Designing and lighting a home editing suite room

[Mark Suszko]

This has come up a time or two in the editing forum; you might also want to search there.

As a general rule I would say you want as neutral an environment as practical, so it won’t have an influence on your color perception. There is some controversy regarding back-lighting the wall behind the monitors: some prefer it, others like it black. I think even more important than the lighting is that the monitors be of high quality and properly calibrated, because you’ll eventually get used to any kind of ambient lighting, and the viewers watch under all kinds of ambient lighting situations and monitor/TV settings as well.

[Todd Terry]

Our suites are the typical “dark caves” with lots of moody lighting… dim track lighting, uplights behind panels, hidden LEDs that wallwash, pin spots on artwork, that kinda thing. Seems these days a lot of people are leaning toward more bright and warm environments, but to me this is the way an edit suite is supposed to look and it’s what I’m comfortable in.

The desks themselves are illuminated (albeit fairly dim) from LED sources that are under the shelves above them. They are just off the shelf under-counter lights from the hardware store.

And yes, Mark’s right, you’ll likely want the area behind the monitors painted a neutral gray… and it should be PERFECTLY NEUTRAL, just a mixture of pure black and white, no color tones in it at all. This should be illuminated with lighting (again, ours is pretty dim) that matches the color temperature of your monitor. If you have standard (and fairly cold) computer monitors, you’ll probably want flos or daylight LEDs there. If you use a wamer monitor, you’ll want lower-temperature lighting back there… tungsten or whatever. Your brain needs that neutral same-color-temp background in order for your eyes to do proper color grading.

T2

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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com