How foodies Rocky and Mayur created their new show with an iPhone 12 during pandemic

March 2020 will never be forgotten for when the country went into a massive lockdown to thwart the spread of the coronavirus amidst PM Modi's clarion call for atmanirbharat and social distancing. But this trend wasn't just restricted to India, as around the world including in the US this was a trend. As we all were locked up at homes, content consumption swelled by leaps and bounds. This was obvious as most people didn’t have much to do from their homes.

There was an interesting dichotomy about this trend as all shoots and productions had come to a standstill. While most big-budget productions had come to stand still but many creators and shows went on. Not using big multi-thousand dollar cameras, lights and microphones but just a tripod, a phone (more often than not an iPhone) and an external lapel microphone.

In some cases, even a green screen was used. Shows like Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert went live just with the assistance of an iPhone. This remained true for the entire world as work from home became a buzzword and everyone was doing meetings and calls on Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

But even in India, this trend was catching on. Indian trailblazers Rocky and Mayur of Highway On My Plate fame took to the challenge back in August with their new venture with History TV18. When the lockdown eased up, the two took off for a trip across Rajasthan to 14 new destinations, at the end of August, which saw the dynamic duo launch a digital exclusive show on Instagram called #RoadtrippinWithRnM which took them across Rajasthan to places like Jaipur, Ajmer, Mount Abu, Udaipur and even in the land of leopards in Jawai. They took this stripped-down modus operandi approach to another extreme as they initially shot with the iPhone 11 Pro Max. They didn't use any microphones and all the content was delivered on the History TV18 Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube channels.

Then in November, when Apple had launched the new iPhone 12 Pro Max models in India, they took their show to another extreme. This time around, they were going into the cold of the hills in Himachal Pradesh. According to the duo, in the last two generations of the iPhone, the gains Apple has made with the camera, at least in the Indian context, allows for broadcast-quality production just from the phones.

"What we're doing with #RoadTrippinwithRnM and HistoryTV18 is a 'first time ever' format. No one anywhere in the world, that we know of, has shot two complete food and travel series using only an iPhone 12 Pro Max. When we say 'only' we mean only! We're only using the native hardware and software from Apple. No external mics, no apps, no attached lenses and no gimbal. We did the second series in November and, for this journey, we chose Himachal Pradesh," said Mayur Sharma.

"Even before I got my hands on the phone, I had some sense of what to expect. I was very excited!, I had a little sense of what the phone was going to be all about," he added.

For the duo, who aren’t tech reviewers but are acclaimed food critics — these were uncharted waters. But the results left them highly impressed thanks to some of the hardware advances Apple had made on particularly the iPhone 12 Pro Max, which includes the larger image sensor, the new sensor-shift stabilisation system and features like night mode which works across all cameras.

"For us that is brilliant. We don’t know of any other phone that can come close to doing this. Especially thanks to the new Sensor Shift OIS," said Rocky Singh. "So thanks to the combination of these things, killer low-light image capture and brilliant sound, I agree with you that for shooting content, especially the genre of content we’re shooting, there is no better phone or no better device in the world," he added.

"The night shots are brilliant. We found the situation to be challenging so it made sense for us to keep the HDR on because we're basically working with ambient light," chimed in Mayur Sharma.

Interestingly, all the editing was also not done on a sophisticated pro editing bench like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Pro. Everything was done on Apple's free iMovie app on the iPhone itself. This underpinned the fact of how advanced a mobile computer it has become.

One of the new features of the iPhone 12 camera is the ability to shoot HDR video in Dolby Vision on the fly, something which needs advanced multi-million dollar editing rigs in studios in Hollywood. Apple has democratised the technology on the phone and has even equipped the iMovie video editing suite to handle this kind of video. All of this is enabled by the new camera system and the A14 Bionic processor which is more powerful than most chipsets found on the PC. This capability is so advanced that Apple is yet adding support for it in its Final Cut Pro software for the Mac which for decades has been the industry standard for professional video editors.

"We have shot on that phone when it was snowing, raining, while sticking it out of a window, in water. We have shot in really low light and bright light, we’ve taken stills from a moving car and, as I said, this whole show was shot on one phone. I don’t think this has ever been done," explained Rocky Singh on how the shoot was implemented with the iPhone 12 Pro Max.

While this show was more of an Instagram-focussed adventure, Rocky and Mayur have bigger plans — now that they’ve tasted blood, using just an iPhone.

"The next big thing is that we're shooting a full travel show for television that will air on television in January or February, only on iPhone 12 Pro Max," revealed Mayur Sharma. "Overall, I started off saying that there is no better phone in the world to shoot a show with. We believe in it enough to have convinced a network to shoot a whole television show in broadcast quality on it. Need I say more?" he proclaimed.

The duo has been so impressed by the capabilities of the iPhone that they have some recommendations for Apple as well. Rocky and Mayur particularly yearn for more battery life on the iPhone, and they also want a better wide-angle camera.

 

"Funnily, our DoP joked that we return the 12 Pro Max and do the next series on the 11 Pro Max again," said Mayur Sharma highlighting the superior battery life of the older iPhone. Of course, this also has happened because of the larger screen and more powerful processor which enables the iPhone 12 series to do HDR 4K video on the fly and enables editing capabilities on the device.

Rocky and Mayur mostly didn’t leverage this high fidelity capability of the iPhone because most consumers of their show are mobile and many devices in India don't yet support HDR, which would leave the capability redundant and also make the editing process more complex.