I told production that I wanted to shoot ARRIRAW at 4.5K, but our line producer was worried that the data and hard drive space would take us over budget. I called Philipp Chudalla (ARRI’s Business Development Manager for the Middle East and India) to explain the situation and he told me I could shoot with HDE (High Density Encoding). He even flew from Dubai to India to teach my DIT the workflow. After testing, my colorist Andy (Andreas Brueckl) told me there was no quality loss with HDE, so I was able to go back to the line producer and say we didn’t need additional hard drives, and yet we would have the same high quality. It was HDE that allowed us to go ahead with the ALEXA LF.

Did ALEXA LF bring advantages beyond the large-format aesthetic?

The ALEXA LF helped me on set because I could shoot in low light situations, for example at real locations that limit what extra lighting can be put in. In London I sometimes couldn’t put lights on the streets, so I couldn’t have light coming in through windows and had to rely on available light, with a few practicals in the room. I generally shot at 800 EI, but was very happy to bump up to sometimes 1600 EI and knew I wouldn’t have issues in the dark shadows when it came to the grade. That was a big plus when shooting scenes at real locations, because it allowed me to work fast.