Arriflex 16 Blimp

This blimp is design to house the arriflex-s, the s/b, and most likely the st, but not the arriflex-m or bl cameras. The main considerations in the camera it will fit are the cameras base "foot print", the turret shape, the magazine position, and the view finder system. Since all the variations on the arri-s have all these in common they all should work. There is one exception and that is the arri-s that has a Jena Zeiss door.  See below for details.

The blimp accommodates the 400 ft magazine of the s camera and has follow focus controls both on the port and rear of the blimp.  The blimp pictured also has a custom extension to accommodate telephoto and or zoom lens.

The blimp is very heavy (about 70lbs) which is good for smooth fluid pans and tilts but bad for transportation.  And impossible for hand held shots.

The main carcass of the blimp itself is cast aluminum, then there is a layer of leather, and layer of lead sheeting, a layer of foam rubber and finally the interior surface as a brown corduroy.  The camera attaches to a base plate which is received into a suspended armature.  The armature attaches to 4 rubber shock mounts which are attached directly to the carcass.

 Most of the blimp's finish hardware is stainless steel and all the view ports are glass. 

A regular arriflex camera motor can be used to power the camera but a special motor that has a interlocked sync output, special footage counter and inching advance interface with the blimp can be more useful.  The motors are rare and require a special power supply.  The motor is a synchronous AC motor requiring 42VAC to run properly.  The power supply provides this power for the motor and the "in the blimp" transformer which powers the blimp's internal lights.

The blimp requires optical connectors that moves the camera's eyepiece to the out side of the blimp.  The eyepiece must be removed from the cameras door and attached to an extension tube that penetrates the blimp.  Then a prism coupler is attached, in it's place, to the cameras door via the same sort of threading that the eyepiece uses.  The prism and the extension tube make up what is a kind of "relay" lens. They do not magnify or shrink the normal viewing of the camera, merely extend the eyepiece to the rear of the blimp.  Unfortunately the Jena Zeiss camera doors that a few arri-s camera doors have are not compatible with the optical couplers because the eyepiece is not detachable on these doors.

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