Heiko Knauer - Bayerischer Wald

CFast 2.0 cards

Animation Header_CFast
Made for professional imaging

CFast 2.0 cards are small and cost efficient recording media for recording in the ALEXA Mini or the AMIRA. The cards made their debut when SanDisk introduced their Extreme Pro CFast 2.0 cards together with the ARRI AMIRA. CFast 2.0 cards can be used for Apple ProRes and ARRIRAW recording.

File Access

Our cameras record Apple QuickTime/ProRes or MXF/ARRIRAW data using our standard ARRI UDF file system. The recorded data is directly accessible with any CFast 2.0 card reader on current operating systems.

While there is no real connection to the CODEX ecosystem of other ALEXA cameras, it is possible to feed MXF/ARRIRAW data on CFast 2.0 cards through CODEX High Density Encoding and benefit from a significantly reduced storage requirement. The HDE feature for CFast 2.0 is offered by CODEX as a paid HDE license option for the CODEX Device Manager software.

CFast 2.0 Certification

The CFast 2.0 specification was created by the CompactFlash Association, a group of international companies with the common goal of creating industry standards for flash-based memory cards targeting the professional imaging, video and industrial markets.

The particular design of a CFast 2.0 card can significantly influence its performance. Each CFast 2.0 card we support therefore has to pass a series of tests before it qualifies for use in our cameras. To keep the amount of testing managable and allow effective analysis in case of an issue, we are only able to certify a small selection of these recording media. Other CFast 2.0 cards are not recognized as valid media from our cameras.