There’s always a familiar argument whenever a new iPhone arrives with serious new imaging upgrades. One camp says it’s still “just a phone, why upgrade?” The other insists it’s now a camera that can stand on a real set. The truth is neither side is entirely right, because the thing that has historically held phones back wasn’t the sensor, it’s resolution or sharpness. It was everything around it in a production environment: monitoring, audio, power, storage, sync, and the ability to behave like a reliable part of a VFX production pipeline.
That’s exactly where the new Blackmagic Camera ProDock lands. Designed as a professional rig expansion for the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, the ProDock is less about making the iPhone look like a cinema camera and more about making it function like one. It adds the crucial connections that turn an impressive consumer device into something that can actually integrate into professional environments: proper HDMI monitoring, support for external audio, timecode, genlock, and USB-C storage and power. In short, it makes the phone “set-ready” in a way that isn’t performative; it’s operational.
Where this becomes genuinely interesting for VFX isn’t simply in shooting pretty footage. It’s in capture. Modern production is increasingly about acquiring reality in formats that can be computed, reconstructed, and reused, and few techniques are advancing faster right now than Gaussian splats. They’ve become one of the most exciting new ways to reproduce real environments and objects with convincing depth, parallax, and presence, often at a speed and practicality that makes traditional volumetric or full photogrammetry pipelines look heavy by comparison.
To see what ProDock enables when you stop thinking about iPhones as individual cameras and start treating them as scalable capture nodes, we spoke with Michael Mansouri, CEO of Radiant Images, and Elnar Mukhamediarov, Head of Production, about Radiant’s Next-Gen 4D Volume Capture System. Their setup uses multiple iPhones paired with Blackmagic ProDock to create a capture array that is designed not as a novelty but as a repeatable production tool. Once you have stable power, fast external recording, reliable monitoring, and, most importantly, sync timecode and genlock, multi-device capture stops being a “best effort exercise and becomes coherent data acquisition system.
That coherence matters enormously for Gaussian splats. Splats thrive on viewpoint coverage and consistency. The more angles you can capture, the more complete and stable the representation becomes, and the less you fight artifacts downstream. But they also demand predictability: consistent exposure, stable temporal sampling, and capture that doesn’t drift out of sync as you do a 4D capture and scale beyond a single device on a still object. Radiant’s approach, backed by ProDock’s practical I/O and sync support, is aimed directly at turning that into a reliable workflow rather than a fragile demo.
One of the fastest ways to test whether a multi-camera system is truly working is bullet time, because bullet time doesn’t forgive timing drift or sloppy alignment. In a quick demo, Mukhamediarov showed how a rig of multiple iPhones could produce a clean bullet time effect while staying manageable in terms of capture and handoff. It’s the kind of result that immediately reframes from “iphone filmmaking” to a lightweight, scalable 4D acquisition system
Blackmagic didn’t just expand the iPhone with ports. ProDock expands what an iPhone can be inside a modern production ecosystem, especially one where Gaussian splats are rapidly becoming part of the everyday VFX toolkit.