ARRI has released a major ALEXA 35 upgrade. ARRI has come a long way since the stock rolling through the gate had silver-halide emulsion. But hang on, I’ll pull my self out of the reeds and speak to this incredible new offering from ARRI in 2025. As a film-trained camera operator, I like to follow along and see where digital is going and oh my goodness it’s gone badass!
The new ALEXA 35 Xtreme is available as a brand new camera or as a major firmware update to the ARRI you or your studio may have already. The ALEXA 35 Xtreme builds on the camera’s renowned image quality, usability, and reliability, now adding the industry’s fastest frame rate of 660fps, and reduced data rates with the new ARRICORE codec, extended pre-recording times, lower power consumption, and enhanced WiFi performance.
ALEXA 35 Xtreme is uniquely versatile, making it a cost-effective rental choice and a sound investment for owner-operators. It is sold in sets, either as the fully featured ALEXA 35 Xtreme Premium model or the lower-cost Base model, which has the same image quality and a core feature set. The Base model can be flexibly upgraded via temporary or permanent feature licenses. That seems more than fair in such a budget-stretched business landscape.
There are 17 stops of dynamic range in the new firmware, together with ARRI Textures. As a high-sensitivity camera, ALEXA 35 Xtreme offers sensitivity settings from EI 160 to EI 6400 while maintaining low noise and exceptional colour accuracy across all exposure levels. The Enhanced Sensitivity mode ensures even cleaner images in low-light environments and is an especially powerful tool when combined with in-camera Shadow ARRI Textures with the +Look functionality.
For the ALEXA 35 Xtreme and ALEXA 35 Base models, and ALEXA 35 Live, the Open Gate/Anamorphic license enables all Open Gate recording formats as well as the anamorphic 3.3K 6:5 recording format and anamorphic de-squeeze for monitor paths. For the latter two cameras it also enables the 3K 1:1 and 2.7K 8:9 recording formats.
Switching to ARRICORE is easy because on-set and post workflows remain consistent with existing ALEXA 35 codecs and drives. The ALF4 ARRI Look File, ARRI Textures, metadata, audio, and the MXF wrapper will all behave in a familiar way. ARRICORE is launching in beta to actively engage users and drive rapid enhancement of its capabilities through direct feedback. Most third-party tools that already support the current ALEXA 35 codecs will also support ARRICORE.
You can just tell I’m from the old world. Which is why when ARRI’s newsletter came to my inbox, I wanted to pour through the details of this major new update.
https://www.arri.com/en/camera-systems/cameras/alexa-35-xtreme
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