Arri Amira - Worth The Wait?

So, the new kid on the block is the Arri Amira. My immediate reaction was four year old technology being repackaged! But, apart from that, what else? Lets look at the selling points. "Designed for documentary use". The buttons and menu have been brought round to the operator’s side which is a must for those without the luxury of a camera assistant, and it has an ENG style shoulder pad. The weight is a big issue; I haven’t weighed one as it would be a bit awkward wandering onto Arri’s stand at IBC with a set of scales, but I’d guess the body and viewfinder come in at about 8 or 9 kg, which is getting on nearly double that of a PDW-F800. Then if you wanted to use a 2/3" ENG Style lens on the Amira you’d add an extra 1/2Kg for the adapter. That makes a whopping 10 to 11.5 Kg on your shoulder with lens and battery! Now, at this point your saying this is a Sony dealer who obviously isn’t going to like the Amira. There are Sony dealers out there who are evangelising about the Amira, but I think that has more to do with it being the next big fashion statement and potential sales rather than whether it makes sense.  In the cold light of day, it doesn’t have much going for it except that’s it’s a cheaper way to buy into the Alexa look and have an Arri camera on your shoulder (however heavy it is). That isn’t great either because plenty of rental houses have Alexas on the shelf that have done their time and hire out for £300.00 a day; what does that make the Amira daily rate when it’s half the cost? So, as a Sony dealer, I’d recommend the PMW-F55 or PMW-F5 wouldn’t I ! Well yes I would! Weight, with a shoulder rig, probably about 4Kg. Lens options, PL the same as the Amira, B4 with an adapter the same as the Amira, EF with an FZ to EF adapter the same ..…… no!, there isn’t a PL to EF adapter so only expensive 35mm glass for the Amira. Formats; the Amira and F cameras have pretty much the same frame rates but the F55 has 4K onboard and both the F cameras can use the adapter to go 2K and 4K RAW. Recording format wise the Amira has ProRes, the F cameras have XDCam HD, XAVC, HDCam SR and RAW. Now we know the ProRes argument that it goes straight into FCP, but transcode software has come on a long way since this was a valid argument and it’s standard practice to put XDCam HD onto a FCP timeline; then FCP is losing its appeal as editors dislike FCP X and Apple have no interest in upgrading FCP 7. Where was I, the F5 and F55 are here now! They’ve proved their robustness on countless jobs. Sony have hit every deadline on the software upgrades which is a lot more than can be said for other manufacturers. The F5 which will do everything most cameramen need is half the price of any of the alternatives. The F55 has a Global Shutter which the Amira does not! Both cameras have 14 stops of latitude whilst the F5 and F55 have a 4K sensor and the Amira using the Alexa sensor has only a bit more than half the active pixels. Arri’s feature package is the same as Sony’s. I’ve given up on trying to work out why there suddenly becomes a huge trend towards certain cameras but what I do know is that cameras are a big investment and you can’t rely on residual values. The F5 or F55 offer a scalable camera that can shoot 50mb/s MPEG2 for TV using a 2/3" ENG style lens one day, a feature in 4K RAW with Cine 35mm glass the next. Perhaps if the Sony marketing team had given the Camera a name rather than a number it would of grabbed the imagination a bit more. But we’re 9 months in, we have customers using them for daytime TV, on Feature Films at Pinewood, in the four corners of the world shooting Natural History in the worst possible conditions, 17 week TV Dramas for major Broadcasters, Documentaries and more. They’re here now and they work and I don’t believe the Amira will offer you anything more, on the contrary, much less!