Here we are, less than a day before Apple's iPhone 13 lineup goes on sale. Excitement is building and people are refreshing their tracking pages often enough to cause someone somewhere to think there's a DDOS attack. But safe in the knowledge that my iPhone 13 Pro Max is sitting at my local Apple Store, I'm pondering the decision to put 4K HDR ProRes video into an iPhone. And not because I don't think anyone will use it, either.
While Apple has already said that ProRes support won't be coming until fall, we do know one important thing about it already. That's the fact that a single minute of 4K HDR ProRes video will consume a massive 6GB of storage space. That's a lot of space being eaten up, but my issue isn't even with that. Nor the fact that 128GB iPhones won't be able to record in 4K ProRes at all. No, my problem comes after all the recording is done and dusted.
My issue is pretty simple: how do we get the video off those iPhones — the best iPhones ever built for video recording — once it's been filmed?
The most obvious route would be to plug the iPhone into a Mac and do the thing. The problem here is that the thing will take a long, long time. At Lightning's pedestrian USB 2.0 speeds of 480Mbps, it's fair to say that we could be waiting long enough for that Lightning cable to fully charge an iPhone while it's connected. That's less than ideal, as I'm sure we can all agree.
The call to bring USB-C, or even Thunderbolt, to iPhones isn't a new one. The EU wants to wade in and get involved, too. But while most of the time it's all about a question of convenience, Lightning could be a real bottleneck from here on out. And that's just bad for all concerned.
There is, of course, AirDrop. I'm out of my depth here because I haven't successfully made AirDrop transfer anything more than a few photos at a time — and even then, rarely at my first attempt. The idea of trying to AirDrop a multi-gigabyte file fills me with dread.
So where does that leave us? Really, I'm not so sure. There doesn't seem to be a good solution for getting huge files off of an iPhone right now but, rather, just a collection of bad and less bad ones. That needs to change and while it's possible Apple has something up its sleeve for whenever ProRes finally breaks cover, I won't be holding my breath. I'd love to be surprised, but if Apple has found a way to make a format that's supposed to be lightly compressed into something that somehow takes up no space at all, ProRes recording is going to be something we all have, but dare not use.
As we sit here on iPhone Eve, that just seems like a real shame all around.
