iPhone 18 Pro for Creators: Apple Log 2, ProRes RAW and Genlock — What Changed, and the Workflow

Apple announced the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max on 9 September and put them on sale on the 18th, alongside the foldable iPhone Duo. There is no plain iPhone 18 this year — Apple is holding the cheaper models until spring. For anyone who films for a living the interesting phone is the Pro, and the interesting line in its spec sheet is the one Apple barely mentioned on stage: Apple Log 2, ProRes RAW and genlock.

Three filmmaker features, and only one of them changes what most creators do day to day. This post is about that one — and about the setting on the phone that quietly decides whether the LUT you already own is the right LUT.

• Apple Log 2 — the log profile the 17 Pro introduced, now the headline on the 18 Pro. Same tone curve as the original Apple Log, but it records into a wider colour space Apple calls Apple Wide Gamut. Saturated blues, reds and magentas have somewhere to go instead of clipping. It is a setting, not a default: Settings › Camera › Formats › ProRes Log Video Encoding offers Log or Log 2, and the 18 Pro will happily record either.

• ProRes RAW — sensor data instead of processed video. Total flexibility in post, enormous files, and a workflow that only makes sense if you already grade in Resolve or Final Cut with time to spare. Most social creators will never turn it on, and that is fine.

• Genlock — frame-accurate sync between cameras. Built for multi-camera shoots and live switching. If you film alone it does nothing for you; if you run a two-phone podcast setup it is the feature you have been waiting for.

• 4K/120 Dolby Vision and 4K/60 Cinematic mode, with cinematic effects now applied after the shot rather than baked in at capture. The slow-motion and depth-of-field upgrades — and the ones you will use most.

• The iPhone Duo, for the record, records 4K/120 Dolby Vision and nothing log: no ProRes, no Apple Log, no Log 2. Lovely phone, not a grading camera.

Here is the part that trips people up. Apple Log and Apple Log 2 share a name and a curve, so a clip from either looks identical on the phone — flat, grey, lifted blacks — and no editor tells you which one you shot. But a LUT carries a gamut as well as a curve, and the gamuts differ. Put an Apple Log LUT on Log 2 footage and it under-corrects: the picture comes out slightly flat and cool, with the greens taking the worst of it.

We measured it. On a 17 Pro clip recorded in Log 2, the Apple Log decode lands about 3 ΔE off on average and around 5 ΔE flat in foliage greens compared with the correct Log 2 decode — visible on 40% of the frame, obvious on 10%. Not broken, but not what the camera recorded either. The full explanation, with the numbers, is in Apple Log vs Apple Log 2: which LUT do I actually use?

The practical rule: match the LUT to the setting on the phone. The iPhone Apple Log 2 pack is the same eleven looks as the Apple Log pack with the Log 2 decode in front of them, and the free neutral conversion, True iPhone, is on the Apple Log and Apple Log 2 pages at full strength with no watermark.

The camera is the easy half. Here is the loop that turns "phone that shoots Log 2" into "clip that gets posted" — the same shape we use for the Luna Ultra and the Osmo Pocket 4, because the bottleneck is never the camera.

1. 4K/120 ProRes still wants an external drive. As with the 17 Pro, the highest ProRes frame rate records to a connected SSD, not the phone. Shoot 4K/24 internally for talking heads and save the drive for slow-motion b-roll.

2. Do not stack a conversion LUT under a creative one. Whether you shoot Log or Log 2, every grade in the matching iPhone pack carries its own decode inside the .cube. Two LUTs on one clip is double contrast and crushed blacks — the most common iPhone grading mistake we see.

3. Check the setting before a shoot you cannot repeat. A wedding, a launch, a one-take walk-and-talk: glance at Formats first. The difference between the two decodes is small enough to miss on the phone and large enough to notice on a monitor.