Hollywood’s top-selling camera maker ARRI chooses Altera

SAN JOSE, USA: Altera Corp. announced that its field programmable gate array (FPGA) products and complementary power products have been chosen to enable a new, versatile documentary-style camera by Munich-based ARRI, the world’s largest maker of cinematographic cameras for Hollywood’s film industry.

The AMIRA is the ARRI camera with its own video processing pipeline enabled on a single Altera Stratix V FPGA, which when combined with Altera’s Enpirion PowerSoC DC-DC converter, greatly contributes to the camera’s compact, ergonomic design optimized for single-operator use.

Altera engineers are demonstrating the live content capture capabilities of the AMIRA camera in the Altera booth (#1.F13) at the International Broadcast Conference (IBC 2014) held in Amsterdam from September 12 to 16.

ARRI MD, Franz Kraus, said: “Our cameras are designed to enable filmmakers to capture the emotion in the moment. There is no second shot, so the camera must offer the highest level of control and the best configuration settings to enable filmmakers to anticipate action; and that is what the Altera FPGA technology helps us deliver in AMIRA.”

The Stratix V FPGA enables the AMIRA camera to feature the same sensor and exceptional image quality as the ARRI ALEXA camera, but at up to 200 frames per second.

At IBC 2014, ARRI will be demonstrating UHD output support for AMIRA, thanks to its reprogrammable system architecture and its processing power allowing in-camera, real-time up-sampling for UHD distribution. The AMIRA multi-viewfinder relies on Altera’s Cyclone V to enable precision capture operation and camera control, making it affordable for cost-sensitive production budgets.

Dan McNamara, VP of the Broadcast Business Unit, Altera, said: “The programmable and high-performance capabilities of Stratix V are ideally suited to the design challenges and enabled ARRI to create a cutting-edge documentary camera. The AMIRA, our first collaboration with ARRI, is a remarkable camera with exceptional picture quality that comes with complex system design challenges, pushing the envelope in terms of smaller form factor, lower power consumption, and computational and memory bandwidth.”