ARRI is one of the few companies that excels at the top end of multiple verticals in film. It makes arguably the best cameras in motion pictures (sorry, Sony, but VENICE 2 isn't quite an Alexa-killer yet), and it also makes some amazing high-end lights with the Skypanel and Orbiter lineups.
By making both, it has the potential to integrate them in a way no one else can match.
Now, ARRI has launched "Sync Mode" to sync between your camera and lighting to take advantage of that integrated design. By putting your light in "Sync Mode," it can be controlled by your camera, down to frame-level accuracy. What does this mean for you in practice?
Meaning in Practice
Well, traditionally, if you want to do a speed ramp in-camera, you had two options.
You could either ramp the aperture (which changes the depth of field), or you could ramp a variable ND. Now, with Sync Mode, you have a third option.
If you want to speed ramp the shot, you can have the speed ramp controlled by the camera, and then the camera automatically controls the lighting to keep your exposure consistent. Triggering this by hand is basically impossible, but doing it by computer should be a snap.
This means if you are doing a speed change in your shot, you aren't going to have to deal with unwanted glass in front of your lens. Since variable NDs can eat a lot of light, doing the change in your light volume instead of with glass will open up a lot of cool possibilities. I guess there's one good thing about having robot overlords.
Of course, there have been solutions to do this in a variety of ways for a long time involving everything from DMX integrations to Arduino boards. In fact, Blackmagic has an Arduino integration officially supported. But they've all involved some level of technical complication that ARRI is avoiding here. By being the manufacturer of both the camera and the lighting, ARRI can engineer compatibility that should "just work," in the Apple phrasing.
Food for Thought
One worry is that ARRI's lighting control app has been buggy in the past. It's the one weak spot in an otherwise stellar lineup. However, they've clearly been putting a lot of work into software upgrades in the last few years, and their willingness to roll out this feature hopefully means they are confident it will work in the field. As their lights increasingly become software-dependent, it makes sense that this would be an area of intense development.
At the same time, ARRI is rolling out more language support and a new "cue" mode to make it easier for all crew members to cue lighting changes when needed from anywhere on set. All of these updates are available now.
Check out weekly specials, deals, and rebates: Pro Video Gear, Pro Audio Gear, Lighting
