srRAW Cinema Camera is the original and only RAW cinema camera for iPhone. Sustainable by design, srRAW works with iPhone Pro 12/14 regular and newer. It offers native DaVinci Resolve "Plug n Grade" support (free + Studio).
Hi ProductHunt 👋, Thanks for existing - we couldn't have designed and built our product without being inspired and informed by some many other great product builders who came before!
You know how ideas are...we get a lot in our lifetimes...many of ours are there for a flash and then we move on if the idea can't respond affirmatively to "Should I think about you for more than 10m?" This one has been in our heads for 5 years and we're still not tired of it even if it's tried, through no fault of its own, to sabotage our health + wealth - but it's never boring and worth it all, I'll tell you that much!
We wanted to create a RAW cinema camera that as many people in the world could experience. You see, creatively speaking, RAW opens up so many options that aren’t possible with processed video, “half” RAW formats that bake in certain attributes, or formats that aren’t widely supported by industry standard tools that are used by professionals or aspiring students and advanced beginners. We therefore created a custom capture engine that takes one RAW image every 41ms; encodes it using a DNG encoder we developed and writes it to disk in the open-source CinemaDNG format. It works on the past half-decade of iPhones from 12 Pro or 14 Regular and, soon, the 17 and 17 Pro iPhones (resolution dependent based on an iPhone models ability to dissipate heat). We designed it so its “Plug n Grade” with DaVinci Resolve, both the free and Studio version, so there’s no time or effort wasted transcoding. And we’re offering it through the App Store or for those in the know, through a “Build Community” called cine.ma that allows any filmmaker with a supported iPhone to help shape its future and share their work and workflow with other filmmakers, creators and artists from around the world. We spent five years since the first idea of "let's make this" and although the experience has been very challenging, we're proud to be the original RAW cinema camera for iPhone and to support from the newest iPhone 17 Pro's to models that are half a decade old. Try it for free and join with other filmmakers if you want to help build its future. We'd love to see what you think and we'd love to see what features you want next!
Thank you for supporting our launch!
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I've always felt iphone video lacked the flexibility of true RAW. srRAW looks like it fixes that gap completely. The fact it works with older models too makes it even more exciting for indie filmmakers.
@hannah_cooper4 Thank you so much Hannah - we share the same feelings ;-)! Please jump over to https://www.cine.ma and give it a try for free. Our srRAW+ Build Program supports more iPhones than the version offered on the App Store. Best, Cortlan
@sentry_co Hi André! Great question. Pardon the "top down thoughts" to get to your answer ;-). I think you mean ProRes but I'm also not sure if you mean ProResRAW so I'll try and answer with both formats in mind. While we were engineering srRAW, one of the major issues we discovered, which is similar to high end game devs or running AI models especially GenAI synthetic media generators (ie stable diffusion for example) is: every current iPhone from 11 Pro until 16 Pro has poor thermal management. Thankfully, a return to function over form has returned to the enclosure design team ethos and aluminum will be used, alongside water cooling, which according to Apple will improve 20x over 16 P/PM. And yet, for whatever reason...this hw change will not impact ProRes recording. My position on the switch to aluminum is not to save money using a "lower cost material" as for example NY Times speculated. The amount of titanium used in iPhones was not that much in the first place compared to how much aluminum will be used now - but the material switch is purely to offer a device that is designed to best manage heat especially; 1) for their AI products; and (I believe) 2) to offer ProRes raw. The other issue many of us indy devs have struggled with is Apple is historically "cheap" when it comes to how much RAM they traditionally provided in their phones. "AI certified" phones come with 8GB and other older Pros (12-14) and even some regulars (14 +15) have 6GB. We designed srRAW to work with any iPhone with 6GB and higher. 17 P/PM will now get 12GB of RAM. And yet this still will have no impact on ProRes internal recording. srRAW uses a very efficient patented process to capture, encode and write as much sensor data as we do in 1 sec (up to 200MB/s) but the RAM still isn't enough for Open Gate (ie full sensor). ProRes raw must use Open Gate because all ProRes (or any other video formats) actually go through a hardware downsizer to reach at 4k, 2k, etc and of course any RAW or raw format must use the sensor or crop the sensor; it can't have any image processing. So again the 12GB was added to properly load AI models (and it still should have been 16GB at a minimum for any meaningful model) as well as to have sufficient sized memory buffers necessary for ProRes raw. The final thing we could look at is: internal memory write speed and external over USB-C write speed. I didn't check but I believe the 17 P/PM offers the same, in 2025, quite slow USB-C speed. We tested it for our purposes and internal writing on 16 P/PM is faster. The final thing to consider is the formats that iOS engineers allow to be written to external. Today it's one: DCIM. In a week with the 17 P/PM it will still be one: DCIM. This is the key reason why ProRes raw can only be written to internal and the reason they are offering 2tb of internal...as well as to grab sufficiently more margin - a $900 markup for 1.75TB of storage. Okay, so all of the main 17 P/PM upgrades that are important to this discussion: proper aluminum performance enclosure; decent RAM; expensive and newly expansive internal storage; yet still no internal 4k 120fps ProRes. As the tech page states: "ProRes video recording up to 4K at 120 fps with external recording." So the answer unfortunately no, an external will be recorded to record 120fps. The question I would ask myself though is: ProRes LOG is actually not a great format at least compared to srRAW. It goes through so much processing it comes out squishy. The work you can do on it in post-production is effectively next to nothing compared to a RAW format like CinemaDNG. Shooting 120fps on a phone I would think is a very rare thing unless you are shooting almost every for slow mo and then everything is slow mo. We have no idea how ProRes raw will look shoot on an iPhone nor the specs of it: what are the fps? We do know that ProRes raw, although apparently better than BRAW otherwise Blackmagic wouldn't have added it to some of their cameras already and more on the horizon, still allows for less creative options in post, color correction and grading than CinemaDNG, REDcode or ArriRAW (ie the 3 "full RAW" formats). My recommendation though is to get at least a 1TB or a 2TB in all cases. We've shoot probably a full Petabyte of srRAW footage on iPhones and, although several people have complained that we can't save to external (I guess they won't ever be using ProRes raw either) is to get beefy internal memory (and probably only shoot srRAW or presumably ProRes raw and then if you absolutely most, ProRes LOG). Feel free to try out srRAW for free over at https://www.cine.ma. Best, Cortlan
@cortlan 120fps 4k is the new cool thing todo since iPhone 16. ref the verge: "Your video director friends will spend hours gleefully taking 4K120 video portraits of people at street festivals" link https://www.theverge.com/24247538/apple-iphone-16-pro-review (but the external drive kills the vibe 😅)
@sentry_co hehe perhaps! I've had the 16 P since it came out and yes its cool for those that want it, for sure. I guess it depends on the filmmaker though...I've maybe used it once...but that's just me, I'm more into shooting docs, avant-garde, etc and love post and grading so CinemaDNGs rule supreme in my files...looking at compressed video (even ProRes LOG) hurts my eyes quickly...but I'm clearly a RAW snob hehe! I hear you re: external drive though! I'll be getting a beefy 17 P or PM.
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💎 Pixel perfection
This is such a game-changer, making RAW cinema capture accessible to more filmmakers is huge. Love that it’s both technically ambitious and community-driven. Can’t wait to see what people create with it
@pwz894mzqk Thank you...we're super feeling this...you nailed our ambition in the length of a tweet ;-)...thx so much!!
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I know @cortlan personally, and that alone tells me this product is destined for success! Having worked in video streaming for years, I see products like this as a real opportunity for anyone to create professional content.
srRAW Cinema Camera for iPhone
Hi ProductHunt 👋,
Thanks for existing - we couldn't have designed and built our product without being inspired and informed by some many other great product builders who came before!
You know how ideas are...we get a lot in our lifetimes...many of ours are there for a flash and then we move on if the idea can't respond affirmatively to "Should I think about you for more than 10m?" This one has been in our heads for 5 years and we're still not tired of it even if it's tried, through no fault of its own, to sabotage our health + wealth - but it's never boring and worth it all, I'll tell you that much!
We wanted to create a RAW cinema camera that as many people in the world could experience. You see, creatively speaking, RAW opens up so many options that aren’t possible with processed video, “half” RAW formats that bake in certain attributes, or formats that aren’t widely supported by industry standard tools that are used by professionals or aspiring students and advanced beginners. We therefore created a custom capture engine that takes one RAW image every 41ms; encodes it using a DNG encoder we developed and writes it to disk in the open-source CinemaDNG format. It works on the past half-decade of iPhones from 12 Pro or 14 Regular and, soon, the 17 and 17 Pro iPhones (resolution dependent based on an iPhone models ability to dissipate heat). We designed it so its “Plug n Grade” with DaVinci Resolve, both the free and Studio version, so there’s no time or effort wasted transcoding. And we’re offering it through the App Store or for those in the know, through a “Build Community” called cine.ma that allows any filmmaker with a supported iPhone to help shape its future and share their work and workflow with other filmmakers, creators and artists from around the world. We spent five years since the first idea of "let's make this" and although the experience has been very challenging, we're proud to be the original RAW cinema camera for iPhone and to support from the newest iPhone 17 Pro's to models that are half a decade old. Try it for free and join with other filmmakers if you want to help build its future. We'd love to see what you think and we'd love to see what features you want next!
Thank you for supporting our launch!
srRAW Cinema Camera for iPhone
@hannah_cooper4 Thank you so much Hannah - we share the same feelings ;-)! Please jump over to https://www.cine.ma and give it a try for free. Our srRAW+ Build Program supports more iPhones than the version offered on the App Store. Best, Cortlan
DiffSense
Question. Do you think the iPhone 17 Pro Max (2TB) will be able to record 4K 120fps ProRes without external drive?
srRAW Cinema Camera for iPhone
@sentry_co Hi André! Great question. Pardon the "top down thoughts" to get to your answer ;-). I think you mean ProRes but I'm also not sure if you mean ProResRAW so I'll try and answer with both formats in mind. While we were engineering srRAW, one of the major issues we discovered, which is similar to high end game devs or running AI models especially GenAI synthetic media generators (ie stable diffusion for example) is: every current iPhone from 11 Pro until 16 Pro has poor thermal management. Thankfully, a return to function over form has returned to the enclosure design team ethos and aluminum will be used, alongside water cooling, which according to Apple will improve 20x over 16 P/PM. And yet, for whatever reason...this hw change will not impact ProRes recording. My position on the switch to aluminum is not to save money using a "lower cost material" as for example NY Times speculated. The amount of titanium used in iPhones was not that much in the first place compared to how much aluminum will be used now - but the material switch is purely to offer a device that is designed to best manage heat especially; 1) for their AI products; and (I believe) 2) to offer ProRes raw. The other issue many of us indy devs have struggled with is Apple is historically "cheap" when it comes to how much RAM they traditionally provided in their phones. "AI certified" phones come with 8GB and other older Pros (12-14) and even some regulars (14 +15) have 6GB. We designed srRAW to work with any iPhone with 6GB and higher. 17 P/PM will now get 12GB of RAM. And yet this still will have no impact on ProRes internal recording. srRAW uses a very efficient patented process to capture, encode and write as much sensor data as we do in 1 sec (up to 200MB/s) but the RAM still isn't enough for Open Gate (ie full sensor). ProRes raw must use Open Gate because all ProRes (or any other video formats) actually go through a hardware downsizer to reach at 4k, 2k, etc and of course any RAW or raw format must use the sensor or crop the sensor; it can't have any image processing. So again the 12GB was added to properly load AI models (and it still should have been 16GB at a minimum for any meaningful model) as well as to have sufficient sized memory buffers necessary for ProRes raw. The final thing we could look at is: internal memory write speed and external over USB-C write speed. I didn't check but I believe the 17 P/PM offers the same, in 2025, quite slow USB-C speed. We tested it for our purposes and internal writing on 16 P/PM is faster. The final thing to consider is the formats that iOS engineers allow to be written to external. Today it's one: DCIM. In a week with the 17 P/PM it will still be one: DCIM. This is the key reason why ProRes raw can only be written to internal and the reason they are offering 2tb of internal...as well as to grab sufficiently more margin - a $900 markup for 1.75TB of storage. Okay, so all of the main 17 P/PM upgrades that are important to this discussion: proper aluminum performance enclosure; decent RAM; expensive and newly expansive internal storage; yet still no internal 4k 120fps ProRes. As the tech page states: "ProRes video recording up to 4K at 120 fps with external recording." So the answer unfortunately no, an external will be recorded to record 120fps. The question I would ask myself though is: ProRes LOG is actually not a great format at least compared to srRAW. It goes through so much processing it comes out squishy. The work you can do on it in post-production is effectively next to nothing compared to a RAW format like CinemaDNG. Shooting 120fps on a phone I would think is a very rare thing unless you are shooting almost every for slow mo and then everything is slow mo. We have no idea how ProRes raw will look shoot on an iPhone nor the specs of it: what are the fps? We do know that ProRes raw, although apparently better than BRAW otherwise Blackmagic wouldn't have added it to some of their cameras already and more on the horizon, still allows for less creative options in post, color correction and grading than CinemaDNG, REDcode or ArriRAW (ie the 3 "full RAW" formats). My recommendation though is to get at least a 1TB or a 2TB in all cases. We've shoot probably a full Petabyte of srRAW footage on iPhones and, although several people have complained that we can't save to external (I guess they won't ever be using ProRes raw either) is to get beefy internal memory (and probably only shoot srRAW or presumably ProRes raw and then if you absolutely most, ProRes LOG). Feel free to try out srRAW for free over at https://www.cine.ma. Best, Cortlan
DiffSense
@cortlan 120fps 4k is the new cool thing todo since iPhone 16. ref the verge: "Your video director friends will spend hours gleefully taking 4K120 video portraits of people at street festivals" link https://www.theverge.com/24247538/apple-iphone-16-pro-review (but the external drive kills the vibe 😅)
srRAW Cinema Camera for iPhone
@sentry_co hehe perhaps! I've had the 16 P since it came out and yes its cool for those that want it, for sure. I guess it depends on the filmmaker though...I've maybe used it once...but that's just me, I'm more into shooting docs, avant-garde, etc and love post and grading so CinemaDNGs rule supreme in my files...looking at compressed video (even ProRes LOG) hurts my eyes quickly...but I'm clearly a RAW snob hehe! I hear you re: external drive though! I'll be getting a beefy 17 P or PM.
This is such a game-changer, making RAW cinema capture accessible to more filmmakers is huge. Love that it’s both technically ambitious and community-driven. Can’t wait to see what people create with it
srRAW Cinema Camera for iPhone
@pwz894mzqk Thank you...we're super feeling this...you nailed our ambition in the length of a tweet ;-)...thx so much!!
I know @cortlan personally, and that alone tells me this product is destined for success! Having worked in video streaming for years, I see products like this as a real opportunity for anyone to create professional content.
Congrats, Cortlan and the team!
srRAW Cinema Camera for iPhone
@tamas_zumpf Thank you Tamas!!