Chemical Wedding is showing Artemis Pro at Cine Gear 2026 in Los Angeles, the next-generation version of what has become the most widely used digital director’s viewfinder in the film industry. If you work in production and haven’t heard of Artemis, you almost certainly know someone who uses it. The app has been a fixture on scouts and sets for over a decade, and its new Pro version is a significant rebuild, adding features that cinematographers and directors have been requesting for years.
What Artemis Is
Chemical Wedding launched the original Artemis Director’s Viewfinder in 2008 as the first digital viewfinder for smartphones. The concept was straightforward: rather than carrying a traditional optical viewfinder or trying to describe a frame verbally, a director or DP could pull out a phone, select any camera body and lens combination from a comprehensive database, and see exactly what that frame would look like through the device’s camera.
The app took off. It is now used on productions at every budget level from film students to Oscar-winning cinematographers. Roger Deakins has described using it on scouts so that the entire crew, from the director to the ADs, can gather around and see the exact frame. Matthew Libatique ASC used it on Venom to record blocking, rehearsals, and lens tests. Nicolas Winding Refn called it a game-changer that eliminated guesswork from location scouting entirely. In 2018, Chemical Wedding received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development for Artemis, a rare recognition for a software tool.
The company also makes Artemis Prime, a physical hybrid director’s viewfinder, a hardware device built on the same software foundation that accepts real lens mounts (PL, LPL, PV, SP70), works with spherical and anamorphic glass of any squeeze ratio, and covers over 6,500 camera formats. It is available to rent through Panavision, ARRI Rental, Keslow, and other major rental houses worldwide. In 2024, Chemical Wedding received the BSC Bert Easey Award from the British Society of Cinematographers for the development of both Artemis Pro and Helios Pro. In presenting the award, Linus Sandgren ASC called Artemis “the most important invention in the film industry since the espresso machine.”
Artemis Pro
Artemis Pro is built from the ground up rather than updated from the existing app. The core function, selecting a camera and lens combination to preview the exact frame, remains, but Pro layers in a set of production tools that turn the app from a viewfinder into a more complete on-set communication and documentation platform.
The most significant addition is video recording. Operators can now record video directly within the app, trim the clips, and add custom title cards — useful for capturing blocking, rehearsals, or scout footage that can be shared with the wider team. Alongside this is a Frameline Generator that allows users to create custom framelines for any aspect ratio or extraction, rather than being limited to presets.
Artemis Pro also adds a Looks system, an in-built library of LUT emulations that can be applied to the live camera feed. Users can build their own looks within the app or import Photoshop curves, which gives DPs a practical way to approximate the visual feel of a grade during scouts and tech scouts before post has been involved.
An Overlays library brings silhouettes of human figures that can be placed on the live camera feed as virtual stand-ins, helping directors and DPs plan blocking and scale within a frame during pre-production. These carry through into storyboard exports as well.
For productions using Helios Pro — Chemical Wedding’s companion app for sun, moon, and star position tracking and light simulation — Artemis Pro can pull that data directly and fold it into reports sent to collaborators, tying together location scouting, shot planning, and lighting preparation in a single workflow.
On the technical side, Artemis Pro addresses the app’s previous main limitation: field of view. On a standard smartphone camera, the widest reproducible frame in Super 35mm was approximately 22mm. Artemis Pro now supports supplementary wide-angle lenses to push that coverage further and introduces a Virtual Wide Mode that extends coverage in the frame for even greater flexibility when scouting wide-angle options.
The Broader Ecosystem
Chemical Wedding has been expanding Artemis into a connected production ecosystem. Athena, the company’s macOS app, allows users to organize images and videos captured in Artemis into scenes and folders, sequence shots, and export shot plans and storyboards. The company has also indicated that tools for virtual production workflows — including Apple Vision Pro integration — are in development, extending the platform further into pre-visualization and XR production environments.
Availability
Artemis Pro is available now on the Apple App Store for iPhone. More information on the full product line is at chemicalwedding.tv.
