vivo X500 Pro Max: Our Own Cinematic LOG Sample Footage

This is our own sample footage from the vivo X500 Pro Max, a short run of shots with nothing scripted over it: just the phone, five very different scenes, and the colour its sensor pulls out of each one.

We shot this around the same time as our rig-mounted camera test on this phone, moving between a park built around a latticed dome structure, a close-up flower bed, candid passers-by and two posed portraits, all inside nineteen seconds.

Contents

Framing the shot on the phone itself
What a posed portrait does under tree cover
The figures behind that colour

Framing the shot on the phone itself

The vivo X500 Pro Max's own screen framing a bed of purple salvia flowers before the shot — *At 0:04 in our video: the X500 Pro Max on a small tripod rig, its own screen showing the purple flower bed it is about to capture.*

That close-up of salvia and celosia is the first real colour test in the clip: a lot of saturated purple, orange and red packed into one frame, the kind of scene that clips or muddies on a phone sensor that cannot hold that much colour information at once.

What a posed portrait does under tree cover

A posed portrait shot on the vivo X500 Pro Max under tree cover, in our cinematic sample footage — *At 0:11 in our video: a posed portrait under tree cover, skin tones kept warm without blowing out against the brighter background.*

Skin tone is usually where a flat, ungraded capture shows its limits first: push the shadows back on a face and it can turn grey or blotchy. Here the warmth holds through the grade, which is the actual job 10-bit Log colour is doing in this clip rather than just a marketing line on a spec sheet.

The figures behind that colour

vivo's own capture mode for this kind of footage runs 4K at up to 240fps in 10-bit Log. When we rig-tested this same phone separately, that capture mode measured 17 EV of dynamic range on vivo's own demo, the figure that lets a flat, washed-out clip pull detail back out of both a bright sky and a shaded trunk in the same frame, which is what the next scene shows.

A flower bed at dusk shot on the vivo X500 Pro Max, red and yellow blooms against a darkening tree line — *At 0:15 in our video: a flower bed at dusk, red and yellow blooms still holding their colour against a darkening tree line and a silhouetted tree.*

That is the closing shot of the clip: light is already falling, the tree in the foreground has gone to a near-silhouette, and the flowerbed in front of it is still reading as red and yellow rather than collapsing to a flat grey-brown the way a smaller sensor tends to at dusk.

We first went hands-on with this phone's hardware in our first-impressions review of its clip-on ZEISS lens, before either of these video tests.

If building a small cinematic phone-filmmaking kit, rig and all, is what interests you about footage like this, our own Pocket Cinematic course covers it from the rig up.