When I am not working at TechRadar, I am making films. No, you haven’t seen anything, just low budget miniatures and sketches. But it does mean I’ve got the right expertise to test out the creative types of products — like the new iPad Air 5.
Now, a lot of devices are marketed to creative types, but most of them are just marketing gaffes, meant to sell aspiring creators on the right device—until they take it out of the box and realize It’s just some other gadget. But that’s marketing for you.
At the time of the iPad Air launch, I could watch it again. Because no matter how much Apple talks about the M1 chipset and its power for creativity apps, or the screen or the Apple Pencil stylus or any of those, there’s a terrible limitation that prevents it from being useful to filmmakers like me.
it’s storage
Drawing on the iPad Air 5 (Image Credit: TechRadar)
I don’t want you to read a thousand words before you get to my point, so I’ll say it beforehand, then explain it later – my problem with the iPad Air (2022) is its storage options. It starts at 64GB, but you can also choose a 256GB version if you want.
Yes, the iPad’s default storage option is less than your average mid-range smartphone. Even 256GB is pretty limited, as I’ll get to in a second. Those numbers just aren’t high enough.
And to anticipate and react to potential retaliation: No, external hard drives or cloud storage solutions just won’t do. For one, you generally need to download files to the iPad to use the files in most editing apps. And the main issue I’ve found with this method in general is that it’s very hard to get the hard drive to play nice with the iPad. It’s like putting a leash on a bee and trying to walk on it – it’s fiddly and annoying, and I wouldn’t do it.
For context, the latest iPad Pro can be purchased with up to 2TB of storage – sure, that’s pretty expensive, but having about 7x the storage is incredibly useful. There are a few more technical differences between the Air and the Pro, and My colleague Lance breaks them down in this articleBut for a lot of creative businesses, the issues start and end with storage.
Filming on the Sony Xperia 1 (Image Credit: Future)
Let’s do an experiment – pick up your smartphone, open the camera app, go to video mode, increase the resolution and frame rate in the settings as much as you can, and record for a minute. Now, go to the gallery, find the file, and see how much space was taken up.
I’m currently using Xiaomi 12 – when I recorded in 4K at 60fps, the file was about half a gigabyte. When I shot in 8K at 24fps, I used almost an entire gigabyte in about a minute. So if you’re a mobile journalist or filmmaker shooting in 8K, 256GB of storage will help you shoot for about four hours.
And if you decide to use a video camera with better color capture and other additions, or you’re shooting in logs, you’ll take up even more space. The same is true if you’re shooting on multiple phones at once, which is very likely – part of the mobile filmmaker war is to shoot as much footage as possible rather than spend ages on a few perfect shots.
To summarize our findings from this experiment, video footage can be taken a lot of storage space, and if you were shooting a lot, it would be pretty easy to fill up 256GB of storage space in a day or less.
iPad Pros Reign Supreme
Storyboarding on the iPad Pro (Image Credit: Future)
Now I know what you’re (probably) thinking: “why not just use a real computer for editing,” and yes, for some tasks, it’s a very real option.
But there are situations when I can’t take my giant home-built editing and gaming PC with me – which is why mobile journalism and filmmaking have become a thing. Being able to edit on the go means you can both shoot and form clips without having to return to a larger suite to edit.
You’d be surprised how many news or online videos are made this way – even some movies are. Apps like LumaFusion bring desktop editing tools to tablets, and although you won’t get the full editing experience from the comfort of a lap-resting device, it’s a pretty close guess. In fact, the main reason I prefer editing on my PC is because the screen is bigger.
I’ve used my iPad Pro 12.9 for several years for mobile filmmaking, and I’ve found its 1TB of storage space to be enough, as long as I delete unnecessary files after picture-locking the project (I’ve also Started shooting in 8K only recently, so my old files take up less space).
Admittedly, an Apple laptop might be even better for these purposes, but I’m not on TechRadar’s computing team so can’t find a test unit, and isn’t in the 1% so can’t afford to buy one. And anyway, this is an article about why the iPad Air is lacking, not about why other devices are great.
but there is more
(image credit: TechRadar)
I’ve worked on projects where we shot over 256GB from video and audio only, and only find that the space isn’t enough for creatives. But the film process requires a lot of files.
I use my iPad to backup scripts, storyboards, call sheets, shot lists, health and safety documents, permits, covid guidelines, notes from shoots, notes on scripts, notes on rush (raw footage taken each day), . all of the above.
Sometimes I also need clips from other movies to use as mood boards, inspiration, music I want to influence the mood, games so I can procrastinate instead of work – and of course I need to. Not only do I need space for documents from this shoot, but all my other projects as well.
And hell, I’m not even a professional working in the field, it’s just a hobby. I can’t imagine what a big project with a long shoot schedule and big team would look like.
film takes Burden of storage space, but film production takes a lot. When I look at 256GB as the storage limit on the iPad, I don’t see a device I can work on, I see something I can watch Netflix on. And if I’m paying too much money for an Apple device, I want to be able to shoot movies, not just watch them. In that respect, the iPad Air falls short – all hail the iPad Pro.
