How Apple built a custom iPhone camera for ‘F1’

You cannot mount a cinema camera on a Formula One race car. These agile vehicles are designed for accurate glasses, and it is not as simple to capture the racing footage from the driver’s point of view as to slap a Gopro and call it a day. It is a challenge that Apple faced the upcoming director and cinematographer after Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda F1 Apple original, wanted to use real pov racing footage in the film.

If you have recently seen a Formula One Race, you have probably seen the clip that shows an angle from the back of the cockpit, along the top or edge of the driver’s helmet in the frame. Captured by embedded onboard cameras in the car, the resulting footage is designed to broadcast, specific color using spaces and codes. Convert it to match the rest of the look F1 The film will be very challenging to be possible. Instead, Apple’s engineering team replaced a broadcast module with a camera made of iPhone parts.

Custom camera

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

The module looks nothing like an iPhone. This intentional broadcast camera resembles the module, and Apple also had to match weight so that its version could not change the car glasses. However, inside, completely different. (Apple gave us a glimpse of the F1 car during the WWDC last week.)

There is an iPhone camera sensor in the heart that is powered by an A-series chip. Apple did not specify the accurate sensor or chipset, but they were used for some cars in the actual F1 races in 2023 and 2024 sessions, so there is a chance that the iPhone 15 Pro had the same A17 Pro and 48-megapixel primary camera. It also had an iPhone battery and a neutral density filter above the camera to reduce the light entering the lens, giving the film editors more control over the exposure.

No one expects the iPhone camera to perform innocently on incredible speed or extreme conditions, so the engineering team had to consider this factor. He tested the camera module to ensure that it could tolerate extreme shock, vibration and heat – it allegedly crossed the glasses provided by Formula One.

Julian Chokkattu

The module ran iOS but was a custom firmware for the camera. The video was captured in log format with apple’s prurse faulty video codec, which looks flat, but gives the editors a lot of granular control for color grade and matches visuals with the rest of the film. This custom firmware essentially led two new features iPhone 15 Pro: Log encoding and support for Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) color workflow.

Since there is no radio in the module, a custom iPad app was the only way to make the filmmakers on–fly changes in the camera. Once connected through USB-C, they can accommodate things like frame rate, exposure gain, shutter angle and white balance. This is also the place where they will make a record hit to start or stop recording. There is footage captured with module Sprinkled throughout the whole F1 film,