DV0307.buildonline

Building an Online Suite
Terence Curren

As postproduction equipment continues to drop in price and increase in functionality, the removal of the high cost of entry has led many editors to set up their own shops. One of the problems with this trend is that each new owner needs to become a cliché, a Jack of all trades.

After spending most of my professional career in large post houses, I decided last year to jump on this wave. In starting up Alpha Dogs, Inc. (www.alphadogs.tv), I’ve been faced with many challenges. Designing a quality edit bay on a limited budget was a major one.

I was fortunate to have worked for a small company that owned a few rental edit systems, which grew over the years into a large post house. This afforded me the opportunity to work with some experienced engineers as we designed and built many different bays. It also let me experience the trials and errors involved in this process.

There’s more to an edit bay than an NLE, monitors, and VTRs. If you’ve purchased a new edit system, and you plan on making money with it, this article will help avoid some potential pitfalls as you build an edit bay for it.

The most key point of this article is: The more advance planning you do, the less you will spend in the long run. I can tell you from experience that poor planning may mean you have to rebuild, rewire, or remodel after you thought your bay was finished. Not only do you lose more money doing something over, but you also lose money by not using your edit bay for its intended revenue-generating purpose.

The key factors
Before you design your bay, you should consider some key factors that should guide your design: Space, air conditioning, power, sound, color correction, ergonomics, aesthetics, and client friendliness.

The first factor is one of space. At a minimum you need enough room to set up your edit table and monitor stand with enough access room behind to hook up cables. Also consider whether you plan on having your decks, drives, computer, and so on in the room with you.

The edit desk needs to be large enough to hold a keyboard, mouse pad and perhaps a graphics tablet, audio mixer, and telephone, with some room left over for your notes. If you will have tapes in the room, then you’ll need room for a tape shelf or tape cart.

Once that space is accounted for, consider the client area. Will you have other people in your bay when you work? How many maximum? Do they get a desk, couch, coffee table, chair? These requirements change depending upon the type of work you do, but planning for extreme situations will prevent you from having to remodel later.

Always keep in mind throughout this process the importance of ergonomics. Reducing various stresses on your body will pay off in a happier healthier editor. The height, and depth of monitors and keyboards, and other devices is very important. (see Ergonomics sidebar on page XX).

If you have windows in the room, you need to consider how to either block them, or position your monitors to eliminate glare. With a single monitor, you can follow the typical suggestion of keeping the window to the side. In many edit bay configurations however, you will have three monitors that form a slight curve around your line of sight. This makes putting the window on the side less workable as the light may bounce off of one of the screens.

Once you have your space planned out, it’s time to start spending money. Air conditioning is one of two areas where it doesn’t pay to scrimp. If you lose cooling while your equipment is operating, you can shorten the life of your gear or even destroy it.

Shared A/C units are the cause of many problems with typical office spaces converted to edit bays. In one room you are running a lot of monitors, drives, and other heat generating gear, while in the next room a coworker is operating a single computer. One of these rooms is going to be too hot or too cold.

The proper, but expensive, solution is to assign individual A/C units to every edit bay. The next option down, which we chose for Alpha Dogs, is to have individual thermostat controlled electronic dampers for each room. These allow you to share an A/C unit, while giving each room more or less of the air as the damper opens and closes. The cheapest option is to install manually controlled dampers and try to fine-tune them as much as possible. Then hope temperatures don’t fluctuate too much.

Whichever route you choose, make sure to add up all the BTU’s generated by your equipment and give that information to a qualified A/C contractor. They can help make sure you have enough air available.

Electric needs
The second area you can’t afford to skimp in is electricity. Your equipment needs a steady stream of clean power. If you don’t already have one, create a spreadsheet listing all of the electrical equipment that is or will be in your edit suite. Add a column where you’ll list each piece of gear’s power needs.

Many devices list several different power consumption levels depending on the action of the equipment. Use the highest number, which is usually the startup current draw. Enter the number into the appropriate column of your spreadsheet. Now add more rows and entries for any possible equipment you might ever add (e.g., another monitor, a second workstation). Then add some padding for changes in your gear list. Why? A DigiBeta deck draws more than a small DV deck. Now add a little more padding. And just for good measure, add a little more for safety. This may seem excessive, but it is much cheaper to run additional power lines now than to add a line later.

Make sure that the equipment power is provided through properly installed Isolated Ground lines receptacles. These are designed to keep the ground on your equipment separate from the rest of the circuits in the building, eliminating unwanted crosstalk. These receptacles are easily identified by their orange color or an orange triangle. They cost more to install, but take it from someone who has spent many hours tracking down the source of video hum bars and audio buzzing; they’re worth it.

You will also need regular electrical receptacles for any non-tech appliances in the room. If poorly designed appliances are plugged into your isolated ground receptacles, you will lose your isolation.

The last power item to consider is a good Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS). I cannot stress the importance of these equipment savers enough. On one of my early projects on Avid Symphony, I had five days worth of digitizing, color correcting, and rendering sitting on my JBOD. Another editor had digitized in an entire show onto the same drives and left it rendering overnight. While the drives were churning away, the building took a very brief power hit. It was enough to damage one of the drives. All the material that existed on that ten-way stripe was gone. Not a pretty scene. I’ve been a staunch advocate of the UPS philosophy ever since.

Fortunately you can save money here. You’ve already added up your electric current consumption, now find a unit that will cover your needs. If you live in an area with consistent power, you don’t need to put all your gear on the UPS to save it during a power outage. Items such as program monitors, vectorscopes, and audio mixers are not going to fail from a sudden loss of power. However if you live in an area that gets power spikes or lightning hits, you will want all of your gear protected by an UPS.

I like the Smart-UPS line from American Power Conversion (www.apc.com). These units condition your power as well as giving you a battery backup. With their PowerChute software for Windows and Mac computers, the UPS notifies your computer when the power goes out and can then automatically shut down. Great for those unattended overnight renders.

Once you know the capacity you need in an UPS, you can save big money if you check out refurbished models. Companies like Power & Environment International (www.4ups.com) rebuild units with brand new batteries (the most common problem with UPS units are the batteries failing) and give the same warranty you get with a new unit. I have purchased many UPS devices at one fourth of list price this way.

Network needs
While you are having the power cables installed in your bay, you should get all your networking wiring installed. At Alpha Dogs, we wanted to have the ability to easily switch drives between bays which is a problem with SCSI’s limited wiring lengths.

The current selection of Category 5 cables max out with Gigabit Ethernet. Last summer Category 6 cable was approved so we spent the extra money to install this cable instead. This should carry us whichever way the next generation of network transmission goes. Make sure you place data outlets everywhere there might ever be a computer. It is cheaper to add an outlet that never gets used, than it is to run a separate line later on.

Proper sound treatment can be broken into two areas. The first is isolation. You need to keep outside sounds out of your bay, and you need to keep your sound in your bay. The second area involves the complex science of sound waves and how to handle them. For an in depth look at acoustic design for your bay, check out DV columnist Jay Rose’s book Audio Postproduction for Digital Video (CMP Books, 2002)

The Importance of Being Ergonomic

Editing is not conducive to great health. We sit for many hours, in unnatural positions while being bombarded by electromagnetic fields. To add insult to injury, the diet most of us consume will never be found in the balanced food pyramid. We owe it to ourselves to do what we can to lessen the impacts of these abuses.

There have been numerous studies done to determine both the positive and negative effects of your work environment. You probably already know you should try to keep your wrists straight and get a comfortable chair. But there’s more to it than that. If you want to see what else you should do, you could start with the links below.

Be prepared to find plenty of conflicting examples. For instance, I have read that you should have a window behind your monitor to allow you to exercise your eyes by focusing in the distance. I have also read reports that you shouldn’t have a window behind your monitor, as the contrast is bad for your eyes. My personal preference is to have a window with blinds so that I can control the amount of light that filters in through out the day.

After you have gathered as much information as you can, use it to do what makes your body feel the best. If you notice a certain part of your body is sore, observe what you are doing throughout the day to cause the problem. Then seek proper help. Don’t forget to add those touches that lighten your spirit, like that window you can see the world through.

Sites with computer ergonomic information:

Healthy Computing.com
www.healthycomputing.com

ErgoWeb
www.ergoweb.com

Paul Marxhausen’s RSI page:
http://eeshop.unl.edu/rsi.html

University of California Ergonomics Program
www.me.berkeley.edu/ergo

Light and gray
If you plan to do any color correction in your bay, you will want to spend some time adjusting the environment. There are several important issues to focus on here, with the key two being light level and color temperature. Like the white balance on your camera, the human eye is constantly adjusting to the existing light source. You want to prevent this from happening as much as possible ensuring that your eyes maintain a consistent perception of your program monitor.

The first step is controlling what happens to light in the room itself. If you have blue walls, your eyes are going to adjust to that. But you want your eyes as neutral as possible. Therefore the ideal color scheme for your room is actually a lack of color. So that leaves us with shades of gray. Which shade is best is a hotly disputed topic.

The traditional thought on color correction rooms has been to keep them very dark. “To create the truest color correction,” the argument goes, “you must remove all contaminating light sources from the bay.”

I have two problems with this approach. The first is an ergonomic concern. We need to keep refocusing our eyes at different distances to exercise them. This is hard to do in a dark room. We also want to avoid the fatigue that comes from staring at strong contrasting objects such as a bright monitor in front of a dark wall. Lighter matte finished walls will diffuse light, eliminating shadows and contrast.

Some offer a stronger counterargument that revolves around the eventual viewing environment. Consider: How many people do you know who sit in a very dark room to watch TV? This question has been the root of a continuing debate amongst colorists.

The challenging response is, “Since very few people view in a dark room, shouldn’t we try to approximate their viewing environment?” I personally agree with that point. Of course creating an archetypical viewing environment is as unlikely as getting two home NTSC television sets to look the same.

I spent too many years in dark linear edit bays, and I am more than happy to have a little light in my current bay. After several tests I settled on a medium shade of gray for my new online suite. Next came the fun part, trying to find gray paint. I couldn’t find a non-tinted gray shade anywhere. I even went back and asked telecine engineers at a post house where I used to work for leads, and they told me they just used a regular blue gray paint. They sort of corrected for this by using gels on the lights, but they never really achieved a neutral color.

Sometimes the obvious solution is not immediately apparent. It turned out the easy answer was to get white paint and simply add black tint until I got the shade I wanted. The only other shade used in the bays was a flat black paint around the inside of the recessed window frames that reduced any bouncing light coming around the blinds.

While it is possible to purchase complete blackout blinds, they are expensive. They consist of an opaque material that rolls up and down tracks on the side of the frame. At the bottom they fit into a grooved receiver. This eliminates all light from seeping in. Unless you have an unlimited budget, or want a really dark room, I would skip this approach. I ended up getting solid vertical blinds in a very light shade of gray. If you need to cut down the light even more, consider window tinting. Avoid any color in the tint.

Getting all of the light sources in the room to be a consistent color temperature is the next challenge. If you have the option, both your computer monitor and your program monitor should be set for 6500 K. All the lighting in the room should match this also. Some bays have small desk lamps that are closer to 3200 K. This can work as long as the source is limited to a small area. Of course you run the risk of having a client who has been working under the 3200 K light telling you your pictures are too blue.

The light behind your monitor should be a fluorescent 6500 K that provides a soft even field. These are not as expensive as they used to be. In the past I’ve used small fluorescent fixtures made by StockerYale (www.stockeryale.com) that cost over $200.00 each. These lamps operate at a very high frequency to prevent strobing. I tried the cheap route once and purchased a small fluorescent holder and a 6500 K growers bulb from Home Depot for around $30.00. I thought I was really clever until I installed it behind my monitor and watched the constant flickering on the wall.

The good news is that I have found a newer energy efficient, 6500 K fluorescent bulb that doesn’t flicker. Technical Consumer Products (www.tcpi.com) sells all that for about $12.00. I now use these throughout my bays; it’s a tremendous savings. Keep in mind that the field of light behind your monitor should not exceed 10-percent of the total output of your monitor.

Furniture
Furniture selection was the hardest part of the design process for me. In the early stages of Alpha Dogs I had planned to have custom built consoles. But then I needed to get my first bay up in a hurry to handle a large client, so I had to order a prebuilt edit desk. I planned on this being a temporary solution, however none of my clients seemed to care about what table I was working on. I soon realized that in the new postproduction paradigm, the old ideas of opulent bays are not as important as doing a good job at a reasonable price.

That said, I do believe in making the client areas as comfortable as possible. We have couches, client tables with client iMacs on the network, a rear client monitor and of course the requisite phones. If your workflow rarely sees a client enter the bay, you can trim a lot in this area. Just keep in mind that you may need these luxuries in the future and should plan space and wiring accordingly.

So now you have an edit bay with all the technical considerations worked out. How do you add that last special touch? Since your walls are all gray, any little splashes of color you add will stand out. A lot can be done with this concept. As long as you don’t use so much color that it taints your visual judgment, you will be fine. Remember to keep the area behind the monitors color free.

It may seem like a lot of trouble and expense to build an edit bay, but if you do it right, you’ll only do it once. Take the time to research other peoples edit bays and learn what you like or dislike, and incorporate this knowledge into your own design. When you think about how many hours you and your clients will be spending each day in this room, it’s easy to see that all the work up front will pay off in the long run.

Copyright 2003, CMP Media LLC