The GoPro Hero 10 Black landed just days after Apple announced a new ‘Cinematic mode’ for the iPhone 13. Is it already dated, or will it remain indestructible?
It’s been a biggest week of the year, and possibly last few years, for pocket video cameras. On Tuesday Apple announced the iPhone 13’s promising ‘ Cinematic mode ’ feature – and, two days later, the GoPro Hero 10 Black skydived into our lives with its powerful new GP2 chip. But with Apple’s new feature, which we haven’t yet tried in the real world, potentially bringing shallow depth-of-field video to the mainstream, is GoPro about to look out of step with the kind of movies we’ll be able to create with our phones? After all, despite its powerful new GP2 processor, the single-lens GoPro Hero 10 Black isn’t able to produce the kind of depth maps and computational wizardry seen in Apple’s keynote. Yet the tough, waterproof GoPro Hero line has already weathered the storms of 4K camera phones – and as we discovered in our GoPro Hero 10 Black review, it’s still the undisputed master of action videos where background blur is usually a disadvantage, and stabilization is everything. There’s no doubt, though, that while we’ve seen pro video modes on phones before, the iPhone’s ‘Cinematic mode’ feature and ability to shoot in Apple ProRes are the starting whistle for GoPro’s biggest challenge so far… The GoPro Hero 10 Black and Apple iPhone 13 Pro are two very different pocket cameras, but they have the same overarching aim – to help people (mainly amateurs, but increasingly professionals) shoot high-quality video and stills with little fuss. The Hero 10 Black will always be able to go to places (and be mounted in unusual spots) that smartphones will never reach. But the issue it could increasingly face is the style of video we become accustomed to shooting on our phones – namely, video with shallow, adjustable depth-of-field. The name of Apple’s ‘Cinematic mode’ has riled many videographers, who see it as hyperbole to rank alongside its ‘Retina’ displays and ‘Lightning’ ports. This is because there’s a lot more to being ‘cinematic’ than blurring out backgrounds to bring something to the viewer’s attention. Filmmakers agonize over color palettes to build an overall mood (follow Cinema Palettes on Twitter for a good insight), and that’s before you even get into lighting, location scouting, storyboarding and audio. But despite the name, there’s no doubt ‘Cinematic mode’ has huge promise for everyday filmmaking and vlogging. Convincing shallow depth-of-field for video hasn’t been a story-telling tool we’ve had on our phones, because their small sensors and lenses don’t produce the kind of ‘natural’ bokeh you’d get from combining a full-frame camera with a bright prime lens. Phones began solving this issue for photos with the HTC One M8 back in 2014, which led to the compelling simulated bokeh we see in today’s Portrait modes. We’ve also already seen some phones (the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S10) attempt to do the same for video. But Apple’s keynote revealed that there is likely more going on under the hood of ‘Cinematic mode’ than we’ve seen in any comparable tech before. For one, it has a predictive focusing system that attempts to automatically choose what kind of ‘focus rack’ you need for your scene – for example, focusing on someone’s face as they enter the scene, or as switching focus as they look over to another person in the background.
