Apple iPhone 15 Pro for 128GB only supports 1080p ProRes video recording unless there is an external hard drive

CTOnews.com Sept. 18, Apple's newly released iPhone 15 Pro ProRes video recording feature is limited by storage space. The 128GB storage version can only record 1080p ProRes video at 30 frames per second, unless users record the video directly to an external storage device. On 256GB and above models, non-external storage devices can also directly support video recording of up to 60 frames per second (4K ProRes).

CTOnews.com notes that Apple does not mention this information directly on the iPhone 15 Pro technical specifications page on its website, but this limitation can be seen when comparing the iPhone 15 Pro with other iPhone models in the Apple Store app, as shown in the figure below.

This limitation also applies to 128GB versions of iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro, but these devices cannot record ProRes video to external storage. This restriction does not apply to iPhone 15 Pro Max because the initial storage space for this machine is 256GB.

ProRes video files are very large, and Apple says that a 10-bit ProRes video per minute is about 1.7GB at 1080p and about 6GB at 4K. Apple may think that the user experience of providing 4K ProRes video recording to internal storage on 128GB models is not good. With the option of recording to external storage, this is no longer a problem.

ProRes is a series of encoders from Apple that can compress video into smaller file sizes while maintaining high quality. The standard version of iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus still does not support ProRes video recording.