Peak Film · PF Glass
PF Glass
A wireless lens control system, commissioned by Peak Film because nothing on the market did quite what our own productions needed.
Pulling focus on cinema glass is unforgiving. The depth of field is shallow, the focus throw is long, and the difference between a usable take and a wasted one is often a few millimetres of barrel rotation. PF Glass is a handset built around that problem, by people who spend their working lives behind a camera rather than in front of a spreadsheet.
What it does
It drives Tilta Nucleus motors across four channels — focus, iris, zoom and an auxiliary — from a single handset with a bright AMOLED touchscreen. Marks are set where you want them, and the response is immediate: the control loop is designed to react faster than the eye can register a lag, because a follow focus that hesitates is a follow focus that is fought rather than used.
- Four channels
- Focus, iris, zoom and aux, addressed independently.
- Built for long throws
- Long focus throws and shallow depth of field were the starting point, not an afterthought.
- Built-in calibration
- Calibration is built into the handset, and it will calibrate to virtually any lens — so it works with whatever glass is on the camera rather than a particular set of it. It is done through a custom-built guitar-tuner-style interface, which makes setting a lens up quick and obvious rather than a procedure to be looked up.
- Wireless
- No cable run between operator and camera.
- Updates itself
- New firmware arrives over the air from our own server. No laptop, no cables, no bench time between jobs.
Why a production company built its own
Peak Film is a working documentary and drama outfit in the Derbyshire Peak District, not a manufacturer. PF Glass exists because a piece of kit was needed on our own shoots and the available options were either compromised or priced as though film crews were oil companies.
That has consequences worth knowing about if you are considering one. It was designed against real shooting days rather than a specification document, and every awkward behaviour it once had was found in the field by someone who then had to live with it. It is also not built to a price point set by a marketing department.
Where it stands
PF Glass is in active development and use. If you are a focus puller, DoP or owner-operator and it sounds like something you would want on a set, we would genuinely like to hear from you — both from anyone interested in owning one, and from anyone who has strong opinions about what a handset should do. The second is worth as much as the first at this stage.
Get in touch through Peak Film.
PF Glass was commissioned by Peak Film and built by Paul Walster, who writes about the engineering behind it, and about cinema camera repair and electronics generally, on his own site.
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