First Studio

[Grinner Hester]

It depends on who ya pay rant to, of course. The last slum lord I had shook me down for more than 7 grand a month while putting my content on his demos. lol
I paid less overhead at my own lil shop and got to put the thermostat lower than 80.

[Jeff Bonano]

Well, it sounds like you got a plan and it’s working out well! Best of luck to you and happy filming 🙂

Jeff Bonano
http://www.bonanoproductions.com

“I want to have a cool quote at the bottom of my signature, just like everyone else on the cow forum!” -Jeff Bonano

[Scott Carnegie]

“The bottom line is every gig we bid on is a test of our marketing and talent.”

Yep.

It’s tempting to make the jump to a “real” office. It depends on how busy you are, what the client demand is and how many people are working with/for ya.

There have been a few times where we were on the brink of a big contract and looked at getting office space with a small studio to accomodate the shooting we’d be doing. It didn’t happen and I still work out of home.

http://www.MediaCircus.TV
Media Production Services
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

[Charles Mercer]

Happy New Year to all!
Well, we moved into our studio yesterday and we have a space to die for, courtesy of the glut of office space here in the UK. There is one snag – there always has to be one – the building has air-conditioning and, although we can turn our own unit off, we can hear sound from the ducting supplying the other offices. This seems to be a low-level white noise which is intermitent, but it’s enough to be an irritation. Does anyone have a solution to this bane of the videographer’s and sound recordist’s life?
Our first thought is to park a bookcase in front of the sound source with some deadening material behind it – this should cut down the resonace a bit.

Charles

Charles Mercer
Pearldrop Video Productions

[Mark Suszko]

My advice is, you may chuck this dream location and get a proper one designed for good sound, because by the time you add the fixes to damp transmitted and conducted acoustic noise, it may add up the same.

The ducts are resonators, like a guitar body or drum. To stop them resonating, you have to add mass for the acoustic energy to spend itself against, This could be sheets of lead foil, or elastomeric membranes. Or you add baffles to bend and break up the air vibrations. Then you have to make an air gap between the noisy wall/ceiling and your own walls/ceiling, or the vibration still gets transmitted through.

The fact is, making quiet HVAC is a really hard thing and generally takes a pro to handle everything from spec’ing brushless fan motors, special serrated “hush kit” fan blades, acoustic “turn-arounds” to bend the sound back on itself, Vibration-isolated duct hangers and grommeted screws for hanging everything from, etc.

You don’t just hang a few Sonex panels and corner bass traps around a room and call it “fixed”. Our studio has walls and windows over a foot thick, sound-absorbing batting on all walls and ceiling, and solid metal doors with gasketed edges that seal as they swing shut. You can’t hear a bomb or sirens go off outside of it when buttoned up. And yet… we STILL hear air handler noise sometimes, though the mics don’t always pick it up. You may have to do the same and build a “room within a room” that’s de-coupled from the floors and walls and overhead, to get it *really* quiet. Or just hang a lot of floor to ceiling drapes or carpeting. Depends on how far you need to go.

Your best bet to SAVE money may be to pay for an hour of on-location consulting from an actual broadcast engineer who specializes in facility planning. They will tell you best how to fix what you’ve got and avoid false starts, or that you may need to find other digs.

[Charles Mercer]

Thanks for this. Regrettably I came to a similar conclusion while I was sitting on the floor assembling a flat-pack desk. The noise wasn’t there when we went to view the space and it just chimed in and out all the time while I was working. Fortunately we can bail out at no cost if we have to, but it’s a real disappointment.
In general, the Brits handle sound insulation in buildings very poorly. I once lived in a semi-detached house where I could hear the news on next door’s TV in my living room. I built a false wall to try to cut this out but it wasn’t dense enough, so we moved house. By contrast, I stayed in the Gershwin Building in New York with apartments all around me and heard nothing. I was amazed at the level of sound insulation.
Ok, we have to give this aspect our work a little more attention, so we’ll talk to the engineers when they return from hols next week.

Regards
Charles

Charles Mercer
Pearldrop Video Productions

[Charles Mercer]

Better news – with six empty offices on our floor to choose from we moved to a quieter location. We still have some minor issues but we can live with them, but the previous air-con noise turned out to be a water feed to the ground floor toilets. We’ve moved away from that area and the problem seems to be resolved. The background noise is no worse than filming on location so we are going to stay here for now.
What I really enjoy about our building is being able to talk to clients in the cafe – we had a visit yesterday from a prospect and the studio premises have also promoted one of the other tenants to enquire about making videos with us. Let’s hope the year continues in the same way. I’ve just ordered the greens-creen supports from ebay, so that’s the next job when they arrive. We’re snowed in at the moment and frustrated at being delayed, but there are some tax returns pending and, now, no excuse not to get them completed.

Regards,

Charles

Charles Mercer
Pearldrop Video Productions