ARRI × pripares: From Linux Drivers to AI-Powered Image Processing
A partnership since 2001. Over 24 years, three technology eras.
About ARRI
Arnold & Richter Cine Technik (ARRI), Munich, founded in 1917. Manufacturer of camera and lighting systems for film and media. The ALEXA camera series shoots roughly 80% of the world's largest cinema productions. To date, 18 Scientific and Engineering Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Hollywood shoots on ARRI cameras. pripares builds the software for them.
Almost every film awarded the Oscar for Best Cinematography in the past 15 years - including Gravity, 1917 and Dune - was shot on ARRI cameras.
How the partnership has evolved
Linux and Film
Cinema films were shot on film, edited digitally, and exposed back to film. ARRI made the equipment for that. We made sure the software ran on Linux.
The ARRILASER was the world's first film recorder with solid-state laser technology - developed from 1995, launched in 1998/99. The device exposes digitally edited image data back onto film - the decisive final step in the digital intermediate workflow. The Windows NT driver was unstable and produced waste during exposure - an expensive problem when producing high-quality master tapes. We ported the driver to Linux and solved the stability issue. Contract value: 30,000 DM, plus 16% VAT. A few weeks later, the euro was introduced. The start of our collaboration literally fell into the final days of the old currency.
- 2002
Academy Award for the ARRILASER
The Academy honoured the ARRILASER with the Technical Achievement Award - it became the industry standard for digital intermediate work.
The software ran for many years inside the company before later being replaced by an SAP-integrated solution.
Together with the ARRILASER, the ARRISCAN formed the backbone of the digital intermediate workflow: shoot on film, digitise, edit digitally, expose back to film. We built software for both devices and supported ARRI extensively in deploying Linux as a platform.
The digital leap
Film was replaced by the sensor. High-resolution image data had to be processed in real time. We helped build the software infrastructure for it.
- 2003
ARRI's first digital camera
ARRI introduced the Arriflex D-20, its first own digital camera - predecessor of the D-21 and ultimately the ALEXA from 2010.
Shooting digitally meant: processing high-resolution image data in real time. Conventional CPU pipelines were no longer enough. The GPU pipelines we built for ARRI became the foundation of digital image processing.
As part of the GPU work, we created a framework for graphical interfaces that renders directly via shaders. For nearly two decades it has been running inside ARRI applications - without rewrite, without replacement. Architecture that holds up.
- 2010
Launch of the ALEXA
ARRI introduced the ALEXA - the camera that would become the de-facto standard for cinema productions.
With the ALEXA and its successors, our software moved directly onto the cameras - no longer only inside the post-production chain.
ARRIRAW and AI
Today much of the work revolves around ARRIRAW - ARRI's own raw image format - and around AI in post-production. We develop the reference tool for it and contribute to the AI integration.
ARRIRAW is ARRI's proprietary raw image format - the digital equivalent of a camera negative. It preserves the sensor's full colour response and exposure latitude as unprocessed raw data. The ARC SDK is also used in post-production tools from Adobe, Autodesk, Blackmagic, Colorfront, FilmLight and The Foundry.
Read the full storyART unifies ARC, ARRI Color Tool and ARRI Meta Extract and supports ARRI's latest REVEAL Color Science and the ADA-7 debayer algorithm.
ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) is an open exchange format for machine-learning models. It enables cross-platform inference on different hardware (CPU, GPU, NPU). Step by step, AI-powered image optimisation is becoming part of professional film workflows.
For the entire camera range - ALEXA 35, ALEXA Mini LF, ALEXA LF, AMIRA, ALEXA Mini, ALEXA SXT-W and others - ARRI offers interactive simulators as learning and training tools. We continually adapt and extend the interfaces.
24 years, three technology eras, one client. Partnerships like this aren't planned.
They emerge when the work holds up - and when both sides are ready to walk through technology shifts together.
