrades, which it's just natural for it to do so, it's going to be harder to shoot for longer and longer periods.

Even though you can shoot with this for like 350 minutes or whatever it is.

But I would say it's still worth it because what this allows you to do that most digital cameras don't, and now they are beginning to make some of them like this, but it's taken them way too long in the camera industry to do it, which is allowing you to record past the 27 or 30-minute mark, and this was typically done to prevent overheating and things like that.

That's problematic if you're going to be shooting for a longer period because you might be shooting thinking everything's on, but it's turned off.

That happens all the time.

So make sure that something can record past that 30-minute mark without any interruptions as long as it has good battery life.

That's pretty impressive. Now to get a glance at what it looks like to shoot with this thing, and what the video quality looks like, I filmed and published a full YouTube video that was recorded with the iPhone in ProRes using the T7.

But no additional audio sources, so I wasn't using a nicer microphone or anything like that anywhere It was just using the iPhone's built-in microphones, which they have improved and I fixed it up of course in post-production and enhanced the sound quality where I could.

So if you're curious, what does that sound like? What does it look like? Is it good enough for your quality standards for you to be shooting primarily on the iPhone?

Check out that full video in the description below and I will see you in the next one.