How Apple Creates Custom iPhone Camera for “F1”

You cannot install a movie camera on a Formula 1 car. These flexible vehicles are built for precise specifications, and capturing racing footage from a driver’s perspective is not as simple as slapping a gopro in a day. This is the challenge Apple faces after the upcoming director and photographer Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda F1 Apple Original, want to use real POV racing footage in movies.

If you’ve seen Formula 1 recently, you might see the clip showing an angle behind the cockpit and on the top or side of the driver’s helmet on the frame. Captured by an onboard camera embedded in the car, the resulting lens is designed using a specific color space and codec. Convert it to match the rest of the appearance F1 The movie is too challenging to work. Instead, Apple’s engineering team replaced the broadcast module with a camera made up of iPhone parts.

Custom camera

The module doesn’t look like an iPhone. It’s intentionally similar to the broadcast camera module, and Apple even had to match the weight so that its version doesn’t change the specifications of the car. However, the interior is completely different. (Apple peeked at us last week with F1 cars during WWDC.)

The heart is an iPhone camera sensor powered by A-series chips. Apple hasn’t specified an exact sensor or chipset, but these are used for several cars in the actual F1 race throughout the 2023 and 2024 seasons, so it’s possible to use the same A17 Pro and 48-megapixel main camera in the iPhone 15 Pro. It also includes an iPhone battery and neutral density filter on the camera to reduce light entering the lens, giving film editors more control over exposure.

No one wants the iPhone camera to perform perfectly at incredible speeds or extreme conditions, so the engineering team must consider this factor. They tested the camera module to make sure it can withstand extreme shocks, vibrations and heat – it is said to exceed the specifications of Formula One.

The module runs iOS but has custom firmware for the camera. The videos are captured in log format with Apple’s Prores lossless video codecs that look flat but make edits more granular controls at color ratings and match the visuals to the rest of the movie. This custom firmware inevitably leads to two new features of the iPhone 15 Pro: log encoding and support for the Academy Color Coding System (ACES) color workflow.

Since there is no radio in the module, customizing the iPad app is the only way for movie producers to change the camera directly. Once connected via USB-C, they can adjust the frame rate, exposure growth, shutter angle and white balance and so on. This is also where they make a record to start or stop recording. The lenses captured by modules are spread throughout the entire F1 movie.