Studio Design

[uk_student]

Edited

[paulears]

One big difference between audio and video is heat! If you are intending on using lighting you'll need HVAC or at the very least, air extraction and replacement to deal with an enclosed space full of lights. I'm sure plenty of people will chirp in with audio advice, so I'll keep my comments to video. Having done this kind of project before, the things I got wrong may help you not make the same co*k-ups. The idea may well be that you don't need a lot of studio space. Wrong! What you will need is the ability to get a clean head to feet shot of at least two people - this sets the maximum depth, and don't forget that you can't have the person up against a wall as you get dreadful shadow problems. So a space 6 or 7 m long is pretty important - if you don't have this depth you will be pretty limited in what you can do with it. Edit suites can be small - they work better that way, simple boxes - 8' square are fine - worktop, rack of kit etc and you are away. If you can manage a largish space, it will work well for sound too. If you are home building it, rather than 'real' builders this is possible It's a bit old but this could be useful on the homebuilt studio idea. If you do it yourself, it isn't too difficult unless you want to go over 2.4m in height - for video, you might want to. Over this height, structural issues get a lot worse.

 

Any good to start with?

Paul

[Bobbsy]

Until I retired last September, I earned my living designing and operating TV facilities including studios, editing and control rooms.

 

 

 

When you get to the stage of specific questions, I'll be happy to help, but it's too big a subject to try and deal with in a single post!

 

 

 

Bob

[Brian]

Like Bob I've built my fair share of broadcast facilities and launched the odd satellite channel or ten. Feel free to start asking specific questions.

[uk_student]

Edited

[uk_student]

Any ideas guys? or wasnt I being specific enough?

[mac.calder]

Your budget is EXTREAMLY limited. Soundproofing alone could run well past your building budget alone. The Air Conditioning, I would ALMOST suggest that you use a relatively cheap system inside the control room and open the connecting door and cool down the studio between sessions. That would certainly reduce cost there.

 

There is also the fact that to make everything portable, you will probably want seconds of all cables, and flightcases for everything, or for things like editing suites, you would probably want to make complete 'stations' that can be moved. To do it reasonably well, your budget will probably not suffice.

[Brian]

OK, for lighting, if heat is a problem, you'll need to go florescent for all but your keys. Chroma key lighting doesn't need to be overly bright but it does need to be even.

 

Acoustics is a whole other ball game. Without knowing your existing building construction it's very difficult to advise but as a general statement the only way to improve sound isolation is mass of material.

[paulears]

Chromakey lighting has to be even, not always that bright. If your budget is really tight, then any form of aircon is going to be out of the question. I simpler but not as good approach is simply to have forced air extraction - a couple of 200mm axial fans and ducting can work quite well, and shift a lot of air. They do some pretty good kit now. For small studios it might be worth considering a plaster or mdf panel wall you can paint in chromakey blue or green (green is better for DV) and have something like a white cyc on a curved track to hide the fact the rooms so small.

[Bobbsy]

I think your budget is way too tight to consider anything of professional quality. I've done some digging, and the last small studio I did (25 square metres, single high-end industrial camera, simple sound mixer, basic lighting, monitoring, cables, air cond plus sound proofing and acoustic treatment came in something like:

 

Equipment: £104,000

Building works: £28,000 (including acoustic works)

Air Con and ventilation: £22,000

Installation and installation materials: £8,000

 

That was just a studio, not any edit suites or MCR/CAR function, i.e. things like sync distribution, recording etc. were separate.

 

Bob

[James]

Chris.

 

This realy does depend what you are after.

 

a small studio this would be a bookable facility students can use to make and edit small video productions and maybe even allow for the recording of live music etc.

 

When I was at university I was involved in student television.

 

We had a small studio, it wasn't particularly sound proofed but we backed into a car park. It wasn't air conditioned so we got hot.

 

We did small film sets in there, small multi-camera programmes and the occational live band.

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411302/ would be one of the last films shot in studio before it was demolished.

 

In our case we had a demand for a facility before it was built. Your specification seems a little vauge.

 

Is this for live recording or TV work - the two aren't necesarily the same.

 

I now work for a facilities house, we have a couple of stucios in converted offices, no key light brighter that 150W, DMX flourescent soft lights, lightweight truss grid.

 

These typicaly are locked off head and shoulders shots only.

 

To be honest have a look at other studios and see what they have.

 

Unfortunatly, at the facilities house where I work what we consider a "small" studio is slightly larger than what you are looking for...

 

http://www.bbcresources.co.uk/studios/small/index.html

 

Basicaly I'm asking

• Will you be doing multicamera work in the studio?
  
• Will you be building sets in the studio?
  
• What format do you want to record onto and edit onto?
  
• Is any of this required to be broadcast qulity?
  
• How many edit suites do you need
  
• Is there a need for sound dubbing / audio remixing
  
• Is there a need for graphics work / compositing etc?
  

James

 

PS If you want ideas on the internet have a look at Sony, Panasonic, Cannon, JVC, Snell & Wilcox, ProBel, Grass Valley (GVG) Drake, Krammer, Avitel, AVID, Adobe, Digidesign.

 

Those should give you a start.

 

James

[uk_student]

Edited

[mac.calder]

* Will you be doing multicamera work in the studio?

I was hoping to have 3 small cameras in the studio I'm not talking full blown broadcast quality equipment here just

something at a semi-professional standard. The studio is there for learning purposes mainly not to produce

promotional films or anything like that.

 

Have a look at the Panasonic Proline of cameras. They are DV quality, and the few times I have used them, they worked well. The mid-range will set you back about 1.6k (all costs converted from US list to GBP) each. However, if you can stretch the budget a bit, maybe you would be better off with something from this line

 

You will probably also want a couple of these if you are going to us miniDV

 

Instead of having 3 avid suites, maybe a vision mixer like This would be a better option for one suite, and will set you back about 4k, your lecturer will thank you, and they are great if you ever want to do live stuff..

 

 

 

Other brands of course offer similar offerings, I have had good experiance with Panasonic in the past, others (with far more experiance than me) will probably recomend other brands, and other types of models - after all, I do not speciallise in studio work.

[paulears]

With all this kit, you really have to decide what the purpose is. Been through this a lot, myself.

 

Is the idea to train people ready for the media industry? If so then you need cameras that function in the same way to pro cameras. This isn't too much of a problem - the main thing will be camera 'shape'. DV in its many guises does produce acceptable pictures - small format cameras like SOny's PD-170 style are pretty good, but you may need cameras with separate lenses, viewfinders - proper camera support etc. JVC, Sony and Panasonic all have kit that do this. What you won't find at the momemnt, due to crazy marketing is multi purpose kit. I had planned on buying 3 Sony cameras, 3 CCU back ends, 3 CCUs and then a couple of DV back ends to make them portable - Sony discontinued them! No replacements. So a camera range that has front and back sections, but you can't have any options? JVC do a camera that has DV and a CCU facility - usefull for studio stuff. If you want to use a mixer, they don't make things like tally lamps work easily - a few people used to modify MX-50's to give tally out. Don't forget to factor in the cost of cabling - multicore is VERY expensive, connectors and boxes even more so. Then you also need monitors, distribution amps - AND proper DV recorders for output recording after the mixer and for vt playin - again, these are not cheap. Communications need thinking about. Autocue would be nice to use, and as I mentioned before - check to see that you can get the talent far enough away from the camera with the lenses you have specified to get a whole body shot. If you can only do head and shoulders you really limit your choices.

 

Training people on 3 CCD cameras and proper equipment is really useful, and the kit produces quite solid products - going to anything domestic is a real compromise.

[dosxuk]

sorry, a little <_< but...

 

So a camera range that has front and back sections, but you can't have any options?

 

The front/back interface has been standardised for several years now, so exisiting gear can be used with new camera heads. One thing I'm very used to is removing the back off Sony and Phillips cameras so we can put in radio link transmitters and/or data recievers which are designed to dock directly to these interfaces.