YouTuber Matti Haapoja shows us how he prepares his ARRI ALEXA Mini LF for a shoot. This very basic but educational tutorial demonstrates how to assemble a high-end cinema camera for a professional production. Spoiler: Minimal setup costs $100,000.
Assembling the Mini LF kit
Have you ever wondered how cinematographers prepare their high-end cinema cameras for a shoot? YouTuber Matti Haapoja effectively covers and simplifies that. By assembling the ready-for-shoot kit for his ARRI ALEXA Mini LF, Haapoja explains the necessity of each part. And it acutely pretty simple to understand. As the name suggests, the ARRI Mini LF ready-to-shoot set is a selection of essential accessories that integrate with the camera in order to allow the proper (and minimal) operation of the camera. The set includes a viewfinder, Codex drivers, top handle, brackets, cables, power source, and more little and important accessories that allow the expensive camera to do what it was intended to do – shooting movies. After assembling it all together, the compact boxy design of the Mini LF transforms into a heavy, expensive ($100,000) but practical kit.
Followed by RED
It’s amazing how the ALEXA Mini LF reminds us of RED Digital Cinema DSMC2 cameras. The camera is actually a brain with a big red button, and in order to use it, you need to add much expensive stuff to it, which multiply the cost of the camera. Furthermore, Codex drives are just like the defamed RED Mini Mags, but much more expressive (thousands of USD per terabyte which is insane). But the most bizarre is the MVF-2 viewfinder, which looks like an ordinary primitive piece of gear but ultra-overpriced. Hence, it seems that ARRI copied RED regarding the design and business model. You buy an expensive camera, then add the same amount for a minimal setup, including overpriced monitors and media. Indeed, it is super expensive to buy a ready-to-shoot ARRI camera. Sony VENICE is no different here. For that purpose, we have rental houses. Luckily, RED has created DSMC3 which is much more cost-forgiving for those who want to own ‘Hollywood gear’. Anyway, Check out Haapoja’s explanation below, showing his $100,000 read-to-shoot setap:
My 2 cents to this:
Granted, RED undoubtedly kicked off a very necessary paradigm shift in the price and marketing and development segment of cameras. We all should be grateful for this, because it changed the industry and made room for new talent, new freedom and new tools alongside of it.
But when you look at the first Alexa, it is what ARRI did right on the first try, e.g the assistants display, settings/complexity/operation and having the right connectors in the right position. It took RED more than 10 more years to correct these early mistakes that they were reluctant to accept („you asked for the small connectors!“).
And to their defense, media hardware used by ARRI is from CODEX as correctly mentioned, and as such the revenue goes not into ARRIs pocket (or at least the bigger part of it). And it is a pretty formidably engineered piece of gear including readers, software and even a virtual filesystem as opposed to RED who indeed took all the margin for themselves and obstructed 3rd party vendors from offering alternative solutions when they were so near and easy.
In the essence RED rewrote their firmware and the cameras’ OS to only accept their branded media, and even took egal action against providers of such soltions.
And that while it was absolutely clear that standard SSDs were used (albeit high performance versions of them), but yes, way overpriced.
That being said, as somebody who once believed in the RED ecosystem and the few ideas (disrupting/shaking up the market, rendering „obsolence obsolete“) I couldn‘t be further away today from shoving any more money down their throat.
Alexa Mini ? Did everything right!
Codex drives are nothing like RED Mini Mags. RED greedily used consumer grade mSATA parts in a proprietary housing and charged artificially high prices. Codex drives actually have sever grade hardware and data protocols (think SAS, the type of stuff you’d find in a datacenter) that justify their professional price point. Sony’s AXS media is the same way, built for reliability, not to fatten your pockets scamming customers.
This is an article sponsored by RED
NO IT IS NOT!
The rabid, frothing at the mouth haters are going to be talking about DSMC2 media until the cows come home while ARRI and Sony laugh all the way to the bank with their prohibitively expensive media, readers and licenses for open gate, HFR, RAW and on and on… Any company is free to negotiate with RED. What is preventing companies from innovating is not RED, but the bean counters who insist on market segmentation. The best DPs to walk the face of the earth have shot on RED and will continue to do so, in spite of these delusional keyboard warriors.
You’re right, 60 year old men with bedazzled jeans and spiked up hair will continue to shoot RED, but at least one bean is being accounted for, whatever that means, because there’s a rumor Canon is letting their next big cine cam use a RED recording module.
And a whole generation of young filmmakers whose entry into RED began with the Komodo are potential lifetime converts as well.
I’ve never heard something more ridiculous than someone saying Arri copies RED
That’s because you know nothing about ARRI. If RED hadn’t existed, we would never have even had the Alexa.