ARRI makes history at Eurovision 2026

24 ARRI camera positions

Max Meißl, Director of Photography at ORF, comments, “Speaking honestly, operating the ARRI cameras—given that we also used broadcast lenses—was just like using a standard 3-chip CMOS or CCD camera. It hardly made any difference. I actually found it easier to pull focus, because the shallower depth of field made it easier to see when the image was soft.”

One of the camera operators shooting handheld with an ALEXA 35 Live was Bernhard Popovic, who says, “It was the first time I had worked with ARRI in a typical live broadcast environment and I was surprised by how easy it seemed. My working area was in the green room and the pits, so I was very close to the fans on the grandstands, moving around a lot and walking up and down the stairs. I had to be quick and the camera handled very well…it sits nicely on the shoulder and is easy to operate handheld; I really love the setup and the viewfinder is great as well.”

ALEXA 35 Live cameras were chosen by ORF because—more than any other option on the market—they fulfilled the original brief of delivering a Hollywood-inspired cinematic look. Michael Kögler recalls, “During a test in Sweden we placed the ARRI cameras next to the main broadcast camera of our Swedish colleagues and we saw completely different color nuances with the numerous light, fire, and special effect elements. When you see a special effect on a broadcast camera, it's a light flash; there is no color detail. With the ARRI cameras you saw not just light spots, but every individual light source. And with fire you saw the colors of a flame develop from ultraviolet to yellow, to a glassy white. These are things that people watching at home will see—things they have never seen in this context before.”
 

The cinematic ARRI image

Many of the performances in Vienna involved special effects and light flashes such as these, as well as intense contrast ratios and colors that are traditionally difficult to capture with standard broadcast cameras. As an example, the Australian delegation’s entry “Eclipse” involved a gold costume and a highly saturated blue background, both of which are extremely challenging to digital sensors (see feature image), but were faithfully captured by ALEXA 35 Live in all their vibrancy. The ARRI cameras also rendered LED display walls far more accurately than standard broadcast cameras, with no clipping or moiré effects.

Image quality was not the only appeal of the ARRI system, as DP Max Meißl notes: “There are two major advantages to the ARRI system. One is the shallow depth of field…which allows me to work cinematically in a live setting. The second is the use of LUTs; I can easily generate look-up tables for color moods in advance, and I can see in the viewfinder what the final images will look like when broadcast.”

The ability of the ARRI Multicam System to implement bespoke creative looks was enthusiastically embraced by the delegations. During preproduction ARRI prepared a ‘look book’ of around 50 music video-inspired looks, from which the delegations made selections in collaboration with the event’s lighting designer and vision mixer. Only one country chose to stick with the show LUT; all the others chose an ARRI look and the winning delegation, Bulgaria, used two different looks during its performance.

With so many looks being used during the final show, ARRI set up a workflow that enabled automated look-switching on a shot-by-shot basis. This facilitated what looked like 25 unique and perfectly graded high-end music videos, but shot in real time and output live with no postproduction and no additional complications to the broadcast workflow. Cameras were grouped together for the application of synchronized look control, while familiar operational controls were maintained for the vision team via standard RCPs.