Premiere Pro 26.5 shipped on September 14, and the headline feature isn’t another generative-AI panel bolted onto the timeline. Buried in Adobe’s release notes is native support for ARRICORE, ARRI’s newest RGB codec, straight from the ALEXA 35 Xtreme. That sounds like a spec-sheet footnote. For anyone who has actually cut footage from that camera, it’s the update that removes a step they’ve been stuck doing for a year.
Photo: ARRI, official press image.
What ARRICORE Actually Trades Away
The ALEXA 35 Xtreme shoots up to 660fps, which is exactly the kind of camera that turns a card full of ARRIRAW into a storage and ingest problem. ARRICORE is ARRI’s answer: according to the company’s own technical materials, it runs at roughly half the data rate of ARRIRAW, landing close to ProRes 4444 in file size, while staying what ARRI calls “visually lossless.” The part that matters more than the compression math is what stays untouched: sensitivity, white balance, and tint are never baked into the file. They live as metadata you can still change in the Source tab long after the card is back in the office, the same non-destructive latitude colorists already expect from raw.
The Real Change Is What You No Longer Have to Do
Before 26.5, getting ALEXA 35 Xtreme footage into a Premiere timeline meant a transcode or proxy pass first, the standard tax on any high-speed raw workflow. Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Media Encoder have supported ARRICORE in beta since June, but full support landing in a shipping release changes who this is for: not just beta testers willing to troubleshoot a codec, but anyone cutting a commercial or unit currently renting an Xtreme package. Adobe’s own documentation is blunt about the target use case: import ARRICORE from the Xtreme directly, no conversion pass, with playback performance good enough to scrub 660fps material without proxies standing in the way. For an editor, that’s the difference between a card that plays nice with the rest of the day’s ingest and one that gets set aside until someone has an hour to convert it.
ARRI Put Working Colorists in Front of It
ARRI didn’t just publish a spec sheet and move on. In late August it ran a live webinar dedicated entirely to ARRICORE, hosted by commercial DP Charles Bergquist alongside Picture Shop’s supervising colorist Peter Doyle and senior colorist Frederik Bokkenheuser, walking through how the codec compares to ARRIRAW, how it intercuts with other formats on a timeline, and what a colorist actually needs to know before a project shows up with it. That ARRI reached for two working colorists rather than an engineer to explain a codec says something about who they expect to actually push back on it: not DITs archiving footage, but the people grading it.
It Shipped Alongside the Splashier Stuff, Not Instead of It
26.5 is also the release with Adobe’s Generative Media Tool for in-timeline prompted video and sound, an expanded Generative Extend that now handles interlaced and non-square-pixel sources, and a Smooth mode added to Object Mask for hair and fabric edges that don’t hold up under Sharp mode’s tracking. Native XAVC/XOCN support for the Sony FX5 shipped in the same update. None of that is what makes this release matter to someone shooting high-speed cinema work, though. The camera-format support is the unglamorous part of the release notes that actually changes a Tuesday.
Codecs rarely make for exciting news, and ARRICORE isn’t going to trend anywhere. But the gap between “shoot a format” and “cut a format without babysitting it first” is exactly the kind of thing that decides whether a tool gets adopted on a schedule or just admired from a press release.
Sources:
- Adobe Community — “What’s New in Adobe Premiere 26.5 – September 2026”
- Adobe Community — Fergus H, “Now in Beta: Support for ARRI ARRICORE Format”
- CineD — “ARRI ALEXA 35 Xtreme Unveiled – Up to 660fps and New ARRICORE Codec”
- Newsshooter — Matthew Allard ACS, “ARRI Live Webinar – Exploring ARRICORE: A Visually Lossless RGB Codec”
- ARRI — Official Press Release, “ARRI Unveils New High-Speed ALEXA 35 Xtreme and Introduces ARRICORE Codec”
