When the ARRI Alexa camera was announced on IBC in September 2009, not all features have been unveiled: Behind the curtains ARRI worked on features for a new “Direct to Edit” workflow that allows to edit compressed footage as it comes from the camera. RED showed that this is an interesting way of working, but realtime playback of R3D files at least in HD is not possible without expensive hardware extensions.
Now ARRI teamed up with Apple and implemented QuickTime and the ProRes codec right into the camera. This means that you can take one of the two memory cards (Sony SxS cards by the way) out of the camera, put them into a decent MacBook Pro and review your shooting day’s work in compressed 12bit-precision 444(4) footage in the Taxi.
This does’t mean, that you will entirely get rid of rushes or dailies - the camera can record ProRes QuickTime movies and output uncompressed RAW data at the same time. And you probably don’t want to edit ProRes 4444 footage that takes 120 GB/h, but at least you have the incredible image of Alexa’s sensor in a “pro-sumer” file format right from the camera.
I’ll be very interested to see the reactions at the ARRI booth on NAB next week and how filmmakers will make use of this unique feature. This is definitively one huge step further away from good-ol’-analog film.
