ARRI Reference Tool | Learn & Help

ARRI Reference Tool, or ART for short, combines the functionality of the previous ARRIRAW Converter, Color Tool, and Meta Extract into a single package. You can review clips, check and extract metadata, create, extract look files, and transcode footage to a different format.

The ARRI Reference Tool allows you to render ALEXA 35/ALEXA 265 footage using our new ARRI Debayer Algorithm ADA-7 and REVEAL Color Science. It is also backwards compatible with all ALEXA and AMIRA cameras, which can be de-bayered to LogC4 and travel through REVEAL as well.

Additionally, ART supports QuickTime/ProRes or MXF/ProRes, as well as the CODEX HDE (High Density Encoding) file format. To keep your footage organized, you can create projects with bins and sequences.

Images showing a crop of a software user interface with a folder & file structure.

User interface version (ART GUI 1.7.0)

The following features are included in ART GUI 1.7.0:

Support for lens metadata of the Ensō Prime lenses and Ensō Vintage Elements.
Support of ALEXA 265 MXF/ARRIRAW with its metadata-encoded manual filter sliders.
Support of ALEXA 35 monochrome ARRIRAW material.
Support of HDE compression in an ARRI Legacy MXF wrapper for ALEXA MINI LF / ALEXA MINI / AMIRA cameras

Command line version (ART CMD 0.3.2)

The ARRI Reference Tool CMD is a command line tool that supports the processing of MXF/ARRIRAW and Apple ProRes recording formats of all current ALEXA cameras.

The following processing functions are included in version 0.3.2

Trim mode
- creation of a trimmed RDD54/55 compliant MXF file for ARRIRAW, HDE and Apple ProRes
- reading of legacy ARRIRAW .ari and output as RDD54/55-compliant MXF file
Verification mode
- for individual (ARRIRAW) clips by recalculating the checksums of the individual video frames and comparing them with the checksums in the clip metadata
- for two clips by comparing the checksums of the audio and video data
Process mode (only for ARRIRAW and HDE)
- OpenEXR 16-bit and 32-bit with compression mode in scenes linear
- Tiff in 16-bit integer in LogC and video color spaces
Export mode
- original audio tracks as .wav file
- Static and dynamic camera metadata as .json file
MXF Recovery
- recovery of a not-finalized RDD54/55 compliant MXF clip
- the original clip is opened as readonly

All functions are supported for the following recording formats

ARRIRAW and HDE in MXF according to RDD 54/55 and ARRI V3 header, as well as individual.ari or.arx files
Apple ProRes formats in MXF according to RDD 54/55 and ARRI V3 header

Currently not supported input and output formats

Apple ProRes Quick Time in .mov container format.
Processing of ARRIRAW, HDE, and Apple ProRes to Apple ProRes as RDD54/55-compliant MXF file.
Processing of Apple ProRes to OpenEXR and TIFF files.

The current version 0.3.2 is not feature complete yet and will be extended for the 1.0 version to decode and encode Apple ProRes.

ART User Survey

Improve ART and vote for features

or share your opinion and feature requests for ART CMD!

ARRI Reference Tool Downloads

ARRI Reference Tool 1.7.0 (GUI) for macOS

ARRI Reference Tool 1.7.0 (GUI) for Windows

ARRI Reference Tool 0.3.2 (CMD) for macOS

ARRI Reference Tool 0.3.2 (CMD) for Windows

ARRI Reference Tool 0.3.2 (CMD) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

ARRI Look Files and Custom Color Management for ALEXA 35 in ARRI's Reference Tool

Have our Camera Systems expert Sean Dooley explain different ways to manipulate color within the ALEXA 35 with ARRI Look File 4. Use the save-guarded ARRI color pipeline or explore using your own DRTs.

Please note: This applies to ALEXA 265 alike.