Our studio or your building? The part nobody budgets for
We hire systems for use at customer sites, and we do it regularly. But when someone asks, our first answer is usually to push them towards our studio if we can make the volume work.
That sounds like we’re protecting our own room. We’re not. It’s that off-site capture costs roughly double a studio day, and the reason why is almost never in the customer’s first budget.
Here’s what’s actually in the gap.
A rigged studio is a system that’s already ready
Our Brisbane studio is a 10 x 10 x 3 m room. The cameras are mounted, powered, calibrated and pointed. The software is licensed and current. The network is built. Somebody has already solved every problem that room is capable of having.
You walk in, we calibrate, and you’re capturing inside the first session.
Your sports hall is not that. Your sports hall is a system that has to be built from nothing and then unbuilt, and the building and unbuilding is the cost.
What off-site adds
Rigging cameras at height. Cameras need to be mounted rigidly, high, and pointing where you want them. On site that means stands, trusses, scaffold, or an existing structure that somebody has to certify will hold them. Realistically it adds a day to the job at the front and another at the back for pack down.
Working at heights. This is a compliance requirement, not an inconvenience. It means the right people, the right equipment and the right paperwork. Venues have their own rules on top of ours, and those rules are usually discovered rather than read.
Calibration in a space you don’t control. Calibrating a high-mounted system is harder than it sounds. On one large-volume install we’ve worked on, the cameras were at 11 m and the team simply couldn’t wand-wave higher than about 3 to 4 m. They ended up putting markers on balloons to get coverage where they needed it. It worked. It also wasn’t in anyone’s plan.
An engineer, non-negotiable. For anything technically demanding we wouldn’t hire a system out without one of ours present. Not because you couldn’t learn it, but because the day you have is the day you have, and diagnosing a network issue for two hours out of a one-day window is an expensive way to learn.
Travel. Obvious, frequently forgotten, and its people-days rather than kilometres.
Add those up and you’re at roughly twice a studio day. Not because off-site work is padded, but because you’re paying for a facility to exist temporarily.
When off-site is clearly the right answer
There are plenty of these, and we’re happy to do them:
The thing can’t come to us. A horse. A vehicle. A patient cohort that has to be captured where they’re treated. A piece of equipment that’s bolted down.
You need the real environment. Sports capture where the surface, the run-up or the light matters. Anything where the room is part of the measurement.
Volume, genuinely. Our room is 10 x 10 x 3 m. The 225 m³ figure on our website is usable capture volume, not the physical room, and the two get confused often. If you truly need a 15 x 9 m footprint, we can’t give it to you, and we’ll say so on the first email.
You’re testing the facility itself. Sometimes the point is to prove the space works before you commit to fitting it out.
When it isn’t, and people think it is
“It’ll be easier at ours.” It nearly never is. Familiar isn’t the same as ready.
“We’ve got a big hall, so we may as well use the space.” More volume is not free. Holding the same tracking quality across a bigger space takes more cameras, which takes more rigging, which takes more time and money. We can absolutely track small 1 to 3 mm markers across a large volume. It just costs what it costs, and the cost is cameras.
“We only need one day.” One day of capture on site is not one day of work. It’s a day of rigging, a day of capture, and a day of pack down, and the two days either side are the ones nobody quoted for.
“We’ll set it up ourselves to save money.” Occasionally true if you already own similar kit and have done it before. Usually, it converts a fixed cost into an unknown one, on a day you can’t repeat.
The question we ask first
When someone describes an off-site job, the first thing we work out is whether the volume genuinely has to be that big.
Often the answer is no. The stated footprint is the room they have access to, not the space the capture needs. Once you separate those two things, a lot of jobs that looked like a rigging exercise turn into a studio booking.
That’s a better outcome for you. It’s a smaller invoice for us. We’d still rather do it, because a day that works is worth more to both of us than a day that was ambitious.
What we’d suggest
If you’re weighing it up, do the first day in our studio even if the eventual work is going somewhere else.
You’ll find out how your capture actually behaves, how long your own turnaround takes, and what you really need out of the volume, all in a controlled space where nothing is a variable. Then scope the on-site job with real numbers instead of assumptions.
We can rig anywhere. We’d just rather rig once, for the right thing.
Come and see the room first. 13 Hudson Rd, Albion, and the coffee is decent.
