ARRI Burbank FBI Raid?

E

Erich Ocean

Active member
UPDATE: It appears that the Feds are investigating "unauthorized computer access" at Arri Burbank. Arri is NOT the target of the investigation. Arri may release more detailed info next week.

-----

Anyone have any info on this?

http://reduser.net/forum/showpost.php?p=648772&postcount=109

An employee confirmed that federal agents went to Arri in Burbank this morning and told all the employees to leave the building while they took a bunch of computers and no one seems to know why. This doesn't sound very good.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Just trying to get some of that great German engineering for themselves? Its been a long time since we stole arri's 2c plans...
 
I heard they were planning to use the same promotional tactics on releasing their new camera, that Red is doing with the Scarlet (delay...delay...delay)

FBI said "Oh HELL no!, one company is bad enough" and stepped in.
 
I'm not posting this on reduser because its pure speculation BUT ...
remember the ceo/president for Arri stepped down in Jan 2010? I wonder if this is connected?
 
It was probably a team from the Panavision Genesis development department, in disguise! All's fair in love, war and digital camera development.
 
Maybe it's my love of all things scandalous, but I read through the thread over on Reduser & want more. Anyone have some info on this? Could it involve Red directly or did Jim bring it up simply to quell speculation on his site as a matter of housekeeping?

My mind immediately went to the break in at Red a couple years ago that looked an awful lot like industrial espionage. This may have nothing at all to do with that, could be anything at this point, but that's what I thought of first.
 
Last edited:
I find it odd that there is no report of this in the news or any of the "Extra" type shows or websites.

An FBI raid at a major camera manufacturer, coupled with it being here in Southern California, and not a peep anywhere but here and at Reduser. This would be all over the news and all of the Hollywood scoop venues.

Very peculiar. Any outside confirmation, other than "an employee confirmed"? Otherwise, I smell a rumor that has dubious origins.
 
Last edited:
Doc Bernard said:
I heard they were planning to use the same promotional tactics on releasing their new camera, that Red is doing with the Scarlet (delay...delay...delay)

FBI said "Oh HELL no!, one company is bad enough" and stepped in.
Click to expand...

Alexa is out though! :)

I've played with it at the rental house that carries my lenses.
 
Apparently ARRI released the firmware update for Alexa enabling ProRes (it was previously in beta, to select customers only).

No announcement yet from ARRI about the raid yesterday.
 
Last edited:
ProRes is great, but if I'm doing something BIG, like theater presentation (which won't be for awhile, but some people will be doing that) I'd want ArriRaw.
 
Ryan Patrick O'Hara said:
ProRes is great, but if I'm doing something BIG, like theater presentation (which won't be for awhile, but some people will be doing that) I'd want ArriRaw.
Click to expand...

I don't know, recording 12-bit RGB with ARRI's LogC to ProRes444 is pretty freaking awesome and the workflow is WAY simpler (not to mention dramatically cheaper). Even for cinema. The quality is there.

I like RED as much as the next guy, and love RAW, but I also think ARRI has got a FANTASTIC workflow for television production with ProRes444/LogC. Producers (rightly) love it. I think Alexa + ProRes444 will be huge.

And for indie cinema, it's also very compelling. One thing's for sure, at least RED and ARRI are competing on the merits -- and we're the winners. :-)
 
Following up on my previous comment, re: ProRes, I believe Alexa with ProRes is getting substantially better results than RED MX because of the lack of compression pre-conversion to ProRes.

With RED, you can only do the debayer/LogC/ProRes conversion *after* the footage has already been wavelet compressed. The plasticky skin people hate with RED footage? I'm almost certain that's an artifact of the wavelet compression, not the sensor itself. With Alexa, the conversion happens in camera from the full, uncompressed ARRIRAW footage -- and is immediately written out as a super-high quality, 12-bit RGB LogC-encoded ProRes444 file.

So, with Alexa, you basically get an on-board RED Rocket that works off the full, uncompressed ARRIRAW footage. And that's why Alexa (currently) has better skin tones.

With RED's new Epic camera, this Alexa advantage will go away because the Epic supports 2.5:1 lossless compression (basically, the same as ARRIRAW but at lower data rates).

Anyway, my $0.02 on why Alexa's ProRes option looks so damn good, even when compared to REDCODE, which in theory should look better, but doesn't because of the effect the wavelet compression has on skin tones.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top