For long, the gap between professional filmmaking and consumer video has been defined by equipment, be it the codecs, colour-grading suites, and processing power that only studios and well-funded productions could afford. Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra attempts to close that gap by introducing two tools — the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec and a Cinematic Look-Up Table (Cine LUT) — that bring studio-grade capabilities to a device that fits in a pocket.

The most technically significant of the two additions is APV, a video codec developed independently by Samsung Electronics and standardised by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Unlike conventional codecs, which sacrifice image data at the compression stage to manage file sizes, APV is engineered to preserve quality across rounds of editing.

The codec supports YUV 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, which retains more colour information than standard formats and gives editors greater flexibility in post-production. Samsung says it reduces file sizes by over 10 per cent compared to existing codecs while delivering what it describes as visually lossless quality.

The trade-off is storage demand. UHD footage recorded at 30fps with APV can consume up to 6GB per minute, which poses real challenges for mobile devices. Samsung addressed this partly through collaboration with its own memory business division, and through thermal management work described by Junseang Min of the MX business: “To enable real-time processing of UHD and 8K video within the constraints of mobile devices, efforts were focused on thermal management and system-level optimisation.”

The Cine LUT feature addresses a different bottleneck: the complexity of colour grading. Samsung’s solution is a set of four preset LUTs, developed in collaboration with U5K Imageworks. The styles — Thriller, Blockbuster, Coming-of-age and Romance — can be previewed in real time while shooting and applied directly within the Gallery app.