ARRI waited until they were on their home turf at the Cinec expo in Munich to announce a new VERY large sensor camera, known as the ALEXA 65. The sensor is around 3x bigger than that of a Super35 with an active image area of 54.12 mm x 25.59mm which is even larger than the film gate of ARRI’s 765 65mm film camera.

The A3X sensor boasts 6560 x 3102 photosites, with dynamic range of more than 14 stops. The sensor design, similar to the ALEXA XT, shares colorimetry and dynamic range characteristics to match well with earlier Alexa models.

Preliminary Tech Specs:
• 65mm Digital Cinema Camera
• ARRI A3X CMOS sensor
• 5-perf 65mm (full camera aperture)
• 6560 x 3102 resolution (maximum recordable)
• 54.12 x 25.58 mm Sensor size (active image area)
• Weight: 10.5 kg / 23.2 lb
• ARRI XPL Mount (64mm diameter)
• 200 – 3200 ISO. Base is 800 ISO
• Dynamic Range: >14 stops
• Uncompressed ARRIRAW
• LDS metadata
• Electronic Shutter 5° – 358°, adjustable in 1/10° increments
• 0.75 to 27 fps (upgrade to 60 fps planned for early 2015)

ARRI has rehoused Hasselblad lenses to cover the much larger image circle including a 50-110mm zoom and primes that range from 24mm to 300mm.

According to Marc Shipman-Mueler, ARRI, Product Manager for Camera Systems, the new camera will not be for sale and only available for rental through ARRI Rental.

Codex has also announced support for the new format, and the camera already incorporates a Codex recording engine, similar to the system that is built into the ALEXA XT. Existing ALEXA XR Capture Drives support recording from ALEXA 65 at up to 24fps, and a 512GB media card will record around ten minutes in full open gate mode. Next-generation Capture Drives developed by Codex will offer 2TB of recording capacity, and be capable of 20Gb/s data rates, enabling recording times of over 45 minutes.

A typical production scenario for the ALEXA 65 camera system, includes the Vault Lab 65, which includes an enhanced Codex Vault S, GPU processing and with 8TB solid-state Transfer Drives, and will support around three hours of open gate ALEXA 65 footage. The Codex Vault S also creates safety copies, allows for playback, image review and color-correction. The Codex Vault XL, including 24 processing cores, is used near-set for dailies, editorial deliverables, camera original archive to LTO, look creation, syncing sound, and other post production work.