A crew that can put an Arri on a tripod still shoots part of the same video on a phone. That is not a budget decision and it is not modesty. It is the clearest thing anyone running a large production has said out loud about what a camera is actually for, and it applies to the two or three cameras already sitting in your house.
MrBeast's camera department has been explicit that the badge on the body is not what decides a shot. What follows is what they said, who said it, and what their reasoning means for the phone in your pocket and the action camera in the drawer.
What the camera department actually said
At B&H's Bild Expo in New York in June 2025, Ryan Elwell, who runs the camera department, and Joshua Kulic, head of post, walked through how these shoots get covered, and Digital Camera World reported the session. Elwell's line on brands was flat: "We will use Arri or any other cinema camera like Reds. We use Canon, Sony, GoPro, iPhones. It really doesn't matter." Cinema bodies and consumer cameras on the same kit list, on purpose, instead of one house standard.
The stated reason was the angle and the footprint: get the shot with as little impact as possible on the atmosphere of the place. Elwell described the other half of it too. A big camera pointed at a contestant changes how that contestant feels, and his stated worry is that it can interfere with the fairness of the game, which on a competition shoot is not a matter of taste. So a camera sometimes goes into the middle of the crash, sometimes sits far back behind a long lens, and sometimes is small enough to blend in.
Three jobs, three kinds of camera
Sorted by job rather than by price, the mix stops looking like clutter:
- Cinema bodies — Arri, Red — for the frames that have to survive being graded, cropped and enlarged. They need an operator, somewhere to stand, and time.
- Canon and Sony for the working middle: handheld coverage that has to move fast, swap lenses and keep rolling while the scene changes shape.
- GoPros, POV cameras and phones for positions where a person cannot stand, or should not: inside the thing, under it, bolted to it, or close enough that a bigger camera would alter the moment it was there to record.
Director of photography Jason Elliott put numbers on that third group for the 1-100 video. In his account, each of the hundred contestant cubes carried three cameras, three hundred bodies in all, plus a hundred tablets, as the baseline before anything else was added. The mix he listed was GoPro Hero 12s with media mods, Marshall POV cameras, ceiling and perimeter cameras, and handheld operators on top. Those figures are his, in an account VP Land wrote up, and they describe one shoot rather than a standing rig. The video itself is the 1-100 video on MrBeast's channel.
The hard part sits downstream of the camera
Once cameras are picked for where they can go, the difficulty moves to power, cable and getting the footage off. For that same shoot Elliott described close to 56 miles of cable and 46 Atomos Shogun Studio 2 recorders capturing remotely, which kept media out of most of the bodies. Recording with no card in the camera is a workflow decision, not a camera one. He put the resulting volume at petabytes.
That is not the ceiling either. Guinness World Records lists the team's record for the most cameras recording simultaneously on a competitive reality show at 1,107, a thousand of them GoPros, and GoPro has published its own account of that fleet. None of that thousand was chosen because it beats an Arri. It was chosen because there were a thousand places to be.
Where a phone genuinely stops
None of this makes a phone equal to a cinema camera. It makes the phone better at being somewhere the cinema camera cannot go, which is a different claim and a smaller one. The real gap shows up where a spec sheet does not look: highlight latitude with the sun behind the subject, how far a heavy grade can pull before the image falls apart, how long the body records before heat throttles it, and whether a lens exists for the framing you want.
On a phone, processing decides a lot of that for you, and each generation moves the line a little. Most of what changed on the current iPhone Pro is processing and control rather than a bigger sensor. Worth knowing, and still a different question from which camera can be bolted inside a cube and left there.
What to take from it for your own kit
If a production with access to anything sorts its cameras by position instead of by sensor, that sort is available to you for nothing. The camera you already own is the right one for the shots only it can reach, and no upgrade changes that. The one worth paying for is the one that opens a position you currently cannot cover, a mount, a second small body, a way to leave a camera running unattended, rather than the one that raises a number you were never limited by.
The flip side of putting small cameras in bad positions is that some of them do not come back: the same crew has talked about the bodies that die on set, and their working answer is redundancy rather than tougher cameras. If you want the scale version of this logic rather than the reasoning behind it, a thousand GoPros on one production is where the idea ends up when nobody stops it.
Last updated September 22, 2026