The Essential Guide to Building a Home Studio€¦ · There are many reasons why building a home...

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The Essential Guide to Building a Home Studio


by Brian Peterson

Produced by

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1 Choosing and Altering the Room Itself: Space Requirements ...3

2 Ceilings ..................................................................................................5

3 Walls ....................................................................................................... 6

4 Flooring ................................................................................................. 7

5 Electricity .............................................................................................. 8

6 Ventilation and Cooling .................................................................... 8

7 Lighting Grid ........................................................................................ 9

8 Studio Stands ........................................................................................11

9 Studio Lights ....................................................................................... 12

10 Studio Camcorder ............................................................................. 13

11 Studio Camcorder Support .............................................................. 13

12 Studio Backgrounds ..........................................................................14

13 Studio Audio ......................................................................................16

There are many reasons why building a home studio could be right for you. Per-haps you want to make your interviews look more professional with a variety of backdrops or a chromakey setup. Or maybe you need more lighting control for product shots. Certainly, if you occasionally rent someone else’s studio, the long term cost savings and convenience might make a home studio an obvious choice.

Whatever your reasons, there are many things to think about before converting a space in your home into a studio. Let’s take a look at some of the more impor-tant considerations.

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Choosing and Altering the Room Itself: Space Requirements

Ask yourself what you are using the studio for and what you might need it for in the future. Is the studio setup permanent, or do you need to be able to alter it on a whim? Making your space convertible back into a living space will take a little more time and money, but it may be just what gets the buy-in you need from your family to take over a garage or living space. If your garage currently has workbenches and stationary tools, by adding lockable casters, you

can wheel everything to the side when you need to shoot. If you want to go a step further, you could even create a fabric room divider that separates the stuff you store in your ga-rage from the videography equipment. You can even turn part of this into a large light source by including a strip of white rip-stop nylon in the middle and placing lights behind it. Of course, if you plan to have clients in your new studio, a garage usually requires a bit more touching up.

You can sheetrock or cover unfinished ceilings, walls or stairs. Additionally, you can hide unsightly wa-ter heaters and AC units by carefully walling these items off, but use good sense. Make sure to allow for adequate ventilation, and never restrict airflow or introduce a fire risk by placing flammable materials near flames.

Roll down divider

Lockable caster

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The actual square footage is not as critical as how you set things up. More room will give you greater options for placing your camera, lights and back-grounds. But just because you are converting your garage into a studio doesn’t mean you’ll be able to shoot something as large as an average-sized vehicle. You need to take into account the distance the sub-ject will need to be from lights, background and camcorder. A smaller area will necessarily limit

you to smaller subjects. Of course, if you primarily need to shoot tabletop items then you can easily get by with a smaller space.

Light table

Utility cover-up

Finished stairs

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Ceilings

Ceiling height is one of the most impor-tant factors as lights will likely need to be above the subject’s head and out of the camera’s view. Standard interior rooms are often only 8-feet high which is not enough if you will be using hot lights up high on stands. And they do not al-low you to install even a simple grid for hanging fixtures. Look for 10-foot ceilings and twelve-foot is even better. You’ll find many garages will be in this range. Think about how you will get your equip-ment and props in an out of your area. Are doors and hallways wide enough to handle them without too much effort? Try to avoid using a space that has more than one step. You will find a hand-truck is your new best friend but it can turn into your foe if you have to muscle it up a series of stairs.

Ceiling height

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Walls

What kind of walls does your space have? Garage walls are sometimes hollow which will cause extreme reverberation. Even if your walls have in-sulation, you still may need to install some type of sound absorbing material to reduce sound bouncing off them. Professional baffles are the best option if you can afford them, but even something as cost effective as egg cartons attached to the wall can be a worthy alternative. Heavy blankets used by movers hung on walls and laid on floors is another low cost solution.

If you’re using your garage, and you don’t mind keeping a little clutter around, shelves, boxes and tools will also do their part to help break up bouncing sound waves. The garage door is a special consideration. If it is one of the more common folding metal doors you can buy the rigid foam insulation boards from a home supply store and cut them to fit in between each folding section. You can secure this same insulation board to other types of garage doors to provide a good amount of sound buffering from the outside along with reducing the reverber-ation of the studio.

Insulation board

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Flooring

Your floors are going to take a beating. You’ll be laying down tape for talent and equipment marks, and you may (ac-cidently) put something hot on the floor or knock over a hot light and exploding lamps can send hot glass everywhere. Tripods, whether on wheels or not, can leave scuff marks and even poke holes from non-retracted spikes.

The most durable floor type is cement. If you are setting up in your garage this is probably what you already have. It is smooth for dollies and makes moving wheeled equipment around a breeze. A high-quality ce-ment paint in neutral grey will make the floor look good and keep it from reflecting unwant-ed color onto your subjects. It also protects against spills and stains that will eventually occur.

While cement is very practical it creates problems for audio. So if you find you are spending more time covering the floor with blankets to dampen the reverbera-tion while recording audio, you might consider cushioned vinyl or carpet. Vinyl comes in a variety of colors of convinc-ing wood grains and can be very durable. It provides only a small degree of sound dampening but it is still easier than car-pet to move wheeled equipment around.

Cement floor

Vinyl floor

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Ceiling vents

Electricity

Ventilation and Cooling

Make sure you have enough individual circuits going to your studio. There is nothing more time consuming, and unprofessional, than running long extension cords from various rooms of your home to keep from popping circuit breakers and risking a fire. Think about what kind of work you’ll most likely be doing and how many lights you will need. Then calculate the power your lights will draw and add a generous buffer for additional equipment and un-knowns. If you plan on installing trusses, you might want to install outlets on or near the ceiling. This is not where you want to try to save money and do it yourself. Hire a qualified electrician. You’ll sleep much better at night!

Small studios can heat up fast so you’ll need to be able to keep your area cool. You can do this with passive ventilation such as open windows or a garage door, or with air conditioning

systems. If you are using your garage, chances are that it is not air conditioned but it can be retrofitted. If the space is small, a window AC unit may suffice, but for anything much more than a single car garage, these window units probably will not move enough air to counter the heat generated from your lights. Plus, window units are very noisy and you could never have one running during an audio take.

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Lighting Grid

One of the most important reasons for having a home studio is to get more control of your lighting. If your ceiling is high enough you can install trusses to form a lighting grid from which you mount your lighting fixtures. All professional studios have them and for good reasons; they keep lights safely above the talent and eliminate the need for stands that are hazardous, limit your camera angles and lens selection, and take up floor space. A lighting grid also lets you cre-ate a semi-permanent lighting setup that is repeatable by marking trusses rather than placing tape all over the floor. A grid keeps cables in check and off the floor eliminating tripping haz-

ards while also allowing you freedom to move gear around easily.

A lighting grid can cost a lot of money if you opt for a professionally manufactured system. These are specialty products that are only available from studio and theatrical supply companies. They often have proprietary mounting systems that lock you into buying additional high-cost grip equipment and connectors. You can, however, build your own for a fraction of the cost by simply using thin-walled steel tubing such as that used for electrical conduit. It comes in 10-foot lengths and 1-1/4" to 1-1/2" diameters work well as inexpensive trusses. Galvanized plumb-ing pipe is a little more expensive but is stronger requiring fewer mid-span support points.

Depending on how many lights you want to use, and how precisely you want to be able to change posi-tions, you could make do with as few as four trusses configured in a square pattern. For more lighting flexibility just add additional trusses. If your lighting fixtures are large or heavy you will need to provide multiple support points along each truss that secure directly into ceiling studs. DO NOT merely secure into sheet rock; this is dangerous!

Lighting grid - above

Lighting grid - front view

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If you are using hot lights it is very important that you either drop the truss low enough to avoid unsafely heating your ceiling or use mounting hardware that drops each lighting fixture an equally safe distance from the ceiling. By using truss clamps with baby pins you should be able to hang most lighting fixtures. Again, always keep safety in mind. Loop a steel cable through lights and around the truss to provide a back up in case the baby pin mount fails and the light fixture falls. It is good practice in general, but if on a lighting grid, you should never use any open-faced lights.

A lighting grid does have a few shortcomings. First, without purchasing expensive scissor booms or adding longer extension pins, you can’t easily adjust the height of your light. Un-less you do a good amount of the same type of work, you may find even a grid with several intermediate trusses will not let you put lights in exactly the right place for every shoot. And since you can’t move lights beyond the last truss, light output can be difficult to control with-out integrating a dimming system such as DMX (Digital MultipleX). Changing lamps, moving and modifying lights with scrims and gels all require you to use a ladder that will invariably require you to move something else below, like the talent. If these considerations have you thinking twice about a lighting grid, then it’s time to reconsider using stands.

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Studio Stands

Stands are much more mobile and flexible than fixed trusses. They make it easy to reposition lights, change their height and direction and service or modify each lighting fixture without a ladder. Plus, if you base your studio lighting support on stands they have the added benefit of serving as part of your field lighting kit.

If you decide on using stands instead of a light-ing grid you’ll need to reserve at least some of your limited budget for buying a few heavy-duty ones like C-stands. These come in a few different designs by several manufacturers. If you want to use this type of stand in the field, be sure to get the sliding leg type also known

as, “Rocky Mountain” legs. This sliding leg lets you securely position the stand on uneven terrain or even stairs. The other C-stand design uses a Turtle base that folds neatly on itself and is perfect for studio use. If you plan to use boom arms it is even more important to get heavy-duty stands as lightweight stands will not give you good stability when extended to height, even with sandbags.

Keep in mind that if you have a small space, stands can be cumbersome if you’re using more than three or four lights at a time, and stand legs are easy to trip over as well as getting in the way of dolly moves and camera angles.

Studio stands

“Rocky Mountain” legs

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Studio Lights

Now that you have your studio space configured and places to connect your lights, it's time to consider what type of lights to use.

The most common lamp used in video light fixtures is still tungsten. Relative to other types, tungsten is inexpensive to purchase and maintain. Without modifiers, they cast hard shad-ows, they can be focusable when in a suitably designed fixture and have a color temperature of approximately 3200-degrees Kelvin that can only be changed by using gels. The quality of the light from most tungsten fixtures can be modified with dimmers, softboxes, snoots, scrims, barn doors, cookies and a mind-boggling array of diffusers. They are perhaps the most versa-tile type of studio and field production light. But they run very hot, can be a fire hazard and consume a great deal of energy. Fluorescent lamps are becoming more popular because of their lower power consumption and variety of lamp shape, socket type, output intensity and even color temperature, though many have a spike in the green temperature range. They are a good option when you need to have a cooler operating light and are a natural choice for green screen lighting. You can get lamps with built-in ballast that can be used in some consumer tungsten fixtures but most of the higher wattage lamps are made for ballasted fixtures. The larger ones cast a softer shadow and can be somewhat heavy and cumbersome, but if they reside primarily in your studio, this should not be too much of a drawback. Fluorescent lights are not dimmable without special ballast. If you have a failing lamp or ballast they can be noisy and even when operating cor-rectly, they can produce audio interference in improperly shielded equipment. LED lights are popular because they are lightweight, dimmable, draw very little power, have variable color temperature and, depending on their relative size to the subject, have a soft light quality. They can, however, throw micro-shadows. They are still quite expensive and, in general, do not have the same high-intensity output of either fluorescent or tungsten lights.

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Studio Camcorder

Studio Camcorder Support

Depending on what you plan to shoot in your new studio you might need a different cam-corder or lenses or both. Will you need full body shots but are tight on space? Then consider something with a wide angle lens. Need lots of clean green screen? Many consumer camcord-ers cannot do this well because of their compression or limited 4:2:0 color. You’ll need a cam-corder that records in (or can output to an external recorder) 4:2:2 or better color. Some of the latest and affordable camcorders even record in uncompressed RAW giving you pristine foot-age that keys perfectly.

Will you need to be able to quickly adjust zoom and focus? Consider something that allows for LANC attachment. If you plan to backlight your subjects, a matte box or brow shade will keep unwanted lens flares from ruining an otherwise perfect shot.

Unlike field production, where it can be like an anchor around your neck, a heavy-duty (and yes, heavy) tripod might be your best friend in the studio. That’s because you may discover your talent really does need a teleprompter. A teleprompter, with its accompanying frame for holding splitter glass, small computer and counter weights, can add considerable weight, quickly overburdening a medium-duty tripod. A more robust head is also a good idea if you plan to pan and tilt this heavier arrangement. Not that you’ll be using them for actual camera moves (though you could if your floor is smooth enough or you build specially designed track), but tripod wheels will make your life much easier in the studio.

Dollies, sliders and jibs are not just for cool shots on location, they work perfectly well in the studio too. In fact here, where you have the ultimate control of lighting and environment that normally make these special camera support devices such a challenge in the wild, you can cre-ate near perfect moves in far less time. A simple home-built dolly can work with or without track depending on how smooth your flooring is. Sliders and tabletop product shots are natu-ral partners. And even if your jib can barely fit into to your studio space, all you need is a few feet of vertical movement to add some spice to an otherwise boring shot.

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Studio Backgrounds

Paper, fabric and canvas backdrops have been staples of studio still photographers for more than a century and they still have a place in a well-equipped video studio. Seamless paper rolls are approximately 9-feet wide and come in 36 and 50-foot lengths in a huge assortment of colors. There are nearly a dozen different types of white alone! You can save some money by using gels on a light to vary the color of a white or grey background. Keep in mind, without adequate spill control with flags and negative fill, white can be a challenge in a small studio space if you are trying to achieve a high contrast look as so much light will bounce back from the paper and wrap around your subject. Paper rolls have the added benefit of easily creating the look of an infinite background by letting the roll flow into a gentle curve onto the floor. Plus, if it gets dirty, just tear off that section and you’re back to pristine white.

You have two choices of how to suspend your paper rolls; on stands or on a perma-nent rack affixed to a wall or ceiling. Unless your space is limited by doors windows or other building features, there is generally no reason why you wouldn’t opt for a built in rack. They are easy to build yourself out of basic materials and can be designed to hold several rolls. And if you are not concerned with a little forearm exercise, you won’t need to invest in automated rolling devices. Like with the lighting grid, be sure to make any connections into building studs.

Paper roll rack

Paper roll rack

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While you can get chroma-green paper rolls, fab-ric seems to work better for green screen. If you find yourself doing a lot of green screen work and have one wall you can dedicate to it, you might consider painting it. You can get specially design chromakey paint but it is expensive. If you are on a budget, some videographers report good results with locally purchased green latex paint.

If you have clients that need certain set elements you will not only need to plan for their layout in your studio but may likely need to allot storage space as well. Profes-

sional studios often dedicate two or three times the floor space to set storage as is used for the studio itself. Be creative. Make your own built-in cabinets for your stands, lights and grip equipment. If you have very tall ceilings and can afford to intrude into some of this space, a 4x8-foot enclosed rack can hold a good deal of props.

Built-in cabinets

Ceiling storage

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Studio Audio

We mentioned earlier how to control studio reverberation but no matter how much you baf-fle, buffer and deaden, there may still be more live-ness to the room than you want to hear in your headphones. Here is where the microphones you select can give you the sound you want to hear. A shotgun microphone on a boom will isolate your subject, rejecting a large amount of studio noise and reverb. A wireless lavaliere, with a pickup element that has a cardioid pickup pat-tern instead of an omnidirectional one will also do a good job of rejecting unwanted reverb. If you will be recording more than two people at a time you’ll need a basic mixing board or low-cost field mixer. Try to allocate a separate location for bringing in all of your audio sourc-es. Simply placing mixers on the floor near your camcorder is a good way to spend money on new equipment. Run cables along the wall on the floor (or on the wall itself if you need to go over a doorframe). Creating a separate space in your studio to create a sound booth to record voiceovers is nice if you can dedicate the space, and it doesn’t need to be large. Dense panels on three sides with a top all covered in a sound baffling material like carpet, foam or sound blankets is all you really need. Place a large diaphragm microphone on a stand in the center along with a pop filter, a music stand and reading light for scripts, toss in headphones and you are ready to roll. If you can’t afford to lose any space in your studio, then a closet full of clothes is a great alternative.

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Last Considerations

Internet access will be handy if you plan to keep a computer in your studio. If that computer is capable of recording and editing your video, you might set it up so that you can record directly to the computer. Sometimes it’s good to be able to review footage on the fly or make quick rough cuts for the client or just for your own piece of mind. And lastly, if you have a phone, make sure it’s muted and/or hooked up to a flashing light ringer. Nothing can ruin a perfect take - and your day - like a sales call.

Having your own home studio adds a new level of professionalism and convenience. It can truly be something to be proud of. One last insight from someone who has had a home studio for more than 20 years; if you went to great pains to convert your garage into a studio space, you’ll need to defend it as such for the rest of your career. You know the old saying about na-ture and a vacuum...well that goes double for studios and clutter. Legitimate props will natu-rally intrude into your working space but so will the usual flotsam of life. Just be prepared to allocate more time to move things around before each shoot the longer you have your studio.

Enjoy your new studio!

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The Essential Guide to Building a Home Studio€¦ · There are many reasons why building a home...

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