Do I need permission to film at the exhibition grounds?

Yes, and from more than one party. The organiser controls filming in the halls and normally issues a press or crew accreditation with conditions attached. Individual exhibitors control filming on their own stands, and a stand is private space for that purpose. Ask the organiser first, then get each stand's agreement in advance rather than on the day.

What lens range works in an exhibition hall?

A fast standard zoom does most of it, with a wide prime for interiors and stands you cannot back away from, and a short telephoto for faces across an aisle. Halls are deep and dark with mixed lighting, so the aperture matters more than the range. Long lenses are rarely useful because there is no clean sightline down an aisle.

Is a card deposit or insurance better?

An insurance certificate, if you have cover, because it avoids blocking several thousand euros on a card for the length of the hire and the return check. Hire houses will name the wording and the sum insured they require. Without cover you fall back to a card authorisation, which needs real headroom on the card during a week when hotels are also holding deposits.

Can I hire a camera for a single day?

Yes, and the day is usually defined as collection one afternoon to return the next morning, which is generous. Multi-day rates fall steeply after the first day, so a three-day hire often costs little more than two. If you are filming across a whole fair run, ask for the run rate rather than adding up days.

Camera and video hire for covering a fair in Frankfurt

Filming a stand is a lighting problem before it is a camera problem, and a permissions problem before either. What to hire for two days in a Frankfurt hall, why the collection window matters more than the daily rate, what the hall expects from a crew, and the insurance line that decides the deposit.

Two days in a hall, a stand to film, three interviews and a general sequence of the aisles. That is the standard brief in Frankfurt during a fair week, and the kit list that comes out of it is shorter than most people expect and heavier on lighting and audio than on cameras.

The difficult parts are not the ones with a price list. They are the permissions, the collection window, and the fact that a hall is a large dark box with green-tinted light in the ceiling and a hundred competing colour temperatures at eye level.

The hall is a lighting problem

Exhibition halls at the Frankfurt grounds are lit from very high up, dimly by the standards of a camera, and each stand adds its own light in its own colour. Point a camera down an aisle and you get four white balances in one frame.

That produces a specific hire list:

Item	Why, in a hall	Notes
Fast standard zoom	Low ambient light, no room to move	The single most useful item
Wide prime	Stands you cannot step back from	Also the interview establishing shot
Two small LED panels	To beat the ceiling colour on faces	Battery powered, no cable run
Bi-colour control	Match to the stand, not to daylight	Saves a grade later
Radio microphone pair	Aisle noise is constant	Two, so an interview is never one-channel
Shotgun and a boom	Room tone and pieces to camera	Only if you have a second pair of hands
Monopod	Tripods block aisles and get refused	Frequently the only support permitted
Spare batteries, doubled	No socket is free on a stand	Charge overnight at the apartment

The monopod line is not fussiness. Aisles are circulation routes and a tripod across one is a trip hazard that hall staff are entitled to move you on for. A monopod, a small gimbal or handheld with a wide lens is what actually gets used.

Flight cases, a folded frame and coiled cable looms stacked on a loading apron beside an exhibition hall roller door. — Kit arrives at the apron with everything else. A crew case with wheels beats two crew carrying boxes down an aisle.

Permissions, in the order they matter

The organiser. Filming in the halls needs accreditation. Apply well before the fair, because the press office closes its list ahead of the opening day and issuing on the morning is not something to rely on.
Each stand you film on. A stand is the exhibitor’s space for the run of the fair. Their agreement is separate from the organiser’s, and getting it a week early rather than on the day is the difference between an interview and a polite refusal in front of your subject.
People in shot. General crowd coverage in a public aisle is one thing; an identifiable person filmed deliberately is another. German data protection and personality rights are strict and the rules are not something to improvise. Take advice, ask, and carry release forms.
Drones, rigging and anything overhead. Effectively never inside a hall without a formal process. Do not plan a shot around it.

None of these are things a hire house can arrange for you. Confirm the current requirements with the organiser and, where relevant, the city authority.

The collection window is the real duration

Hire houses in and around the city work on a business-hours counter. That has three consequences during a fair week.

A “one day” hire is usually collect in the afternoon and return by mid-morning, which gives you a full shooting day in between — good value if your call time is early. A hire that ends on Saturday morning is short, because most counters close early or not at all on Saturday and the return runs into Monday. And on the last afternoon of a fair, half the city’s production crews are returning kit at once.

Book the return slot at the same time as the collection. If your fair ends on a Sunday, ask for a Monday return and expect to pay the weekend rate, which is still usually cheaper than an extra full day.

The deposit question

This is the line that varies most between hire houses, and it is worth settling before you build the kit list.

With your own equipment insurance, you send a certificate naming the hire house and a sum insured, and the deposit falls to a nominal figure or disappears. The house will tell you the wording they need; get it to your insurer early, because certificates take days rather than minutes.

Without insurance, expect a card authorisation sized to the replacement value of the kit. On a two-camera package with fast glass that is a serious block on a card, held through the hire and often for several days after the return check. During a Frankfurt fair week, when a serviced apartment is also holding a deposit and everything else is on the same card, that headroom disappears quickly.

What to shoot before the hall opens

The single most useful hour of a fair shoot is the one before the doors open on the first morning. The aisles are clear, the stand is finished and lit, nobody is standing in front of the product, and the light is the same everywhere because the stand lighting is on and the crowd is not there.

Book the crew in for that hour, get the empty-stand sequence and the product detail, and then spend the open hours on people. It is also the only time you will get a clean wide of the hall, which is the shot every edit needs and the one nobody has once the fair is running.

If the brief extends beyond the grounds, the towers and plazas in the banking district are the other half of the standard Frankfurt sequence, and they come with their own set of permissions — most of the ground you would want to stand on down there is privately owned, whatever it looks like.