Live sports coverage has a dirty little secret: those buttery slow-motion replays usually come from a dedicated high-speed camera that looks nothing like the rest of the broadcast feed. Arri wants to end that mismatch. The Alexa 35 Live Xtreme, the first camera to launch under Arri’s new ownership, is a broadcast-friendly sibling of last year’s Alexa 35 Xtreme, and it’s built to deliver high-frame-rate footage and standard coverage from one body.
The headline trick is 8x slow-motion HD over traditional SDI workflows, plus 2x slow-motion 4K UHD — no separate slow-mo rig required. That matters enormously in sports, where replays are as much a part of the telecast as the whistle. Arri also pitches the camera for concerts and other live events.
Because it’s the same sensor behind both feeds, the slow-motion clips carry the same Arri look — the company’s much-loved cinematic color and natural skin tones — as the live coverage. As Arri puts it, “the HFR content now has the same Arri look as the regular feed,” so engineers, operators, shaders and directors keep working the way they always have. There’s also a motion-blur control feature that blends “two or more phases” to match the look of standard-speed cameras without hurting HFR output.
Inside sits a Super 35 format ALEV 4 CMOS sensor with a traditional Bayer color filter array — the same custom silicon Arri uses across its Super 35 Alexa and Amira lines. It carries 4608 x 3164 photosites across a maximum 27.99 x 19.22 mm image area, with a 33.96 mm image circle and 6.075 μm photosite pitch.
The frame-rate menu is deep:
- ArriRAW up to 4.6K in Open Gate (4608 x 3164) at 80 fps
- 16:9 4.6K at 95 fps
- 16:9 4K UHD at 125 fps
- 3.8K at up to 190 fps
- HD at 260 and 330 fps
- ArriCORE at up to 660 fps in 2K and HD
Arri promises up to 17 stops of dynamic range, an electronic shutter from 1s to 1/8000s (5 to 356 degrees), and recording in ArriRAW, ArriCORE, Apple ProRes 4444 XQ, ProRes 4444 and ProRes 422 HQ. Frame rates up to 330 fps hold the full 17 stops; the Sensor Overdrive mode pushes live HFR SDI up to 480 fps but drops to 11 stops — a dynamic-range hit that’s par for the course with high-speed cameras.
The core sales pitch is simple: broadcasters no longer have to choose between a dedicated HFR camera and a standard broadcast unit. That’s a genuine deal where rig space at the touchline is scarce. The camera ships with a permanent High Speed License and a High Frame Rate SDI License.
The Alexa 35 Live Xtreme is available to order now. Arri hasn’t published a price, but for context the Alexa 35 Live Standard System runs $115,400, while the Alexa 35 Xtreme starts around $70,000 — so expect the Live Xtreme to land somewhere in that expensive neighborhood.
