Just a reminder that though we research these videos as thoroughly as we can, we will miss some details in some of the complex stories that are only available now through old videos and archived webpages. So please let us know if we miss anything and we will be sure to amend it here in the comments! ============================= Join our Discord Channel💬 ► discord.gg/3aeNPU7GHu Twitter ► twitter.com/frame_voyager Instagram ► instagram.com/framevoyager/ TikTok ► www.tiktok.com/@framevoyager Join our RU-vid channel 📺 ►ru-vid.com/show-UCmXGDFnFh95WlZjhwmA5aeQjoin
The name Alexa is coming from the fact that it whas a secret project. So people who had to come to Arri to work on the camera had to ask for Alexa at the front desk. Like they had a meeting with someone who called Alexa. And when the moment come that they had to release the camera everybody whas so used to call it “Alexa” so they decided to keep it that whay. The name Amira whas invited because it seems like the name of the little sister of Alexa.
The ALEXA was such an industry breaker that a lot of people don't even know that Arri made digital cameras before the Alexa. Once again, great history lesson!
I have been shooting on the D21 this year. I shot a short film, with the D21 + Master Prime 16mm Prime Lens. I shot Arriraw (2880x2160), with the use of the Codex M Recorder. My editor wrangled the footage, and he couldn't believe how much it truly emulates the look of 35mm motion picture film stock. Yes, the native ISO is 200, but with the addition of powerful LED lights, and the use of fast lenses, like the Masters, it is definitely manageable. I am shooting more & more on the D21, and I couldn't be happier with the image. There is something unique about the colour science, that looks different to the Arri Alexa's. Great video mate. Enjoyed it!
best looking camera I could afford was the BMPCC6k pro.. im still to this day stunned with the imagery that comes off that thing. so film like its insane. im an old guy and I remember the very first time I saw digital video on a computer monitor. my jaw just dropped. we take it for granted but that was like magic back in the day. Also the first time I transferred digital tape to the computer via deck, and then started being able to edit. I mean it blew my doors off. no more EDL or rocking the reels..
Kudos to Arri for having a foot in digital cinema with the D21 while learning and perfecting their technology for what would become the Alexa. Arri is a reminder to self to balance adapting new technologies with controlling quality.
Arri really proves that they’ve been at it for over a century. Instead of rushing, they think long term, and they listen to the industry. While RED would have an attitude of “they’ll change for us”, Arri’s has always been to listen and provide what the pros want. That and to keep things compatible! The fact that accessories for film cameras work on the Alexa and vice versa really shows their long term game!
I should probably add that I worked at a rental house for years, and the difference in approach between Arri and RED was tangible. RED, while cool and innovative had a tendency to be impatient, announcing things before they were ready and often releasing them too early as well. It wasn’t uncommon for us to send out a spare RED just in case when they introduced a new model or sensor… because they had a tendency to go a bit haywire. Arri’s greatest strength (and flaw) is that they’ve been around for a long time, so they don’t rush things. Which means they can sometimes fall a bit behind the curve, but they make up for it in reliability. That reliability would often cause things to take time. An Arri rep showed me Master Grips A LONG time before they were even announced, because they wanted it to be sure it worked before hitting the market. Heck, I remember hearing about the replacement for the Alexa sometime in 2016-2017, but it took so long to perfect the sensor. The LF was essentially a stop-gap for them to have a 4K Native camera while waiting for the Alexa 35.
I went to the University at 5:39 that made that demo video on the RED One, I remember using that exact camera body... It was abysmal. I now work at ARRI and it's funny watching this video and going full circle. The D21 still lives on in a small capacity. At ARRI, here in London, we have a D21 that has been adapted and is now the only digital camera that is capable of hand cranking, and we still regularly send it on jobs to this day for that reason. Enjoyed watching, cheers!
That's awesome! Hope this was a faithful retelling of the story of those cameras! Hard to always get the right narrative from just news sources and online videos lol
@@davidconsumerofmath Hand controllable variable frame rates (and therefore exposure also), changing live during a take as you change the speed of cranking. It's used more as an effect more than anything else, was very common on most cinema film cameras but no digital cameras can do it other than our D-21. I'm sure there are examples on RU-vid if you want to learn more :)
It's like the NeoGeo AES home console, so beloved it went from rental-only to becoming a genuine sales item sold around the world despite the costs involved in the machine and the games. Great video, fun to learn more about ARRI and their legacy.
Of course you all voted on doing the HARDEST story to tell haha! Hope you enjoy it though. Not really ABANDONED per se, but enough to be able to tell the story that way!
They just don't rush anything. Like I've said in other videos, it's really smart to look at how they do things and emulate it. They know what matters because they take the time to nail out every detail.
@@FrameVoyager this is why i don't like when people keep asking to make another very high resolution camera. specially in the Nikon community if you ask them how Z8 should be like they will say bring 80MP or 100MP sensor. this kind of higher resolution will have bad performance in low light and it will perform very bad in video. camera manufacturers should now try to get more dynamic range out of new sensors. i would rather have only 30/35MP 6k resolution sensor with 15+ stops dynamic range and better low light performance rather then just keep pushing for the resolution. its just amazing to see how new good ARRI Alexa S35 sensor 17+ stops dynamic range footage looks like. you can clearly see the difference between other cameras footage and new ARRI just due to the dynamic range.
I’m really enjoying these episodes focusing on early digital cameras. This was such a unique time for the film industry, and there were so many innovative cameras that you almost never hear about anymore. The Panavision Genesis might be worth adding to your list if it isn’t on there already. It was one of the most successful digital cameras of its time, but it was pretty much forgotten after the Arri Alexa released.
Appreciate it! Have a lot more on the list too and I believe that Genesis is as well! I'll have to do a full on documentary of the beginning of the digital camera age when I'm done with all of these lol
@@FrameVoyager I would love to see that! I was trying to do research on cameras from this time a few months ago, just out of my own curiosity, and I was surprised how hard it is to find information about a lot of them. Plus, there was basically no recent mentions of them. You are practically the first person to talk about these cameras in a decade. That being said, I know you definitely have a lot on your plate, and I’ll be looking forward to whatever you put out next. Keep up the great work!
@@toad6565 Plan on doing some spinoffs to this series along with my other normal content as well. And it really is HARD to find info on them. You really gotta dig deep into the archived internet lol. Appreciate you watching!
Appreciate it! It helps with companies like ARRI when they really care about their history to have all these stories still intact! But these are fun stories to tell and I'm glad to help tell them the best that I can!
Loving these videos! Can you do one about the short lived "cinema adapter" era? It was led by companies like RedRock Micro with the M2 and later the M3, and Letus. it was an attachment that went on the front of prosumer video camera like the Canon XH A1s, Sony PMW series cameras and so on. it allowed you to utilize various lenses by zooming in on a sensor plane behind the ground glass to get that grainy look. That whole "rise of the DSLR shooter"/Prosumer video camera era was crazy! All sorts of adapters and attachments were coming out but quickly stopped around 2012/13. Funny enough, that's when BM entered the scene and changed everything with the OG Cinema Camera!
@@FrameVoyager There's an extreme amount of info to be found (mostly forums but also early Philip Bloom videos) about those adapters. From the pro market to home made :) And like Aarom Smith said. It was also extremely short lived before DSLR's came out, after that it was over!
Arri's ALEV III sensor was designed by ON Semiconductor, but that's not a bad thing. The ALEV sensor was built on Arri's scanner technology, which was outstanding in dynamic range and color, but also gave them film scans to use to developing a film-like noise pattern that was extremely pleasing.
If I am not mistaken, ARRI (engineers) was involved in the design. The manufacturing being produced by this company. No longer the case for the newest ALEXA 35 ALEV 4 sensor. Worth to also mention that the ARRI scanner (and ALEXAs) was highly praised due to its digital imaging engineering (including the logarithmic encoding), behind the "ARRI look" that is part of the company's reputation.
brooooo this series is so good. there's still a tribe of people who shoot D21, just as there is an explosively growing tribe of people shooting alexa classic now. I have a classic plus that im going to continue to hold onto just because i have a feeling they might be very sought after eventually.
Appreciate it! Having a lot of fun digging through obscure camera history! And for real! Vintage digital cameras are for sure going to become a thing 😂
This is a very interesting watch, thanks. My company had a very early prototype D-20 on loan from Arri Munich when we were developing our own field recorder, that used 12 disks striped together and attached via fibre channel, to record full uncompressed HD video. This was just around the time that Codex Digital also started showing the world their recorder. Our recorder never got productised since we were relying on outside sources for things like frame capturing and we couldn't support special features like the D-20's special 'ArriRaw' mode. It was a fun time, though.
So fun fact about the Arri D series. A Cam op I work for called Mark Barrs used to Focus Pull for Gavin Finny back in the 2000s. They did a feature (can’t remember the name), where they shot on (I remember him saying the ArriFlex D-1 idk if that was an early prototype or he meant the D-21 but he described it as Arris first digital camera). Apparently they got a new camera every two weeks and the Arri project management team would come down and ask for feedback from Gavin, Mark, the loader and the Grips. I’ve had that story told back to me by Gavin, Mark and even Vadim who directed that movie (acc Vadim was the first person who told me that). Just goes to show Arris commitment to quality, you notice those cameras aren’t just designed for DOPs, but for the teams that support them too. Arri isn’t just popular because of it’s look, but it’s functionality, working with Alexas on high budget long form is a pleasure, and takes no time at all to get trainees completely up to speed with the system.
Bro this series feeds my soul as someone who literally grew up in this era and cut my teeth on film and digital at the same time while I watched it all unfold.
Also interesting two of the top companies making cinema cameras today (blackmagic and arri) both came from having a history of heavy involvement with film scanning and digitizing, makes sense.
VIDEO NOTE: Thanks to @randomgeocacher for pointing this out. At 11:03 I make it sound like ARRI fully developed the Alexa sensor themselves. This is not true and not my intention. They did it in partnership with ON semiconductor that was specifically created for ARRI. Through ARRI's own research and partnership with ON and others on the arrilaser and arriscan, they were able to make this sensor.
Biggest problem for me of the D series was the codec. Raw files seemed to be almost impossible to manage. Everyone talk about the sensor but i'd be curious to know how Red managed to create the .r3d codec in such a limited time, it was 10 years ahead of its time and its still amazing to work with it today
Oh interesting! Yeah, hard to find a lot of people that worked with it. But that's interesting to hear the codec was that bad. I feel like most were a pain until .r3d codec was made. Though the story surrounding how they figured that out is bizzare. Like most things are with Red lol
@@FrameVoyager I don't think the Arri codec was bad in term of quality or possibilities. Most probably it was very good. But the data management seemed to be almost impossible as it had no compression. I've read that you had to carry something that looked like a little server plugged to the camera to store all this amount of data if you chose to shoot Raw It's definitely a mysterious and amazing camera, thanks for this video!
I have a D21. I have shot with both a D21 and an Alexa side by side on two features - and the D21 always outperforms the Alexa (except for night shots). Image wise it is superior to the Alexa. As a side note, you can tether it to a Convergent Design monitor or another SDI monitor, and capturing becomes effortless. Thanks for this video!
Nicceee! I've been trying to find a d-21 or d-20 to buy for so long 😅 interesting to find a couple people that own them. Let me know if you ever see one for sale 😉
@@FrameVoyager I deleted it, cause I saw you made a video of that one already. I had one of those for a while as well, but sold it. It has a beautiful image, but the workflow really sucks. How do you like it?
@@FrameVoyager Yay! BTW Hope it comes with a card reader. That camera is basically impossible to shoot video without one. Just watched your ikonoskop video. You included a clip from one of my films in it - the girl holding the ikonoskop in yellow shirt! That movie was mostly shot with the d21 actually but some of the shots were with the ikonoskop.
I started watching your abandoned camera series a few weeks ago and one of the first things I thought was, he should do the Arri D-20. Wish granted, thanks.
I had a 2 days commercial shoot around 2008 in Hungary with D21. The camera was brand new, bulky, looked like a motorbike without wheels and frames. The recorder was attached by cables so we couldn't really moved (we tried and it was hard) the camera or use it handheld. After on and a half they shoot the camera stopped working, it freezed and couldn't start again. They take it back to Munich immediately and I never heard about it. The production brought a Sony F-900 the Ford production HD camera (Star Wars Attack of the clones fame). The Sony footage looked inferior to the Arri's. I was seriously disappointed in the D21. I worked with Red One, lot of people hated it, because of overheating and etc, but I never had problem with it, and I like the image that Red One produced. Later on Red changed to modular cameras and Arrived released Alexa that reminded me the Red One aesthetically. Those were the days...
Last time I was at Arri Rental, they had one for sale along with an S.two onboard recorder. $6K for the complete package. This is for something that was worth about $200K new.
I feel like you left out a bunch of key reasons. If I remember correctly the native ISO of this camera was 200 so it was slow. It was also gigantic and heavy, and required being tethered to an external recording device like the minifridge sized Sony SRW-1. The image quality and compatibility with film accessories made it appealing as a real digital cinema camera, but If I had something of my own to shoot back then I would have much preferred a Sony F900R, for weight, simplicity and being able to just throw it on my shoulder and go.
I'm sure I missed some too! These are not the easiest subjects to research as I'm relying on very little data or information, especially with these cameras and when they were around.
Only as a dedicated amateur (managed to picked up a second hand Arri 2c 35 mm motion camera for a v.good price in 2007), my perspective on the changeover to digital reflects what is set out in this helpful video - a "critical mass" was reached circa 2009 - companies continuing to sell motion picture (film cameras) were like Olivetti - the Italian typewriter manufacturer - trying to compete with word processing packages on home computers !!! I was initially skeptical about the move to digital - movies like "Public Enemies" (2009) didn't look great (the low light scenes looked like average quality television video) but movies shot on the Arri Alexa (or any of Red's cameras) approximated to film much better. I hope film continues to be used for some movies but - as regards the general motion picture industry - the "R.I.P." sign for film went up circa 2009/2010 !!!
It seems like ARRI and others are really dedicated to getting back to that filmic look with digital sensor. It's honestly quite amazing the technological achievements in the video industry in the past 20 years. The quality we get now is just leaps and bounds above what we even had in 2012. But I really like what ARRI did with this last camera and the ability to emulate film grain in camera, pretty fascinating.
I just randomly got your channel recommended, and I love it. A question: Is there any used digital cinema camera (resolution doesn't matter) that is really cheap? I kind of want to try this whole thing out. I got a Canon DSLM and video isn't the best experience. Looking for a cheap, used, but good cam just for private use.
Amazing work! Great research and you really make it entertaining to watch, Thank you! 5:30 I believe that the Red One was only capable of 2K at release. It wasn't until the Mysterium X sensor upgrade became available that you could get 4K on it. By then the DSMC bodies had arrived. I am not 100% certain that my memory serves me correct tho!
I seem to recall during the launch that the camera had no name yet only the sensor was the AlevIII and the engineers nicknamed the system Alexa but that was not supposed to be the official name. But the press catch that name really quick and started referring to it and this the Alexa name became the model? I’d love to corroborate this but I do remember the absence of the Alexa And in the original presentation.
11:03 no, maybe a bit of a nitpick but it’s very wrong. ”The ALEXA camera is powered by the ALEV III image sensor, which was designed and manufactured by ON Semiconductor specifically for ARRI.” very few companies (Sony, Canon, …) with strong background in digital design have the ability to design sensors. Arri, RED, BMD etc mostly work on integration level, at best collaborating with experts like ON, Fairchild, etc etc who designs their sensors. Prior experience in analog ASIC design and issues/challenges specific to sensor design are a requirement to make your own sensor, which none of the digital movie camera pioneers had, needed to buy externally. Basically if RED or Alexa would have designed their own sensors their cameras would have entered the market maybe 5 - 15 years later as they either needed to hire other companies sensor/ASIC engineers to get started, or in an extremely fast fashion learn a couple of generation of sensor design issues. Basically a company who haven’t released their own “bad” to “great” sensors for several years clearly lack the know-how to make a sensor. Sony, Canon, … could pioneer in digital design because they had lots of smaller sensors for consumer markets where perfection wasn’t required. ON, Fairchild, … could also pioneer because they had access to tech application sensors and also a lot of non-sensor digital design. Basically all pioneers in digital image sensor manufacturing needed a lot of time, money and several iterations to get from bad to great.
🤔 hmmm... I think I said that wrong here. It was definitely a partnership between them and ON. Probably should have been more specific to say that. I was more meaning the first camera that the sensor was fully developed by them through the partnership with ON. But meaning more so it wasn't just an experimental sensor as had been in the d-20 and d-21. Really ARRI learned a lot with that arrilaser and arriscan through multiple partnerships! Thanks for catching that!
Going back and listening to it yeah I think when I wrote that bit I knew what I meant in my head with it but didn't notice how it sounded until you pointed it out. It truly was their first fully developed sensor from all the data and research they conducted and the partnerships with ON. I'll add a note about that in the pinned comment!
@@FrameVoyager tanks :) I know it is impossible to state everything correctly and get all the details correct, so I felt a bit bad nitpicking on a single quote. RED at some point in early history tried to make people believe they magically designed sensors in-house with like eh, zero sensor experts in their staff. An area I care a bit more than healthy because I understand the challenges in engineering even small simple ASICs; and manufacturers clearly unable to do this themselves have been very great at taking credit for advanced products where the integrator either buys a pre-designed sensor… or participates in a joint venture where the integrator only stands for maybe 5-10% of the joint design, the experts for the rest (and the years of trying/failing/evolving at imaging designs). If I would guess, what ARRI brought to ON was a couple of unusual requirements (large sensor area Super35, low-SNR / high DR, optical/filter quality) that most sensors don’t need. Super35 (and even worse, Full Frame) is where you’d expect yield to go down unless the design somehow accept/hides manufacturing errors (todays error accepting IC designs are orders of magnitude larger than what I learned to be bad-yields… in school we used to say 1cm2 chips had bad yield, 2cm2 chips had insanely bad yield, … but recent super-large chips demonstrate engineers have overcome such limitations in error-accepting designs) So a Super35 imaging sensor is an extremely interesting specialized design. It is large. It has analog parts, and analog to digital converters. It has glass/microlenenses/filter elements, glue, coatings. So many challenges to overcome before you successfully can produce such a thing.
@@randomgeocacher red totally did! Have you seen my RED 28k sensor video yet? Literally ROAST them on it. At least ARRI acknowledged the sensor partner at an awards show
@@FrameVoyager Eric Fossum, credited as the designer of the original CMOS sensor, was initially skeptical of RED’s claims to have designed their own sensor, stating that he’d never heard of any sensor designers at RED. However, he later did meet the manager of a team of sensor designers who worked at RED. He writes, “at the recent 2019 Int. Image Sensor Workshop, I finally ran into someone who claimed to manage a large team of sensor designers at Red. So my statement about never meeting a sensor designer from Red probably needs to be relative to the time of the statement. I don’t recall his name and I can only take his word that he was a sensor designer or manager of sensor designers.” So I would not be so quick to dismiss RED’s assertions.
@@FrameVoyager Maybe just make a spin off series after season 01 of the abandoned camera series. You got a real winner concept here. Milk it for all its worth, your channel will blow up (AFAIK its grow is accelerating since the start of the series) AND we viewers also profit! A rare win-win in the RU-vid content creation hustle.. ;) We nerds just cant get enough of camera history, and no one else seems to have done it before..
@@TDCIYB77 true! Oh, believe me I plan on milking this series for as long as I can 😂 but, in the meantime also building other plans for other content as well!
@@FrameVoyager here is a paper with some information (it names the D-20 ;) ) tech.ebu.ch/docs/events/hdtech05/presentations/ebu_hdtech05_popp.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3UHchDhSK_dr9zlQRNepfKg5Euzwk2XeoQpKcG0KnVwRn1NShOlrR7hjM
The name Alexa is coming from the fact that it whas a secret project. So people who had to come to Arri to work on the camera had to ask for Alexa at the front desk. Like they had a meeting with someone who called Alexa. And when the moment come that they had to release the camera everybody whas so used to call it “Alexa” so they decided to keep it that whay. The name Amira whas invited because it seems like the name of the little sister of Alexa.
The D20 was not a success as the image quality was too much like "video"...I entered the business 1999 and this was exactly when the transsition began from film to digital...the audience was used to the traditional organic mood of film with its depth of field and sometimes unperfect look. And the film crews were used to an analog workflow, nobody knew how to handle this digital cameras. The very first Red camera had same issues with "video" look, but as it was a newcomer system, much more cheap then ARRI, more newcomers get a hand on them to eyperiment with pushing boundries. Was a crazy era wow...
Cool series. It's funny but before I knew anything about Cine cameras I had a dislike for Red in part because of their naming and the whole macho vibe it gave off, now seeing who was behind it I see I was right; macho Yanks versus reticent Europeans!
Yep! Probably why I never liked them either 😅 but hey! Gotta give Jannard props though. Don't think they would have made it as a company without him, that marketing strategy paid off 🤷♂️
Who started this pronouncing it "airy" thing?When I went to film school it was "are ree" It hurts my ears when ppl say airy- the company is combined names -}ARnold and Richter--->>>> AR not AIR!!! its right there people - ARE RE not AIRY! theres no "I" there!
"here's a brief history of arri" *skips the part where they were nazi contractors whose factories were allocated jewish slaves* "their factory was destroyed during world war two"
@@GregoryVeizades there are companies that are not german, and companies that were not nazi contractors, and companies like leica that aided jews in escaping nazis. glossing over these companies' histories lets them off the hook for their complicity in industrial scale genocide and it is not enough to assume people just know these things.
There's just something about the optical viewfinder... going back to still photography 35mm film I love the look of using the viewfinder. It feels like I'm actually looking through the lens. But nonetheless digital electronic viewfinders are so useful now for the features they add. Still, the D-20 and D-21 at least influenced Arri to have an optical viewfinder in the Alexa for a short while on some models. Sadly, those models are hard to come by these days. Great bit of history here. Still wonder why they kept the Alexa name for the Alexa 35?
