iPhone 17 Pro Is Still Limited To 1080p 30FPS Spatial Video Recording

The iPhone 17 series is still limited to 1080p 30fps spatial video recording, and iPhone Air can't capture spatial media at all.

Spatial video is Apple's term for stereoscopic 3D video using the Apple HEVC Stereo Video Profile format of MV-HEVC. Recording it first became possible with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in 2023, limited to 1080p 30fps. Then, last year, Apple brought spatial video recording to the base iPhone 16, expanding the capability to hundreds of millions of people.

We had hoped that the next step, with the iPhone 17 range, would be an increase in the resolution and/or frame rate of spatial video recording. But that's not the case.

iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max are still limited to 1080p 30fps. Meanwhile, the iPhone Air only has one lens, like the budget iPhone 16e, so cannot record spatial media at all.

It's unclear why exactly the iPhone 17 Pro is still limited to the same 1080p 30fps as the iPhone 15 Pro.

The iPhone 17 Pro's A19 Pro chip is significantly more powerful than the iPhone 15 Pro's A17 Pro, and 2D video recording went from 4K 60fps to 4K 120fps with the A18 Pro last year. Pro iPhones can even record both the front and a rear camera simultaneously now. This suggests major improvements to the ISP (image signal processor) on the chipset - so why wouldn't it be capable of 1080p 60fps for spatial video?

Perhaps it comes down to thermal considerations, camera bandwidth limits, or some other obscure bottleneck currently known only to Apple's engineers.

We've reached out to Apple for an explanation, but the company is famously opaque when it comes to the specifics of technical details like these, so we're unlikely to get an answer. But if we do, we'll let you know, as the iPhone 17 announcement has left many 3D media enthusiasts sorely disappointed.

For reference, the Apple Vision Pro headset itself records spatial video at 2200×2200 30fps.