For collectors

If you capture hours, here is the bar and the rate.

Published for the same reason our sync error is published: an operator who knows exactly what gets rejected produces far less rejected footage. Roughly seven percent of applicants reach active status, and the paid trial session is where the rest stop.

Base rate: $38 / hour, time-based
Applicants active: 287 of 4,180
Equipment: Supplied by us
Terms: Net 7, no clawback

Pay

Hourly, including the unglamorous parts.

Setup, calibration, breaks and travel are all paid time. Payment is never contingent on the footage being accepted, because that incentive produces exactly the wrong behaviour on a marginal take.

Base session rate: $38 / hour, all time in session
Thin-coverage premium: +$12 / hour in clinical, construction, agriculture, hospitality
Site lead premium: +$9 / hour when you are coordinating a multi-operator session
Travel: Paid over 20 minutes each way, plus mileage
Payment terms: Net 7. No per-episode bounty, and no clawback on rejected footage.
Equipment: Rig, storage and consumables supplied by us; you never buy hardware to work with us

The bar

What we check before you are active.

None of this is about camera talent. It is about calibration discipline, spec literacy and consent handling — the three things that decide whether an hour is trainable.

Calibration discipline: Opening and closing solve completed and passed on every session, without exception
Spec literacy: You can read a skill spec and tell mid-session whether the take will be accepted
Consent handling: Releases collected before capture; you stop recording when an un-consented person enters the region
Environment access: Legitimate, documented permission for every site you propose
Trial session: One paid calibrated trial, reviewed against a real spec — this is where most applicants stop

session checklist — belt pack card

# printed on the card clipped to every belt pack
[ ] opening calibration passed   rms < 0.28 px
[ ] all 8 streams present in preview
[ ] sync banner green            < 2.0 ms
[ ] release signed for every person in the manipulation region
[ ] spec line read aloud before the first take
[ ] storage headroom > 90 min
--- end of session ---
[ ] closing calibration passed
[ ] drift recorded                 < tolerance
[ ] session notes: what went wrong, in your own words

Where we need hours

Four environments we are actively short in.

If you have operators and legitimate site access in any of these, you are more useful to us than another kitchen.

Construction & trades410 h heldSite access and PPE compatibility are the bottleneck, not operator supply.
Clinical & care180 h heldCapture only in training environments with simulated patients. No real patient footage, ever.
Agriculture120 h heldSeasonal. Ask about the capture window before you scope against it.
Hospitality95 h heldFront-of-house is bystander-dense, so yield after de-identification is low.

Clinical capture is limited to training environments with simulated patients. We do not capture real patients under any commercial arrangement.

Partner collection teams

Bring a team, not just yourself.

If you already run collection operations, the fastest arrangement is a per-environment partnership: you bring operators and sites, we bring rigs, spec, QA and paperwork.

Who this suits: Existing collection teams with operator supply and site access in an environment we are thin in
What we supply: Rigs, ingest tooling, spec authoring, QA review, and the consent paperwork
What you supply: Operators, sites, scheduling, and on-the-ground session leadership
Commercials: Per validated hour, quoted per environment. Rejected hours are paid if the reject cause is ours.
Exclusivity: None asked of you. You keep working with whoever else you work with.

Request a quote

Tell us what you're training.

We quote per engagement rather than off a rate card, because price depends on which environments you need, how thin our coverage is in them, and how dense the annotation has to be. Fill this in and you get real numbers back.

Reply time: One business day, with a scoped estimate
You receive: Hours, price, delivery date, coverage cells to fill
First call: 30 minutes, technical, no deck
Then: A written spec you own, whether or not you buy
Billing unit: Validated hours only — rejects are never billed

Or skip the form entirely — hello@ifirsthand.com. A research engineer reads it, not a sales inbox.

Read the consent framework before you apply.

The release you would be collecting is published verbatim, along with the de-identification steps applied to every clip.

Provenance & consent →Capture methodology