How Apple Created a Custom iPhone Camera for ‘F1’

You cannot mount a movie camera on a Formula 1 racing car. These agile vehicles are built on specific specifications, and capture racing images from the driver’s point of view is not as simple as slapm a GoPro on and call it one day. This is the challenge that Apple was confronted after Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda, the director and director of photography of the next F1 Apple Original, wanted to use real POV racing sequences in the film.

If you’ve watched a Formula 1 race lately, you’ve probably seen clips that show a right angle behind the cockpit, with the top or the side of the driver’s helmet in the frame. Captured by on -board cameras integrated into the car, the resulting images are designed for diffusion, using color spaces and specific codecs. Conversion to correspond to the appearance of the rest of the F1 The film would be too difficult to be possible. Instead, Apple’s engineering team replaced the broadcast module with a camera made up of iPhone parts.

Personalized camera

Photography: Julian Chokkattu

Photography: Julian Chokkattu

The module is nothing like an iPhone. It intentionally resembles the diffusion camera module, and Apple even had to correspond to the weight so that its version does not change the specifications of a car. The interior, however, is completely different. (Apple gave us a Take a look during WWDC last week Alongside a F1 car)

At the heart is an iPhone camera sensor fueled by an A series. Apple did not specify the exact sensor or chipset, but these have been used for a few cars in real F1 races throughout the 2023 and 2024 seasons, so there is a chance that it is the same primary A17 pro camera and 48 megapixels in the iPhone 15 pro. It also contained an iPhone battery and a neutral density filter on the camera to reduce the light entering the goal, giving film editors more control over the exhibition.

No one expects that an iPhone camera behaves perfectly at incredible speeds or extreme conditions, so the engineering team had to consider this factor. They tested the camera module to ensure that it could endure an extreme shock, vibrations and heat – it supposed to exceed the specifications provided by Formula 1.

Julian Chokkattu

The module executed iOS but had a personalized firmware for the camera. The videos have been captured in the newspaper format with Prore Video Codec without Apple loss, offering images that seem flat but gives publishers a much more granular granular control and correspond to the visuals with the rest of the film. This personalized firmware has inevitably led to two new features of iPhone 15 pro: Encoding of the newspaper and support for the workflow of color coding colors of the academy (ACES).

Since there are no radios in the module, a personalized iPad application was the only way for filmmakers to make changes on the fly of the camera. Once connected via USB-C, they could adjust things such as the frequency of images, the exposure gain, the shutter angle and the white balance. This is also where they reached a recording to start or stop the recording. The images captured with the module are sprinkled throughout the F1 Fill.