Four bodies, six lenses, ninety-two kilowatts of light and a tower you can drop forty kilos down. Every plate below is the number we have actually measured in this hall, not the number on the box.
Will not: run above 54 000 fps on battery, hold focus past 38 °C, or record anything at all while the fan is off — and the fan is off for every take with sound.
Will not: trigger off the same piezo as the ARC-9 without a 40 µs offset. We learned that twice.
Will not: be the hero camera, however much nicer the wide shot looks in the edit.
Will not: see through glass, which surprises a client about once a quarter.
We built it in 2021 out of two lengths of lift guide rail salvaged from the grain elevator the hall used to be. The carriage is held by a 24 V solenoid, which means the release is silent and repeatable to about four milliseconds — close enough that the pre-trigger always catches it.
Six point two metres gives eleven metres a second at the anvil, which is enough to break anything domestic and not quite enough to break a 300 mm concrete cube. For the cube we use the press and a great deal of patience.
The rails came out of the elevator's own lift shaft and still carry the grease marks of sixty years of grain hoists. We kept them because they were already plumb to within two millimetres over six metres, which is better than anything we could have bolted up ourselves.
No. The ARC-9 goes out with one of us attached to it. Half the value of a high-speed day is somebody who already knows what 11° of shutter costs you in light, and the other half is somebody who can tell you in the first hour that the shot you planned will not work.
Yes, and about a third of our days are location days. We need a 400 A three-phase supply or room for the trailer generator, a floor that will take 1.4 tonnes, and somewhere dark enough to kill the daylight. Travel outside Zachodniopomorskie is 2.40 zł a kilometre plus 220 zł a day each.
Because every doubling of the frame rate halves the exposure. Going from 5 000 to 54 000 frames a second with the same shutter angle costs you eleven times the light, and the only honest way to find it is more kilowatts. That is why the hall sounds like a wind tunnel on a fast day: it is all fans.
Witness footage the same evening on a drive. Graded hero takes in six working days, or three for a 35 % rush. We do not send dailies by link because a 72 GB take over a hotel connection is nobody's idea of a good evening.
Two people, behind the yellow line, in the goggles we hand you, with ear defenders on for anything above the press. Everybody else watches the witness feed from the mezzanine, which is honestly the better seat.
Live animals, firearms, pressurised vessels we have not had certified, and anything that will not fit inside the 2.4 metre box. The box is the limit on the whole business, and we would rather lose the job than shoot something outside it.
High-speed work is sold on the camera and delivered on the electricity. A fast day at Elevator 4 pulls 92 kW across four heads, which is roughly forty domestic kettles running for nine hours, and every one of those cables has to be run, taped, numbered and coiled again by the two of us before we go home.
We put this on the site because it is the part clients do not budget for. If your building cannot give us 400 A we bring the trailer, and the trailer is 1 400 zł a day with fuel.
Byk on the mezzanine during the Forty Tonnes press run · 9 October 2025 · photograph by Rzepecka