Today people expect more from their productions. This means that when clients walk in, production studios have to be ready for anything. One thing that can be a great addition to any shoot is a Studio Control Room.
Studio control rooms aren’t only for large TV Productions. More and more they are being employed in studios of all sizes and scopes. This helps make sure every client who comes in the door has access to some of the highest tech and great workflows. These little things can make production and post that much easier and more efficient.
Take a look below to see some of the ways that a studio control room can help your next production.
One of the most obvious ways a control room can help is when it comes to live streaming. Live streams have come a long way. That means it’s easier than ever to have a live stream kit you can take on the road.
Really what it comes down to is consistency and confidence. When you set up a new live stream kit in the field, you have to get there early, lug it over, trouble shoot to get things working. It takes time and energy which experienced crews can manage. But when you walk into a space, you want it to be ready to go from the moment you walk in. That’s where studio control rooms can be great. No need to worry about setting up a whole space from scratch like below in Cannes, France for Axios. The site is ready to go the next day, the heavy lifting already done.
I’m sure if you working in video production you can probably recall at least one time where you filmed something on a blue or a green screen. Or gotten footage from someone else that is not as clean as you wished.
From a quality control room, the ability to live key your subject or scene should be simple. This means no more wondering about how those graphics will look. No more sleepless night wondering how it will look with the green keyed out and the scene in the background. A good control room has the ability to remove the background and show you the final shot. Everything included behind, on top and around your subject or subjects!
You can absolutely combine the two too! If you do a live stream shoot with a line cut, you can also do live key, bring in graphics and run a real tv live stream for all of your viewers.
Another great thing to be able to do with your control room is show the people IN the studio what’s going on. A good control room has the ability to send your live key, or raw image to everywhere in the studio. That way green rooms, receptions areas, HMU rooms all become viewing for clients and crew.
This means no running cables or having to have everyone circle around monitor on the stage. People can spread out, see what’s going on in the studio and make sure they can be checking things off along the way…from the comfort of a couch or chair anywhere they’d like!
A good control room has the ability to record quality, consistent audio. When you’re filming your band, an interview or a round table discussion, it’s important to have the right gear. Our studio has a Dante audio network and wireless lavs that pipe directly into the recording studio control room.
The audio is sent to the program feed and anyone watching in the space or the livestream or remote link. This will get the full effects of professional audio. Keep an eye out for camera audio as well. The best control rooms can send audio back out to the cameras from a lav or boom. That way, so that audio is imprinted on the mix in the camera or xlr tracks as an upgrade to reference audio!
Even if you aren’t doing a livestream, a live to tape cut from a TC1 or something equivalent can be a fantastic way to get ahead of your editing needs. By doing a line cut, you can walk away with a hard drive of your favorite shots as chosen by your director or switcher from the control room. From there they can be watching feeds, often see through a window and make sure you get an almost complete show by the time you are done!
The last and maybe most important factor is flexibility. All of the things we’ve spoken about already can be brought in, planned, prepped and done really anywhere. Including a beach from France!
However, having a fully built, ready to go control room in a state of the art production space, especially if it looks in on two soundstages, can be VERY helpful! This means that even day of you can often make decisions that you may not have thought of before. You can be ready for anything.
That’s why we think the best way to be prepared is to choose your studio carefully, and if at all possible include a control room so you can get the most of our every bit of the space!
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