Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Building a new Work/Grading/Screening Room

Hey Brad , I suspect I know where you going with this.....whilst I cant help too much with theatre design ( In a previous life I did a lot, but that was all some time ago) I can maybe help with insights to what your planning business wise in the region...email or call me . Mike
 
Dermot said:
I'm working in a gradeing theatre alot, the projector is in a room behind me, with a porthole for the lens, the reason for this is the projectors throw out alot of heat and light from the rear baffles

In your current plans with the proj hanging from the celling it might throw light straight into your eyeline - but we just don't know until the Red proj's are delivering - making the room pretty useless for gradeing or QC should the Red proj need ventltion, and assumeing that it really is up to the task in the first place... all unknown at this point.

It seems you are putting all your eggs into the Red projector basket, but it might be wise to keep open the option to look at other soultions, i can't think of one that would work hanging off a celling infront of you

Should note that we use a Dolby PR4200 in our QC/TV gradeing room, and a Sony BVM-OLED in the gradeing theatre along side the Christe proj... you might want to look at the Dolby mon - it's the gold standard.

d
Click to expand...
Hey Dermot,

You are absolutely right - don't want to throw all my eggs in one basket! To be honest, I'm actually still pretty open to change on the projector side of things. Whilst I like the idea of the RedRay, and it seems absolutely perfect on paper, I won't really have a good idea until NAB and once they start shipping the things. The combination of remote light boxes, 4K and full DCI P3 coverage for $10K (plus it being a RedRay Player too) does seem perfect on paper though - now if only it could play back DCP's too :P

Evangelos (who Marc W recommended earlier) said I should take a look at some of JVC's projectors. Can't seem to find any that have true 4K support as opposed to upscaled 1080p but will be very keen to chat to them and other manufacturers come NAB. And yeah, a different projector could very well mean I need to accommodate room for a separate projection booth or something that serves the same purpose.

Yeah the Dolby monitor definitely seems like the gold standard - I have a feeling it will be a long time until there is enough cash flow spare to cover it's cost though! Will be interesting to see if Dolby has a 4K panel in the works. Seems inevitable I guess - wonder what a reference 4K panel's cost would look like?

Thanks for you input :)
 
Mike Garrick said:
Hey Brad , I suspect I know where you going with this.....whilst I cant help too much with theatre design ( In a previous life I did a lot, but that was all some time ago) I can maybe help with insights to what your planning business wise in the region...email or call me . Mike
Click to expand...
PM sent Mike :)
 
Hrvoje Simic said:
"Reasonably accurate" and "decent audio" is very subjective and depends on the criteria. Criteria is a moving target.

---Clip---

Proper audio mixing requires a special setup, nothing which is "along the side" of another activity in the same room. It requires not only acoustic design (wall arrangement, angles and ratios) and treatment of the room (absorption, diffusion, resonators if needed), measuring and fine tuning (RT60 etc), it needs proper monitors with proper measuring tools and live metering tools, a high quality DSP to compensate the volume of the room and a proper D/A converter. The list continues...and you are well over five figures before even starting. Any serious partaking into audio segment will demand higher investments.
Click to expand...

I agree with the first point (It's all subjective), but then the follow up claims you "Require a special setup". No you don't. Perfect is the enemy of good. To mix something within a millimeter of being perfect, you need a very accurate setup as described, but to deliver content that is good enough for 90% of what most client needs are you do not need a "Special" engineered setup. If you are mixing 5.1 for local theatrical DCP commercials (as the author describes) you do not need "Special" to attain "perfect", you need "good" to attain "good enough".

What you do need is an intelligent, structured approach for sound in the room. 2 of the 4 proposed walls are already not parallel, which is a good thing. You need a PC, a good 7.1 channel sound card, a good set of amplifiers, a graphic EQ for each channel, a good set of audio monitors properly sized for the room, an audio test CD, a good SPL meter, and a enough acoustical treatments (like Owens Corning 703) to approximate the commercial theater you are trying to replicate. Large audio monitors are relatively rare, so if you can't source them to try to find the flattest (i.e. not 'musical') speakers you can find and use the graphic EQs to flatten them out. It may take a few days to dial the room in , but you may be able to tap into a local audiophile group and get some free help.

soundblaster.com
atsacoustics.com
parts-express.com
mcmelectronics.com


Bob
 
Bob Gruen said:
I agree with the first point (It's all subjective), but then the follow up claims you "Require a special setup". No you don't. Perfect is the enemy of good. To mix something within a millimeter of being perfect, you need a very accurate setup as described, but to deliver content that is good enough for 90% of what most client needs are you do not need a "Special" engineered setup. If you are mixing 5.1 for local theatrical DCP commercials (as the author describes) you do not need "Special" to attain "perfect", you need "good" to attain "good enough".
Click to expand...

Thanks for your input Bob. I think what you have mentioned here is pretty much what I originally had in mind. Not aiming for perfect sound wise - but good enough to get 90% of the way there. Having said that, I do appreciate Hrvoje's input as it has prompted me to explore what's involved in getting the room Dolby certified. If it ends up not being too cost prohibitive with the construction of the room, it could make a decent value add and open a few new opportunities too :)
 
Definitely will do Thomas!

I'm still in talks with Dolby to get the nod on the current dimensions I'm working off. Room has been enlarged slightly again from what is posted here, but things are looking good.

Once I get the nod that things are headed in the right direction from Dolby, the next step will be to get the current plans to a draftsman to draw up building plans :)
 
Hey Brad! Any update on your grading room plans? Im in the situation where I've started to look at building our own grading room, and this thread contains alot of useful information. I don't have the ceiling height that you got, but the room size is otherwise pretty similar. Would be interesting to hear your thoughts about light setup etc. in your room.
 
Hey Guys,

Just thought I would resurrect this thread to give you all an update on where it's up to and what happened. Essentially the landlords of the space it was going into decided that they would prefer to manage construction of all the rooms in the space (which makes perfect sense business wise). Unfortunately, this wiped my room plans off the map in regard to being able to really build something custom designed for the purpose and have it get dolby certification etc. For a while I looked for other locations I could build the space but they all proved too cost prohibitive, so instead I decided to dial back my vision substantially and jump in a smaller space that the original location had available. This was a little heartbreaking, but also reduced the amount of work needed on my part as well as the amount of $$'s going into construction. In hindsight, this is a much better approach as I'll still be able to do 90% of the work I was going to do in the other room and free's up funds to go into gear and equipment.

So I thought I would present the Unravel space v2. I've pulled in Steve Shaw from Light Illusion for consultancy in regard to setting up the room correctly for the color grading work I'll eventually be doing in there. Gerben Van Duyl from Procella Audio is also helping me with some advice for acoustics of the room and is providing the Speakers/Monitors that are going in.

The new space looks like this:
unraveloverview.png


At the moment I'm finishing off the ceiling, which is made up of beams/rafters. In this space, I've been installing acoustic foam which is now being covered with acoustically transparent black fabric. This allows the entire ceiling to act as a sound absorber to help reduce reflections in the room. Pics of the foam and rafters before installation: (I'll have to take some more pics of where it's currently up to)

unravel1.jpg
unravel2.jpg


Building materials for the baffle wall arrive tomorrow and putting that together will probably take up most of next week. Speakers and screen will be mounted into it once finished :)

I realise the thread may not be quiet as interesting for some folks being that it's on a reduced scale, but hopefully it will be for some. Feel free to ask away with any questions :)
 
Just another quick update. Acoustic foam is all in the ceiling now and the first section of fabric to cover these is up to:

unravel3.jpg

There's a couple of pulls in the fabric that I need to work out but lighting in this pic makes it look far worse than it is. Rear frame of the baffle wall is also complete and I'll be finishing the front frame today also :)

unravel4.jpg


Also attached some studs to the rear wall that will serve as the mounting point for the plasma (Panasonic 50" ST60) I'm temporarily throwing in for editing until I have the money to kit the room out for color grading.

More shots to come as more is finished off :)
 
Hey Brad

Happy new year !

My only comments is where is the client bar fridge & Barrista coffee machine in your floor plans ?

A def. must for clients.......like me ; ) !

Mike
 
I have built two post houses and 6 rooms like this, so i think I have made most of the mistakes possible...:)

Just skimmed tis thread so these points might already been made. I think it's uber important!!!!

Before you build this setup, most important, are you sure you want to sit behind your clients? I tested the same setup, same as you tested in 3D models and it all looked great, I also thought it would be super nice to sit above the clients. But that was a huge mistake I learned the hard way. It's a psychological thing, because the clients wants to see you and what you do, and the last thing they want to do is turn around and look up and when they do so all they see is the wall behind them, or best case the back of your monitors and you looking out behind them....

It's called back seat driving for a reason, and then it's not you that should be back there it's the client. They much rather sit behind you so that they can over view what you do and talk to your back. Because from reading what you want to do, it's not being a projectionist, you create stuff and you do so for clients and you want to invite them to work with you.... So by setting yourself behind them you do the opposite, and also above them, talking down to them, that does not really work according to my experience. You will first get the director up the stairs and pull out a chair next to you.. and then the producer wants to come up there too... then the client feels lonely down in the sofa.. you get the picture..

So basic rules are having the clients elevated above yourself will make them like your suite. Also if you think of it your desk up there will have a lot of monitors and other things, the client want to be able to see what you fiddle with, even if they do not understand a thing they still want to see that vacom pen move or something on the screen that indicates things are rendering etc. And those screens on your desk right in front of you will also ruin your own view for the big screen, and personally sitting closer to the screen than the client is never a bad thing, that way you spot the little jagged edge on the graphics or what ever error there might be before them.

Best thing possible is to have the room setup so that the agency producer can sit a little bit elevated above the clients and production company and then also have room so that the director and creatives can sit next to you and be like a filter between you and the client. A lot of times the director wants to tell you something that he does not want the client to hear at the same time he needs to be in eye contact position with his clients... then he can not run up and down the stairs to do so.


Further more any kind of high end projector needs to be outside the room, or you can forget about sound all together. Most of them sound like a vacum cleaner or worse and they spit out quite a bit of heat so if you put it above your head that means that you will leave it off for most of the time.

Also head room is important. From looking at your drawings you get some storage space underneat but there is no real reason to elevate everything so much. A screen can be a sitting from half a meter from the floor if needed it's a bit like you pushed it all to the sealing... I did that mistake myself in the most expansive suite I built and I even made a little coffe bar and small kitchen up there but still running up and down those stairs was really annoying from day one.

So,

If having a projector keep it out of the room project trough a small window.
Think things over about the above and behind client thing.

Then also,
If you go for the new trashcan mac for workstation I think you can have that in the room with Thunderbolt distance to your monitor and such. But then still you need cable distance to projector also and if you build a render farm you probably want to set up a fiber network solution and then you definitely want to build a small machine room... small machine rooms need to be tempratur regulated and if the cooling fails you need to have it installed so everything shuts down in a nice way, or things will eventually catch fire. The room itself needs air conditioning as well so deepening on how the facility is you can use cooling system with an external unit that exchange with the outdoor air or you can (as we do) use a water cooling system if you do not have access to put up an external unit.We basically cool our machine room with tap water.

But again all cooling devices fail, frost up or have other problems sooner or later so it's really important to put some thermostatic switch for your mains... I know people want the computers to be turned of in software etc etc. and thats all true but those things have their issues as well and I had to many incidents where those things just did not do the trick so I set termoswitches on all power when the temperature reach 70 deg celsus, and I have an sms alarm that pings my phone when it goes to 50 deg.

Hope I did not come across as to negative but I see your drawings and they very much remind me of some very costly mistakes I made trough the years... and I might be wrong and this is the perfect thing for you but it sound like we are doing about the same kind of stuff so I figure I share the knowledge from my mistakes.

My best advice. visit some big post houses and see how they are doing it. Everyone has their own ideas and most think their stuff is really great and when you start to compare a few you will soon see that it a quite difficult thing to get right especially if you bring sound into the mix.

Any way, this is a great thread I will for sure follow it. If i find pen and paper i would sketch up something. Maybe tomorrow while rendering. :)
 
Fantastic detailed explanation Bjorn. Good work :-)
 
Hey Mike!

Happy new Year - hope you're doing well!

Client Bar Fridge and Coffee Machine (well,.. Nespresso) are on the latest plans (on the previous page at the back of the room). Bar fridge should arrive this week - so I'll have you covered if you ever want to pop in and have a cuppa' :)
 
Björn Benckert said:
I have built two post houses and 6 rooms like this, so i think I have made most of the mistakes possible...:)

Just skimmed tis thread so these points might already been made. I think it's uber important!!!!
Click to expand...

Hey Bjorn,

Thanks so much for taking the time to write this out :). Much appreciated. Plans have changed a lot since the initial design on that first page of this thread due to the landlords taking over construction for all the spaces going into the facility I'll be in. Check out this post for the current plans that are underway and an explanation for the changes :)

The good news is that the latest plans have reversed the seating positions as you have recommended. So that works out nicely, coincidently. The only recommendation I can't take on board is the elevated seating for the agency producer as my ceiling height in the latest plans is now much lower than the previous plans.

Projector is also off the map for the moment as 95% of my work won't be for features and so I'm just going to run a decent sized monitor mounted into the baffle wall I'm building. Currently have it planned to be FSI CM500TD but have purchased a cheap 50" Panasonic ST60 to throw in as an edit screen before I purchase all of the coloring gear in one hit.

As far as aircon goes, there is one mounted on the rear wall in the current space. It's a split system so the actual cooling happens on a unit on the roof of the facility :). There is a 42U rack unit which is due for delivery this week which will be going in at the back of the room. This will accommodate the UPS, Audio Amps, DSP, Computers and eventually a smaller render farm to assist with 3D work and conversion/creation of DCPs for cinema. Should I need more space though, there is a dedicated machine room in the facility that I can rent extra space from, so I could load in more render nodes there and link them back in over CAT6 cables that run to the room. I realise that rack units can typically be pretty loud so I'll be spending a bit of time bringing down the sound level of the unit through some acoustic absorption at the rear and replacing fans etc.

Workstation wise, I'll be on Windows as I prefer to build my systems by hand and I'll probably have this live underneath the desk and design it to be low noise so it doesn't annoy the ears after a full day :)

Thanks again for all your help! Looking forward to your input :)
 
Last edited:
Quick update:

Finished the construction on the front frame of the baffle wall today - nice to see plans that have only been in my mind and on a computer screen appear in real life :)

unravel5.jpg
 
Hi Brad

Keen to see if you have an update. Your build was interesting to follow.
 
Absolutely have an update - been flat out between building the space and working on a feature which has prevented me from updating as much as I would like.

Since the last post, quite a bit has happened. Baffle wall is now 99% complete. Procella audio monitors have arrived also which is nice. Just waiting on the DSP until I can hook them all up :)

Baffle wall uses the frame seen in the previous post, then adds a layer of MDF and then 2x layers of plasterboard. This thickness helps to create some density to stop sound transferring from one side of the wall to the other. Around 30mm thick all up. Holes are then cut out of this for the speakers to sit in (which have a shelf to sit on behind the MDF).

I then just built a final frame which has acoustically transparent black material run over it that presses up against the baffle wall. This covers the speakers up but allows sound to pass through them. The material also helps absorb light better than black paint for grading purposes. Eventually I also need to purchase some extra acoustic fabric that will get sandwhiched between the acoustic frame and the plasterboard that will help cut down sound reflections coming from the back wall. Black cinema curtains will also run down the side walls to the desk which will essentially create a black void from the seating position (except for a monitor floating in the middle of it of course!).

Progress pics :)
unravel7.jpg
unravel9.jpg
unravel10.jpg
unravel11.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top