The iPhone 18 Pro still overheats when you shoot video for hours in desert heat, and Final Cut Camera was the least reliable app in the heat. That’s one of the findings from Calgary photographer Tyler Stalman, who posted his in-depth iPhone 18 Pro camera review on YouTube on October 19, after a few more weeks with the phone.
Stalman shared his first iPhone 18 Pro camera review back in September. This follow-up was shot entirely on the phone at Wasteland Weekend, a Mad Max and Fallout themed event in California’s Mojave Desert (that looks wild).
Apple added new vapor chambers to the iPhone 18 Pro, and Stalman says they help in a controlled environment. Outdoors in temperatures over 30°C, though, the phone “still overheated, and more than I expected,” he said. “I was hoping we’d completely solve the overheating issues, and I was still running into them.”
Once the phone got hot, his camera apps started crashing. “Final Cut Camera was the least reliable of them. I just could not shoot with it,” he said. Blackmagic Camera held up a little better, while Apple’s own Camera app was the most stable and became his fallback.
Battery life followed a similar pattern. Other reviewers are reporting better results, but Stalman said shooting all day will “still crush your battery in half a day,” and charging made the phone even hotter. “It was kind of a vicious cycle out there in the desert,” he said.
The new pro controls in Apple’s Camera app get high marks. Manual white balance had the biggest impact on his shooting, since a bad auto white balance used to mean switching apps. Manual shutter speed works too, though you lose the usual 24-megapixel output, and manual aperture makes starburst effects easy. There’s still no ISO control for photos.
Stalman called the new f/1.48 main lens “the real star of the show,” since it’s about half a stop brighter than the old f/1.8 lens. The variable aperture itself rarely mattered day to day, and he suggests leaving it on auto.
One tip is to set ProRAW to compressed lossy, which makes files around a quarter of the size with no visible quality loss. For a film look with Photographic Styles, he suggests the Gold style with tone at about -50 and colour at +10 or +20. He still wishes Final Cut Camera supported custom preview LUTs and saving straight to Photos, two gaps that remain after the Final Cut Camera 2.4 redesign.
His verdict is that the 18 Pro is “an evolution, not a revolution.” The iPhone 18 Pro starts at $1,749 in Canada, so it’s not cheap, but at least the phone handled the end of the world better than Final Cut Camera did.
Has your iPhone 18 Pro overheated while shooting video?
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