No price or availability yet, and it looks like this is going to be a rental item only… but even so, it would seem to be officially “Game on” in the camera business with Arri’s upcoming Alexa 65:

http://nofilmschool.com/2014/09/arri-reveals-6k-65mm-cinema-camera-alexa-65

Looks like Arri is doing 6k and the RED Dragon officially has its first bit of 6k competition.

And if you’re wondering why you should be shooting 6k… well, in my opinion, you certainly don’t need to deliver in 6k, but for the same reasons that it gave you a lot of flexibility to punch in from 4k down to 1080… well, it’s basically the same deal going from 6k down to 4k. It’s all about flexibility.

As far as I’m concerned, the Dragon is still my first choice on the high end if I had to shoot a feature… but, well, when we know a little more about this camera (price/ship date), that may change a bit.

It seems like every day some crazy new camera comes out that changes the whole game. Whether it’s the Panasonic GH4, Sony A7s, RED Dragon, the AJA Scion, all the BMD Cameras (I can’t keep track of what’s current), or the Alexa 65… I guess all it really means is that we as filmmakers have a lot of great new options… and as editors, a lot of different formats and styles we’ve got to keep track of.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam Mestman, FCPWORKS.

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Workflow Architect, Sam Mestman. Sam’s also a regular writer for fcp.co and MovieMaker Magazine, teaches post workflow at RED’s REDucation classes, and is the founder and CEO of We Make Movies, a film collective in Los Angeles and Toronto which is dedicated to making the movie industry not suck. If you’ve got any FCP X questions or need some help putting together a system, drop him an email at workflow@fcpworks.com and you can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

Sam here…

Looks like ARRI’s finally getting their act together and are finally supporting 4K capture with the Amira:

http://www.arri.com/news/news/prores-uhd-with-amira/

While I’d love it if it supported full 4K DCI (4096×2160), this is still a big step in the right direction for them.

What’s really nice about this is that’s it’s going to shoot out Prores, and not some ridiculous, impractical RAW format that’s going to be hard to work with… although it seems from the diagram like they’re not quite supporting Prores XQ, which is a bit of a drag. That’s the capture format I’d love to see for feature/high end work.

Regardless, a huge step in the right direction.

Whether you all like the way the ARRI Amira is set up or not… you need to start thinking about how you’re going to shoot and master in 4K. It’s going to become the new standard.

PS- and don’t forget to tune into FCPWORKS’ Sam Mestman appearing on the Final Cut Virtual User’s Group at http://hazu.herokuapp.com/pixelcorps/fcvug-3 at 1:00 PM PST today!