Peak Film · Engineering
Electronics, embedded software and custom hardware — so the equipment a production needs can be built rather than waited for.
Most production companies hire what they need and make do where nothing quite fits. We have an engineer in house instead, which changes what is possible on a shoot: a control system that does not exist can be designed and made, and a camera that fails on a Friday does not necessarily mean a lost week.
The engineer behind it is retired, and does the work in his own time because he enjoys it rather than because there is a day rate to recover. That has a practical consequence: production tools that would otherwise be hired, or bought at the price the film industry is used to paying, get designed and built here for the cost of the parts.
It also means the help is not rationed to whoever is paying. He builds kit for our own shoots, but equally for the people around us — other crews, first-time filmmakers, students on their first real production — who are exactly the people least able to absorb the cost of specialist equipment.
The same applies to our own cameras. Our Blackmagic Design cinema bodies are serviced and repaired in house at no cost — sensor and filter cleaning, worn connectors and board-level faults — the failures that normally mean a body goes away for weeks and a hire replacement goes on the budget. A camera that develops a fault on a Friday is looked at on the Friday.
That experience has produced a view worth stating plainly, since it is not the one a supplier would usually volunteer: our engineer does not recommend Blackmagic Design cinema cameras for the long term. The pictures they make are not in question, and on the day they are bought they are remarkable value. But the faults he sees are not the ones that come from hard use, and they recur. We shoot on them because the image is right and because we can keep them running ourselves; a production without an engineer to hand should go into that decision with its eyes open.
Two practical things follow from that. Blackmagic Design will not supply spare parts to an independent engineer, so every repair done here is done with components salvaged from other Blackmagic bodies. That works for us because we have accumulated the donors and the knowledge to use them; it is not an option open to most owners, who are left with whatever the manufacturer decides to offer. And the warranty on a Blackmagic camera in the UK is twelve months.
What that warranty is worth is a separate question. Blackmagic's own position, put to us directly, is that a camera whose sensor has failed is beyond economical repair. So once the first year is up, a sensor fault is not a repair bill to be weighed against a hire — it is the end of the camera, unless somebody is willing to do what the manufacturer will not.
PF Glass is the clearest example: a wireless follow-focus handset driving Tilta Nucleus motors across focus, iris, zoom and an auxiliary channel, designed around cinema glass and built because the available options were compromised or absurdly priced.
Alongside it: camera control systems for Blackmagic cinema cameras, timecode synchronisation, and the board-level repair work that comes from taking those cameras apart far enough to understand them.
If you have a problem that needs a piece of equipment nobody sells, or a camera that has been written off by somebody who did not look very hard, we would be glad to hear about it.
Get in touch through Peak Film.
Peak Film's engineering is carried out by Paul Walster, who writes about electronics, embedded firmware and cinema camera repair on his own site.
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