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Getting started on the bottom floor introduced some unforeseen challenges – there were plenty of film productions going on at the same time. The construction workers worked from 07:00 to 15:00, leaving us to work on sound recording and mixing after the hammering and drilling stopped. So the days were long, and of course the weekends had to be used for all they were worth. Fortunately, film workers are generally very flexible.
The ground floor had been used as storage for some years. Old iron doors had to be dismantled, the radiators were old and had to be replaced. Hidden load-bearing walls appeared, and five massive 30 x 30 cm supporting beams in the ceiling created problems. Core drilling was required. The electrical system was about eighty years old, and had to be replaced... etc.
The inner half of the ground floor was raised one meter. The basement below was completely sealed, presumably for safety reasons, as it was likely once a swamp of toxic chemicals. People weren't so worried about such things a hundred years ago.
The plan is to divide this area between a lounge and a storage room, so that lighting requirements are met. A storage room is needed for location recording equipment: cameras, lights and sound, and should be easily accessible to be able to roll equipment in and out as needed.
The innermost part of the floor is elevated with one meter. This will be the production area where I will have a small video offline room, a small cinema for sound editing and mixing, with an adjacent recording studio. And a larger editing room for online and mastering of both audio and video.
I designed several new floor plans, and ended up with this. It looked decent – on paper.
The strange angles of the new inner walls are for acoustical reasons.
The ground floor is intended to function as an independent unit, so it can be rented out on a daily basis without customers needing access to the rest of the house. In this regard, a toilet, a mini-kitchen and an office space / reception / lounge are needed. The ground floor has two levels. The lower level is 65 square meters and is located at ground level. It has only 4 small windows, and thus does not meet the requirements for window surfaces in living rooms or offices.
Then we vent to work:
The Reception / lounge
The first thing that had to be done was to level the floors. The building is an old chemical factory from the turn of the last century, and had drains in every room. This means that every floor naturally sloped towards a drain. The drains had to be sealed, and grout had to be used. In this snapshot, the floor has been levelled and is waiting to dry. That will take a few days...
In this part of the floor, the ceiling height is 390 cm. This will naturally create a lot of reverberation. In an empty room, even in small apartments, you can hear how the room feels "empty" before you put in furniture, bookshelves and carpets. Such things are natural absorbers and diffusers, and help make the room comfortable for conversations and listening to music or TV.
A large room with a high ceiling will create a lot of reverb. I chose to construct a mezzanine for two reasons. One reason was to use the height to create a storage for things that take up a lot of space, such as boxes and packaging for equipment that you rarely use, but which is important to keep in case something needs to be sent for service or sold – out of sight, but still within easy reach. The other reason was that book shelves not only added a decorative touch but also improved the acoustics. Some bookshelves would greatly contribute to dampening the reverberation. The mezzanine rests on a polished metal pipe, centred between two bookshelves.
Carpets on the floor was out of the question, since equipment for use on locations, like cameras, lights and audio recording har to go in and out from the storage, and traffic in and out makes a mess on days with rain or snow, which we have plenty of. In a room like this, the floor needs to be easy to clean. I chose to install a vinyl floor intended for bathrooms, non-slip even when wet.
There’s always someone arriving early – often actors waiting for their turn in the studio. In the lounge, they could have a coffee, review scripts, and even watch the film they were about to work on.
A room with a high ceiling needs to be “stretched out” a bit. One way to do that, is to create horizontal lines. I decided to do this the easy way, using colours. Of course I got advice from qualified people who said I ought to reverse the colours, using dark at the top. Well, for me, theory and practice collided. I wanted the weight at the bottom of the room. I made a colour map for the entire project, with the colour numbers printed on the walls for the painters. These are the colours for the reception area, splitting the height at exactly the elevated level of the inner floor.
One thing I often prefer is rounded shapes. To me roundness reflects qualities like warmth, softness, harmony, and comfort. I have used that as much as possible when designing this studio. In the entrance to the small corridor leading to the storage, the kitchen and production area, I chose to create a 45 degree angle to open it up a bit. This angled corner is something I feel is more “welcoming”:
The small kitchen
People often go out during their lunch break, eat at a cafe and take the opportunity to do a little shopping, and often order take-away if they work late. So the need for a kitchen is limited to making coffee and possibly some slices of bread, and having a refrigerator for mineral water and cold cuts. Some shelves with space for glasses and cups, a microwave, a dark cupboard for coffee and tea and facilities for washing glasses, cutlery and plates are basically all that is needed. If there is still a need for a proper kitchen, there is one on the floor above.
The video offline room
Offline editing is the initial stage of video post-production where a low-resolution proxy or duplicate of the original footage is used to create a rough cut of the video. This allows editors to work more efficiently, especially with large high-resolution files, without taxing their computer's resources. Once the offline edit is complete, it's conformed to the original high-resolution footage for the final online edit. In essence, offline editing is focusing on the creative storytelling aspects without the burden of handling the original, high resolution media. An offline editing room does not need a lot if equipment.
A first sketch:
Modified and built:
The control room
The room we had available was not perfect. I would have preferred a larger room, and the ceiling height was only 290 cm.
Daylight is nice, but it can be too much if you are going to have a projection on a screen. Keeping a small part of the large windows can be nice. I chose the four bottom windows furthest from the screen. There can be a lot of nice things to look at outside, even in winter.
Audio editing and mixing are distinct but related processes in audio production. Audio editing involves manipulating individual audio tracks to improve their quality and prepare them for mixing, while audio mixing focuses on blending and balancing all the edited tracks to create a cohesive final soundtrack. So you need the best equipment available. In this rendering I was also checking if the sunlight would affect the screen. The date was set to late December when the sun is at its lowest. So a window it was.
I was lucky to come across a batch of moulded diffusion panels. The room should not be quite acoustically dead. It is much more comfortable to work in a slightly lively room, but damping is needed, and standing waves must be avoided. In this room there are no parallel walls.
And blinds are nice, in case the view becomes disturbing.
A calibrated audio editing / mixing room is a workspace designed with specific acoustic treatments and speaker calibration to ensure accurate sound monitoring and mixing. This involves minimising unwanted reflections and resonances, and precisely tailoring the audio output to match the listening environment.
Snapshot from a calibration session.
The studio
Not exactly the best starting point for a studio. What we need a studio for is to be able to record voices, – singing, dubbing and voice overs, and instruments. We can do this one track at a time. I would have liked a bigger room, but this will have to do – just make the best of it.
Electricity is required…
A combined shelf support and a place to mount a headphone amplifier.
Recording studios must be acoustically treated to control sound reflections and create an optimal environment for recording. Minimising external noise and preventing sound from leaking out of the studio is essential for a clean recording. Soundproof glass doors were needed to minimise sound transmission between the control room and the studio. One was not enough.
The control room / studio is also rigged for one-man operation. It can be operated by using an iPad or a lap top as remote-controller for Nuendo/Nuage, allowing for quickly recording any missing foley or an instrument track, such as an acoustic guitar, a flute or some hand-drums – without a technichian to handle the mixer.
Ideally, there should be a better view between the studio and the control room, but this will have to do.
Snapshot:
The Video Room
In an old building, no one knows which old pipes may be in use. Best to leave them untouched.
Testing a short-throw-projector.
And this is a snapshot of the finished room.
Ventilation?
The last challenge was quite expensive: There was no ventilation on the ground floor!
Luckily there’s a backyard with a backdoor (fire escape), with just enough room to fit a ventilation/AC unit. An aggregate is a big, ugly and noisy unit. The older it is, the more noisy. The one we got looked like it was some centuries old, but looks can deceive – it wasn’t as old as it looked, but it was definitely as noisy as it looked.
Not only is it noisy – it doesn't make it any better that the pipes have to bend under the support beams, adding noise with every bend. Dealing with noise involves a number of noise-traps, and when the ceiling is 2,90 meter heigh, it became challenging. But we somehow managed to make it fairly quiet. We also have the option to turn it off completely if required.
With an optional air-condition unit mounted, the temperature became quite agreeable.
That’s it! It’s built and customers are pleased. Using SH3D for this has been very easy, and the construction workers were pleased getting quick and detailed sketches printed out in a matter of minutes.
Everything was constructed and rendered by Sweet Home 3D on a 24 core Mac Pro 2019.
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last edit by Xiste at Jul 26, 2025, 7:16:48 PM]
Netherlands
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Re: Part 3 – Constructing and building a post production facility house with SH3D
Once again a great showcase of Sweet Home 3D. That is some investment you had to do to rebuild the building interior for you company. Thank you for sharing how Sweet Home 3D helped you plan this huge rebuild. Sometimes it's difficult to distinguish between a real photo and a rendering, great work! (And we learned something about accoustics!)
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Russia
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Re: Part 3 – Constructing and building a post production facility house with SH3D
Thanks for the interesting experience. Great respect for the real thing in a real setting. This is for real, not just an illusion from dreams. And this work is impressive because there are real difficult tasks to be solved. I really like this reality of work. Thank you. I will look forward to new victories!
