Building a studio- on behalf of a friend
 

My friend is in the market for a house, and looking toward building or finding a house for the following:

With consideration for cost and limited space, what are the top ten points in building and assembling a studio aimed toward mainly chroma keying and sound control? What are the recommended dimensions? Consideration for voltage, if necessary, outlets, type of flooring, and any all other aspects of the project.

For Chris Hurd--is there a way for you to have the responses to this thread go to this email: jsolis33@aol.com instead of mine?

For the acoustics, it's good to have banked walls and sound dampening material in strategic places. Banked walls might be a bit excessive for you. prorec.com has a review of a service which analyzes your room and does a sonic makeover for that room by adding foam in the right places. You definitely don't want your friend's studio to be all echoey.

I totally rebuilt a house about 5 years ago and reworked one bedroom for my studio.

I insulated all of the walls, interior and exterior. Put something like R40 worth of foam in the ceiling and less in the walls. Ran two 20 amp circuits into the room with two outlets on each wall.

Ran a combo telephone and LAN outlet box to each wall in the house.

Put the airconditioning out on a pad behind the house so I don't have vibration and almost no noise (except duct noise that I can kill if I have to).

Double-insulated Anderson windows. Stanley insulated steel door to the outside.

Overhead fan to circulate the air (special slow fan).

Track lighting so I can steer the lights away from displays.

I have not added bass traps or sound absorbing material to the walls as I have so much gear in the room that the sound is quite good from the nearfield monitors.

All AC power is regulated and each computer system and monitors have their own UPS units.

If I had decided to add sound recording capabilites to the room, I would have doubled the wallboard thickness and added another Stanley door for an interior door. The Stanley's have a refrigerator-like magnetic rubber strip all the way around their perimeter and are of solid wood core construction.

The rest of the house has comparable insulation and windows so my studio, which is at the rear of the house, is quite insulated from street noise. I hear very little that is going on in the big wide worldhen I'm in there.

Woah Mike. Is it possible to take a few photos of your studio? I'd be interested in seeing photos of anyone else's studio as well.

Andrew,

Think of a room with plain white walls, two windows and both inside and outside doors with lots of power and LAN/Telephone connectors on all four walls.

Now stuff it with three editing suites, a 10-deck dub stack and all the business equipment needed.

Did I mention it is 11 by 12 feet? Feels like I'm back on a submarine but then one doesn't need a whole lot of room to edit.

It is all possible by having 9 floor to ceiling racks that hold a very lot of gear. Gotta love them Banker's boxes!

The only thing I don't keep in the room are the tripods and lighting kits. They go out in the attached one-car garage (which was similarly rebuilt with air conditioning and all) and is where the studio will go when I get a detached garage built to house the machine shop

Not certain I could get far enough from any one wall to take a shot, even with a WA adapter.

It certainly doesn't look like those fancy shops shown in Videography or Post!

Keep in mind, this guy wants it for Chroma keying--he would take a location shoot it, use it as a background, and bring foreground elements in, and make it all blend together.

For chroma key it's good to have rounded corners where the wall meets the floor. It's like a skate park ramp except it's smaller of course. I have no idea where you would get something for this, but it shouldn't be hard to figure out.

You build your own unless you have alot of money. They do have portable cycloramas but they tend to be expensive.

What you need for a chromakey stage is a lot of room. The action has to take place quite a way from the background unless you like color spill onto the ojbects of interest.

A good key wall with acceptable room for lights is going to need to be 14w x 20d ft minimum, plus some relativly high ceilings to accomadate lights. that's just MHO though. If you built a psyke that curve will take up 6 ft min.

J