Most people who email us asking about hire are really asking something else. They want the data. Hire is just the first way they thought of getting it.
So before the price list, here’s the honest version of the decision, including the cases where we’d tell you not to buy anything from us.
Start with days, not dollars
A day in our Brisbane studio is $5,000. That includes half a day of setup, a full capture day, half a day for data delivery, and one of our engineers with you throughout.
The first question isn’t “what does a system cost,” it’s how many capture days you genuinely have in front of you over the next three years.
Be honest about this. Not the days you’d like to have if the grant lands and the PhD student start on time. The days you can already name.
If that number is small, hire. You’ll get better data, sooner, with someone who runs this kit every week, and you’ll spend a fraction of the money. If that number is large and growing, and the work is core to what your lab or studio does, ownership starts making sense quickly.
The crossover is further out than most people assume, because the purchase price is the part everyone budgets for and the rest isn’t.
What owning actually costs
The cameras are the easy bit. The things that catch people out:
Space. A system needs somewhere it can live rigged. If you have to set up and pack down every time, you’ve bought a hire system and you’re doing the labour yourself.
Rigging. Cameras want to be mounted rigidly and high. That means truss, or wall mounts, or a rail. It also means someone qualified working at height. This is a real line item and it’s frequently missing from the first budget we see.
A person. Someone in your team has to own the system: calibration, marker sets, subject prep, troubleshooting the day something doesn’t come up. That person exists in every lab that gets good data out of their system, and doesn’t exist in the ones that don’t.
Software and support. Ongoing, not once.
The upgrade cycle. Systems have a service life. Plan for it rather than discovering it.
None of this is an argument against owning. Plenty of our customers should own, do own, and get enormous value from it. It’s an argument for costing the whole thing rather than the invoice.
Where hire genuinely wins
You’re proving something. You need data to justify a grant, a budget submission, or a business case. Hire, get the result, then buy with evidence rather than hope.
The work is a project, not a program. A film, a study, a validation campaign, a one-off measurement.
Your requirement is unusual. Very large volumes, very small markers, very fast objects. These push camera counts up hard, and a bigger volume with the same tracking quality means more cameras, more rigging and more cost. Renting the right configuration for a fortnight beats owning the wrong one for a decade.
You don’t know what you need yet. This is the most common one and the least admitted. A day in a studio will teach you more about your requirement than three months of specification.
Where hire is a false economy
You capture constantly. If you’re running sessions most weeks, day rates add up fast and you lose the ability to be spontaneous. The value of owning isn’t only cost per day, it’s that a five-minute test costs five minutes.
Your data has to be comparable over years. Longitudinal work wants the same system, the same room, the same calibration routine. Hire introduces variables you’ll spend the rest of the study apologising for.
The room is the point. If you’re building a facility that must be there for students, patients or clients, hire never gets you a facility.
A middle path most people don’t consider
Hire first, then buy.
Do one day in a studio. Capture what you actually need. Take the data away and put it through your real analysis pipeline, not a demo one. Then decide.
We suggest this to people regularly, including people who arrived ready to spend six figures. It costs $5,000 and it routinely changes the specification. Sometimes it changes it upwards, because they realise what’s possible. Sometimes it saves them from buying a system configured for a problem they turned out not to have.
Nobody has ever come back and told us that day was wasted.
On multi-day and off-site
Two things worth saying plainly, because they surprise people.
Multi-day hire is fine, but it doesn’t get materially cheaper per day. The setup is amortised, not the capture.
And hiring for use at your own venue costs roughly double a studio day once you add rigging, travel and setup. It’s not us being difficult. It’s that a rigged studio is a system that’s already calibrated and ready, and your sports hall is a system that has to be built and then unbuilt. There’s a separate piece on that, because it’s where most off-site budgets go wrong.
The short version
Count your real capture days over three years. If it’s a handful, hire. If it’s most weeks and the work is central to what you do, own it, and budget for space, rigging, a person and the upgrade cycle rather than just the cameras.
If you’re somewhere in the middle, do one day first. That’s genuinely the advice we’d give a friend.
Happy to talk it through. Give me a shout on 0423 049 195, or come in for a coffee, and we’ll work out which one you are.
