The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP008: Room Design Strategies Part 1

Episode Date: April 13, 2024

Designing a suite thats both comfortable (for you and clients) as well as functional for color work is more complicated than you might think!  Having built dozens of suites from scratch over the years, in part one of two episodes on the subject, Robbie & Joey share their lessons learned about room design including executing proper planning,  if you should consider having a machine room, considerations for cable runs & connecting equipment in a suite from a machine room, common room layouts, and lots more.  

Hello and welcome to the Offset Podcast. I'm Joey Deanna, and with me is Robbie Carman, and today we're going to be talking about different strategies for laying out your color or finishing suite. Stay tuned. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com.

Ah, Joey, room layout strategies. How many times I have to, I'm being honest with you, how many times have I shared like a Google sketchup or like a home styler thing with you? I'm thinking about rearranging the room to do X, Y, Z, right? The truth of it is your room, where you work to do color, editorial, audio, wherever, is an important thing. And, you know, it's not only important to making you, you know, comfortable in the room, but it allows you, you know, allows you to work fast, allows your clients to do whatever the clients need to do in the room. And so in this installment of the podcast, I want to talk a little bit about kind of some of the considerations that go into room design, some of the things to think about.

this is going to be less so about, you know, kind of calling out individual pieces of gear. I think we'll, you know, just in the course of normal dialogue here, we'll probably mention a few pieces of gear, but it's more about just kind of the overarching strategy, right? And so I guess where I would like to start is kind of the, kind of the, I think, partly a big choice that goes into whether you need a room, multiple rooms, a room with a closet maybe, or something else. And that is just, okay, everything that we do is just gear related, computers, converters, monitors, okay? Some of that has to exist in the room, obviously, right? You need some sort of input device, whether it be a control, surface, pen, mouse, whatever, a monitor

going to be in the room. But I think that one of the first big choices you have to make is where are all the computers and other stuff going to live? If you've been to a larger facility, no doubt those places generally have centralized machine rooms. And so, Joey, give us kind of that 50,000 foot view of what a machine room is, why you might want to consider one, why it seems like bigger facilities generally have them, smaller facilities might not have them, and what are some of the kind of challenges or pros and cons of going after a machine room. Yeah, absolutely.

The machine room is, as the name implies, a room for the machines. And I think it's the best possible configuration for just about anything, but it comes with a lot of challenges. So the first thing you really got to think about is what's your equipment, what's your requirements, and what is the capabilities of your space? Right. So the advantages of a machine room, you have everything that is noisy and heat generating and power sucking and space taking upping somewhere out of your room. Right. You don't have to worry about it.

You don't have to worry about the noise. You don't have to worry about the heat. You can have dedicated power circuits going in so you're not blowing breakers all the time whenever you hit render. So it also allows you to grow in capability. If you start with a machine room that isn't filled and is way more capable

than you need to, and then two years later you end up, oh, well, I need to buy a render farm of supercomputers for this huge project. Where am I going to put them? Nope, I got space in the machine room. Great. The challenges, though, become largely logistical. How do I get my mind?

monitors, my keyboard, my mouse, my WACOM tablet, my everything, speakers, audio. How do I get that into the room where I'm doing the creative? And that kind of comes into the situation of how far away is your machine room? Do you need extenders or you just need

long cables? Right? How easy is it to make upgrades when all the machines are back there somewhere? You need to run new cables every time. You can't just plug in a new device, you know? So like anything else, there's advantages and disadvantages. And I think that the key thing to do is to think about both your

requirements now and what you're trying to accomplish now and your requirements in the future and where you see the business and the suite evolving to. If you know you're only going to be using this, like if you're making a home suite and you want to come home and do some tweaks to an edit and you need like an iMac and some speakers and that's it. Then you don't ever really even need to consider doing a machine room. But if your goal is, I'm going to build a color business primarily out of my house, and I might not be able to afford all of the latest and greatest computers and gear right now, but I want to be able to build this business into something bigger and bigger and bigger.

You might want to think about doing a machine room, even though where your business is right now doesn't necessarily mandate one. Being able to grow into it could help. And then, you know, it comes down to also, you know, what is, your space capable of. Not all spaces can have a machine room. You know, if you shove everything into a closet thinking, I've got a machine room,

you now just have an overheating computer room because you might not have the climate control for that room. So there's a lot of different factors that go into this. I personally, just to give a little bit of background about my space, I came with the attitude

of I want to build a business where I'm primarily out of my home. And we bought our house with an unfinished basement. I set up my office, in a bedroom we weren't using with like a cheap desk and a computer no machine room, no nothing.

The basement sat unfinished for years. Eventually I got to a point where I could fund finishing the basement. So I had a contract to come in, finish the basement, split it up in like two thirds finished, one third unfinished, where all the HVAC equipment was,

where all the power stuff was, and put a nice wall with double insulation in it to mute the sound. And I decided that's going to be my machine room. So the next phase of that was kind of implementing the machine room. I just had a computer and some storage in there, not much else. And then I ran some cables through the wall to my desk. But eventually it evolved to, I've got high-end network storage in my machine room. I got network infrastructure in there, high-end workstations, dedicated climate control, because there was space in that

room to put that. And there was electrical hookups to put that. So thinking about it from the beginning, saying, okay, I'm going to take this space to my house, dedicated to my job, and leave myself potential to grow every step of the way. That's what kind of allowed me over the course of almost 10 years to build a really

competent machine room-based color suite in my house. Yeah, you know, those are good points. And when I think about machine room, the two things that come out to me, and maybe it's because I have a bit of, you know, a music, audio background. I am paper.

I mean, like, underline that and make it bold, hyper sensitive to the whirl of fans and, like, the extra heat noise that machines generate in the room, right? And so, you know, to me, that's number one thing, right? It's just kind of to make a comfortable, creative place. I think that if you're in a room that's always at, you know, 90 degrees Fahrenheit and you're hearing the wine of, you know, fans in the background, it's really difficult to be, like, kind of in the, in the mood.

and kind of in that creative vibe when you're just, oh, God, this is driving me crazy, right? The second reason that I, you know, that machine room choice I think is important and it was the right one for the facilities that I've built is it actually makes, you know, we'll get to some of the pain the ass factor in just a second, but it actually makes a lot of things a whole lot easier, right? So instead of having to run, you know, oh, well, geez, we want to have, maybe it's you want network storage, right?

Instead of that network storage, all the cables being having to run, one suite or whatever and if something happens to that suite or whatever hey it's all centralized you don't have to knock on the door while somebody's in session and go uh excuse me can i just um copy something over to that computer real quick um you know even though you're in session it's a centralized place that gets there part of that also is better besides the noise is better thermals right oftentimes machine room will have dedicated uh ac to it or like something like a mini split or something like that you already mentioned power. But the other thing I'll mention again about this is that it is a centralized, secure, possibly secure place in the facility as well. A lot of, if you think of the company threes or the light irons of the world or whatever,

that machine room is like the bridge of a spaceship or, you know, an aircraft carrier, right? You are not getting in and out of that room unless you have cleared access, And I'm mean, legitimately, access, key card, biometrics, whatever it may be. You know, why? Because that's where all the data is, right? In this world, we're so terrified of piracy and data going missing. That is one surefire way to have a central clearinghouse where all the stuff that lives that has all the expensive data on it is secure, right?

If you've ever thought about, you mentioned about planning for the future, If you've ever thought about doing something like TPN certification or things of that nature where you want to work with higher-end OTTs and clients that require it, almost assuredly, you're going to have to have a centralized secure location where all the computers exist. Everything's going to have to be air-gapped and so on. So that's a good reason. To me, let's get into the downsides of that, and then we'll get into the particulars of the room in just a second. You mentioned cabling, extensions, running that kind of stuff.

Um, this is so much easier than it used to be. Um, I, again, dating myself here a little bit. I remember the first place that we set up, everything was component video, right? Yep. And so you wanted to have a backup of your component video. But hey, as long as we're running those cables, we might as well want to have like, you know, a Y connection only or Y C, you know, S video kind of thing as well. Yeah, we need some AES audio. Right. AES. Excellent. So you ended up with these cable bundles, you know, that were six, seven, eight inches. thick and having to build the conduit and all that kind of stuff and if there was no drop ceiling it was a pain in the ass right um these days uh cable runs can go surprisingly far and with significantly amount less cables like if you're building a new facility now you know what used to take four five six cables single 12 g scei cable right or or a single hdeme i cable um also the world of this is actually a really important thing to mention um because people confuse it and get it wrong all time, people are like, oh, well, yeah, I have, you know, Cat 5 or Cat 6, or they might call it, like, you know, Ethernet running to the room for network. Well, guess what?

That's standard. Ethernet is a multi-protocol carrier, if you will, right? There's a lot of things that you can do over an Ethernet cable, USB, video, and so on and so forth. And a lot of the extenders or adapters, whether they be USB, whether they be HTML, etc., are going to oftentimes work with just a single or a couple network cables which are easy to run and don't take up a lot of difference, right? And so... Yeah, and their general purpose. So you can just, like I

talked about future proofing, run 15 cat-6 cables into the room. Right. You're not going to run each one as Ethernet. You're not going to run each one as network. One might be video. One might be your keyboard or your mouse. But, you know, you can always just use those

for anything down the road. Totally. And I think no matter what you're doing, whether you're just kind of broad pictures here, planning and documenting your planning, huge, huge thing. And I mean this in a couple different levels. And I'll just give you the high level things that I mean. Number one, machine room, power consumption. In your planning, you should have an idea of what the maximum and idle pull of every piece of equipment is so you can build the appropriate electrical infrastructure for that room to handle all the things. Because the worst thing is, as you said earlier, you hit render,

the whole circuit goes down and everybody's screwed until you get it back up, right? So, electrical planning. Thermal planning, believe it or not, all these manufacturers have done this testing for you already. They will oftentimes publish what the heat output is in BtUs or whatever of their equipment at full blast. There's ways of measuring that too. But getting a qualified, you know, AC technician or whatever to kind of go, okay, this is the pile of gear that you're using. This is, because surprisingly, and you've actually faced this, Joey, too much AC is actually just as bad as not having enough AC, right? Yeah, and just on the topic of thermals here,

you might think that adding an AC unit is going to be a huge drain on power, right? Your electric bill is going to go through the roof. Well, that's not always true because whether you're in an office, a home, a home office, whatever, the thermal load, the amount of heat your equipment is putting out

is always going to be there. It needs to be removed somehow. So if you have a machine room where everything is in a closed loop and you are removing that heat with, you know, in most cases it's going to be what's called a mini split unit where you have an outdoor unit and an indoor unit just like your central air, except it's smaller and it's only for one room, right? Those units are very power efficient and they remove the heat before it can get anywhere else in the building or the house. When I added a dedicated mini split to my machine room, my electric bill went down $50 a month because I was much better managing the thermals of my equipment, instead of letting it dissipate up into the rest of the

house where the home AC was now overrunning because I was generating so much heat. It's a great point. So besides thermals and power, the other thing is planning cable runs, not only in the number of cables, but what cables are going to be used. And one of the nice things you should try to get is if you have building plans, so you're not just guessing at, oh, that's about 80 feet or whatever to only find out that it's 150 feet, right? You know, that's always a bad thing. But it also saved you money to in the long run by getting the right appropriate length cables to do what you need. The other planning factor that comes in there is where is everything entering and exiting both rooms, the machine room and the rooms that you're running to? I found it

generally a good idea to have a central egress point and ingress point to those rooms. So everything is kind of for just cable nicety, everything is kind of going in and out of the rooms at the same spot. That's the thing to plan about. But also in that part of the planning is to have some fudge factor, if you will, you know, some pad. I'm sure you've been there, Joey, but you're, you know, you're wiring up an Ethernet cable and all of a sudden, you know, the end breaks off. So you cut, you know, an inch off and start over. And then you go, ah, crap, I got brown yellow confused with brown and you cut it again, right?

Having enough extra to kind of support that some slack. don't ever want to have something to be exactly onto the number. We call it having a service loop. If you are cutting cables to length, you do what's called a service loop. So one, you can pull the machine out of the rack. But two, like you said, you have some wiggle room. Yep. And then the third thing I would say about just planning a machine room style kind of thing

is that you have a plan for how things are organized in the machine room. I don't know about you, Joey, but one of like the greatest OCD joys in my life is looking at those like data center pictures where they have like the professional data cablers come in and everything is perfectly like it's just right nothing is worse mine is not that right nothing is worse than having a centralized machine room that is just essentially a bird's nest of cables there are a plethora of tools by the way whether it's something as simple as a spreadsheet or to a dedicated tool to help you visualize what's going in equipment racks how power is being run you know something like Omnigraffle comes to mine on the Mac

which is a great little tool for planning kind of rack layouts and stuff do that work. You don't want to be on Amazon 17 times in a week ordering oh one more pack of screws or one more cable for this or whatever going into it with a plan is

essential. Okay. And label things. Buy a label maker. Buy a label maker that can make the ones that fold over and wrap around a cable. Yep. Right. Those little things Label makers are not that expensive.

But if you do it when you start to build everything, when you have problems later, or like we've been talking about, when you want to expand to bigger capability, you know what all the cables are doing because you'll think at the beginning, like, yeah, I can remember what these cables do. About five minutes later,

you've forgotten what every cable does. And you will never remember that ever again. Better yet, you're out sick one day or you're not going on vacation and somebody has a problem and they can't figure out what's what, well, if that cable is labeled and you have documentation of how the machine room and the room proper is set up, even better. And you don't have to go overboard. I've been in facilities with super qualified engineers that did huge CAD drawings of everything to absolute perfection with individual serial numbers for every cut-to-length cable.

That's obviously the standard you would like to adhere to if you have all the time and staff in the world to do it. But most people don't. So just make a good effort to label and document everything you can, but you don't have to get completely hung up on it to the point where it's being a detriment either. Yeah. So you made the decision whether you want things in the room with you. And by the way, I should mention even if you do make the decision to have things, I mean, it sounds like we're advocating in the machine room,

which I think we kind of are for a lot of people. But the same kind of thinking should go into play whether the stuff's in a rack or on the desk in the room with you. too. Same principles of organization and labeling, all that kind of stuff. You know, I hate walking in, literally one of my biggest pet peeves in life is poor cable management. I hate walking into rooms where I just see a whole bunch of cables piled on the ground. Now there are ways of hiding those cables as Jerry will tell you about the wonderful TBC consoles that we use at the facility for that. I'm not going to lie. I am not at the moment practicing what I preach. My cable management is a disaster. And I will tell you this,

it's a constant frustration. And I'm waiting for the time. to literally rip everything out of my desk in my machine room cable-wise and redo it from scratch to get it better. So, yeah. So regardless of where you're going to get the majority of your gear set up, let's talk about kind of, I'm going to say there are, thinking about this in my head, I'm going to say there are five, four or five kind of tried and true principal layouts for a room. I'm going to argue that these will work for editorial VFX and color slash finishing. The needs for audio are going to always be a little different just because of the needs to separate speakers, distance from speakers, and so on and so forth. But some of this will apply to an audio room too.

So let's talk about the tried and true layout, which I call, and we'll put some pictures in the show notes of these, just so you can have some visual representations of these. I call this the up against the wall layout, and I'll describe it briefly, and that is the operator's desk is up against a wall, with their monitors and stuff facing that wall, and any client sitting in the room happens behind them, right? Some people call this the over-the-shoulder look. I just call it over-the-wall because where the operator is.

But traditionally, this is what you would find in editorial suites, color suites, et cetera, where the operator is kind of in one side of the room. Clients are sitting behind them, maybe at a desk, square at a couch. And in those situations, there's often a larger client monitor either over the operator's head looking back to the back of the room. There might be some additional monitoring back there depending on the size of the room, you know, can't it on the wall or on a wall mount. This view, I think, is the default for a lot of people. My big problem with the up against the wall

look is twofold. Number one, it's this, the turnaround constantly in the swivel of your chair, right? And two, as a colorist, this is the big one, it provides full view to, from the client to the screen, not only the reference monitor or client monitor, but also to the UI. And so I have found it challenging over the years in that set up, somebody to go, no, no, no, what are you doing there? I meant that clip. Oh, no, like, dude, I'm getting there. Like, calm down. Like, they're kind of just like nagging you about it. Uh, what do you think of pros and cons of that kind of up against the wall or over the shoulder layout are? The pros are, it's easy and it fits in most room layouts.

The cons are literally everything else. I, you know, I hate this layout. I've always hated this layout. I hate having my back to the client. It feels impersonal. It feels awkward. It feels like you're being watched. From a absolute ridiculous wingnut paranoid security perspective,

I don't like having my back to the door in a room. You know? If the Terminator's come for me, I want to be ready. So it's just a feeling of almost claustrophobia where there's so much going on behind me that's important. And I can't focus on the important stuff in front of me because there's so much stuff behind me.

And yes, you can work in that environment. Like I said, it works great for a lot of people, probably people that are not as kind of loony tunes as I am. But it just feels so impersonal to have everybody looking at the back of your head. I agree. I can't tell you how many pictures. I mean, over the years, I've had that.

set up and mainly do the space considerations in various rooms. I have so many pictures of like the back of my head and my shoulders looking at my, people are like, oh, we're in the street with Rob today. I'm like, oh, great, there's another back of the head photo, right? I feel you on that one. I will say the only pro of that one is really just the simplicity of setting it up. Put a good desk in a wall. It fits everywhere.

Yeah, it fits everywhere, but it's not the greatest. All right. So the opposite of that one to me is the everything kind of in front of the operator, right? right? This kind of works well when you have kind of a long or a deep room, right, where you can kind of place your desk maybe in the middle of the room or, you know, three quarters in the front and clients kind of in front of you. And this is actually how the room at our current office, the main color room, is set up with clients in front of you.

This, some people like to call this kind of cinema style setups, right? You know, think about it if you're in a projection room where you might have a whole bunch of, you know, like theater chairs or whatever, kind of in front of you, looking at a screen. The advantage of this, I think, is that it kind of gets the client from, you know, not looking over your shoulder and being claustrophobic like that. The challenge, the number one challenge, I'm sure you have some others to add to this, that I find is that the client ends up being the one who's turning around all the time

or standing up and coming over to your desk or whatever. There's kind of a hybrid version of this in bigger, rooms, especially in theaters, you'll see like some behind the operator seating and some in front of the operator scene. So like the DP might sit back with the colorist at the desk, but you know, the, whatever, the associate producer or something is sitting in a nice comfy chair up front, right? I think communication is a hard part about this. Also, in our current room, and the biggest thing I hate about this setup right now is that, you know, if you're using direct view monitors versus as a projector, right?

I'm a big fan of having that direct view reference monitor directly in front of my line of view. That obviously cuts that off, not only my line of sight to the client, but also my line of sight to what the client is seeing, right? So if I want to see what they're seeing on the, you know, the client monitor, I have to get up or look around. Do you have any more thoughts on this layout? Yeah.

I mean, full disclosure right now for most rooms, this is actually my favorite layout. And it's the way my room at home is laid out. Well, actually, let me take that back. It's not my favorite layout. It's my favorite layout that fits in the most possible spaces. We'll get to, you know, because anytime you build a room, those constraints, right? What's the shape of the room? What's the length?

What's the width? What's the depth? You know, where you physically put things can be very limited by the actual shape of the room, which in most cases is something you can't easily change. So I have this room, my room set up, like we have the one of the office, where I've got a client monitor, client couch in front of my desk. and then my desk with a direct view monitor behind them. The advantage here being, one, I think it helps with client focus.

The client is in a almost living room like space with a big 65 inch calibrated monitor. So it feels comfortable to them. It feels like they're watching television. And we're making television. So I want you to feel like you're watching television. I actually think the opposite of what Robbie said, where not being able to see the client monitor in most cases, unless I stand up, is an advantage because there's some,

always going to be some level of differences in monitors, no matter how well you get them calibrated. That's true. I want to focus just on the reference. I don't want any other monitors in my line of view for me or for the client. I never want, and that's, you know, the big problem like we talked about with the client behind you is constantly, wait, which monitor do I look at?

And even if you tell them, you have to look at this monitor, sure enough, they will always halfway through the day say, yeah, but I kind of like it better on this monitor. Can you make it just use that one? Like no, no, no, that's not how any of this works. So that's a fair point. And I think there is, so when I think about that cinema style setup, as we're describing, in a true theater, there's not something between the operator and the screen, right?

The screen is... Yeah, that's the dream, right? If you can have a theater with just a desk and a console and you can see your clients, you don't have a monitor in front of you, and you've got a big cinema screen, or you have that hybrid setup, you've got some people behind you, some people in front of you. That's wonderful. Most colorists won't be able to fit that into their suite. Well, I think actually, I think we're kind of getting there these days.

You know, the big challenge was always that high quality reference monitors, directory reference monitors didn't come in big sizes for everybody to really see. Yes. So oftentimes we were using lesser quality consumer-type televisions or whatever for client monitors. I think we've seen over the past year or two that's, that's changing. Like there are now large format, you know, 55, 65, 77-inch, whatever, large format displays that in the right room, you could, replicate that cinema style layout with a single.

Yeah, and we've talked a lot about doing that at our office where we have this kind of layout that I like, but to be perfectly honest, like Robbie said, he's not thrilled with it because of what I'm going to get to next, which is the client communication aspect. That's the biggest downside of this layout. There is a big old monitor sitting between me and my client, whereas I didn't like having the client behind me

talking to the back of my head, guess what? Now the client is not going to like me talking to the back of their head. And it's the same problem. And just inverted. And there's also so much showy to like body language that you miss out on too, right? Like, you know, as, you know, one of the things that we do as colors and operators, whether you're doing audio or whatever is, you know, you're playing something down and you're kind of, you know, you're taking a peek at the client.

And if they're making a frowny face, you know something's up. And if you're hiding behind monitors behind that they, you know, you can't see them. That part gets. And they get real weird if you start putting in cameras and rearview mirrors. So you don't want to do that. But I will say this. Yes, the client communication aspect is the biggest, biggest hands down downside to this layout.

I feel that there are ways to mitigate this. To me, I use it as an excuse to stand up and walk around the room as many times as I possibly can. I feel like, you know, a lot of people love their standing desks because it keeps them moving. I hate standing desks. I don't know why. I just don't like them.

So to get that physical movement in my day, I'm constantly jumping up, talking to my client, then jumping back down. that's just me. That's kind of how I've worked around this big disadvantage of what otherwise would be my favorite room layout. Okay. Well, that brings us to the next one, the third one. And there's modifications on this, but let's just say for an argument, the perpendicular or the L side by side.

The side by side or L kind of layout, if you will, right? This is a popular one for because it alleviates a lot of the communication. things that you were describing, right? So instead of having to, you know, fully turn around to face the client or have the client do the same, it's just a turn in one direction, a head turn in one direction or the other. It also has the advantage for the operator to be able to quickly see their monitor and the client monitor. It's a little more difficult for the client to see both because it's kind of behind them in a lot of those situations. I actually had this layout in a suite for the longest time.

The room was small, but the layout like that worked great. I know you've been in some rooms at some places like that. What do you think the pros and cons of that one are? I think if you're going to do direct view monitor is not a cinema style, kind of having the client to your side is the absolute best, best way to do this. It alleviates all the problems, right? Because the client, let's just say, and they don't have to be exactly side by side. They could be to your right or left and then a little bit behind or a little bit ahead. Right. But the idea is the client has a space where they have a dedicated, client monitor and it is their main field of view, but just with a 90-ish degree turn of the head, they can be talking to you face to face.

They're not seeing your monitors in their direct eye line, so there's no which is the right monitor. There's no barrier between you and the client for communication, right? You are not directly looking at the client monitor off axis, so you're not getting a perspective shift of which monitor to look at, whether consciously or subconsciously. you've got direct view to your reference monitor, you've got direct line of sight to the client to see their reaction to things while you're playing back,

to have face-to-face creative conversations, and your client is still in a comfortable living room-like environment with their own monitor. The only disadvantage to this room layout is, from a physical space perspective, it's incredibly hard to get right in terms of, it takes up more space, especially on the width axis,

than most practically built rooms have. You know, if you are coming into it, doing drywall work and doing renovation, this is the layout that I would say to target. If you're retrofitting a room that only fits one shape, you might not be able to make this work comfortably because it can't work comfortably if it's too close, right? If it's too compressed. So I have a fourth one that I'll add that I have no practical experience with, but it just came to mine after I talked to a colleague that was describing this to me and I thought it was the strangest thing ever, but I could see,

I could see the advantages of it for the, let's put it this way, the confident colorist or operator. And that is the directly across from me set up. Let me describe this for you, okay? That is my desk and the client desk. Just put them, the backs of them right up to each other, right? And so when I'm doing my thing here,

I'm coloring, I'm coloring, I'm coloring, I'm not looking straight ahead at a monitor. I'm looking straight ahead at the client sitting at a desk or whatever directly in front of me who is also looking at a monitor. So this means that the monitors are kind of on different sides of their desks, right? They're kind of opposite one another. But there's one for me to look at and one for them to look at, but I still have straight to straight eye contact. And my first thought about this when it was described to me is what kind of masochists are you that you want to have to send something? somebody's staring at you the entire time that you're doing your work, right?

You know, you're whatever. You're picking your nose or whatever. You know, who knows? So yeah, I don't know, man, if I have the guts for that one. It's a little more, it's a little too intense. But I suppose that I could see the benefits of it for the right client operator kind of relationship. I think that kind of solves most of the communication issues that we've talked about in all

of these layouts in the smallest possible space. Yeah. Right? Because that's always the, that's always the hard part is how can you make. the layout work in the space you have. So that's an interesting one. I'd never heard of that either. Personally, I hate turning my head to look at a monitor.

So I would maybe offset the desk so I'm looking directly at the monitor and it's a slight turn of my head to look to the client. That's a good point. And that all could be kind of adjusted to taste. Well, in the fifth one, the last one that I'm going to mention is the side by the alternate side by side. And what I mean by that is having the client literally at the desk with you, but just off to the side. So, I mean, everybody's probably had a client, you know, an overzealous DP or whatever, you know,

kind of roll up right next to you. And it couldn't kind of be a little uncomfortable, right? We used to have a producer who we nicknamed Screen Toucher. Yeah, yeah. Oh, God, that's the worst. Right. Real close to you, I see the benefits of having them there, looking at the same monitor, you know, that kind of stuff. But the, the claustrophobicness

of it doesn't appeal to me. But with a long enough desk or a desk that maybe has like a client extension on it, kind of thing where they can kind of sit at one end. By the way, that kind of set up, also really good for like if you have an assistant in the room, right, that has another computer that's down there doing some other things, whatever. But that's a good one where you could have it up against the wall.

You could have it in the middle of room. There's lots of flexibility with that set up. I would just urge that if you're going to do the side by side or sit with me kind of set up, that you somehow try to get either a very long desk or something to kind of separate yourself a little bit from the client. Yeah, and the real big thing equipment-wise to consider with that is when you're selecting monitors and where you're putting them, make sure they're within the limitations of the viewing angle aspects of that monitor. I'll say this, we've done that for sessions in our office. And depending on the client, it can work really well.

I did a feature where I had the director sitting in front and I had the DP sitting with me. The DP really spoke the language of color with me really efficiently because he knew Resolve pretty well as well. And we were able to talk really, and he was kind of actually interested in what I was doing in Resolve. He was never like, oh, you need to click on this or anything like that. He was really cool about it. And we had a great rapport. And it worked really, really well. But we were using an LCD monitor that had a very wide viewing angle.

If we were using a dual layer panel that doesn't have that viewing angle, it would have been a nightmare. So just one of the things to consider is what's the thing. the viewing angle capabilities of your monitor before you start saying, hey, you could just come sit next to me. Very cool. Well, so I think that's a kind of, I'm going to phrase this as kind of part one of room set up. In a later episode, we'll get into some additional details of the room set.

It was particularly about equipment, I think, are important things because we have, let's just say, some strong opinions about input devices, control surfaces, other doodads to have in the room. but we've labbed for about 35 minutes or so here, so we'll save that for part two of this how to set up a room. But I think, you know, deciding on kind of whether stuff's going to be in the room with you or in a machine room,

and then kind of, you know, one out of, you know, four or five different kind of setups, again, which we'll put in some into the show notes, some examples of that with some pros and pros and cons. You know, it's largely about kind of feeling what's right for you and your clients, but I would also say, you know, your needs and your desires are going to change on this. I know for a long time I was fine with the client sitting behind me,

the monitor overhead and all that kind of stuff. These days, I couldn't imagine going back to that setup. It would kill me. So feel free to experiment. There's not a hard and fast rule with these. There's hybrids of each that you want to go into. So, you know, a lot to think about there, but some

basics of room setup, I think we'll get you a long way. Yeah, and I think just to kind of wrap up a little bit, you know, the big things to think about are what is the space you have or the space you're building. So what is it capable of? What are your requirements? How can you best kind of merge those two limiting factors into something really comfortable for you? Because you're at your best creatively when you're comfortable and you're not fighting ergonomics. And then as as much as you

possibly can leave room and think about how you can grow because you don't, the last thing you want to do was build out a room and then completely have to tear it down to grow. And if possible, This isn't going to be possible for everyone, but if at all possible, get into different facilities, get into different suites, and just kind of anywhere that you know a colorist or anybody, any facility that you know, try out their rooms, sit in them, see what feels good to you. You don't know what you like. I always get, you know, I give this advice to people getting into motorcycling all the time. They come in with an attitude of, I want this kind of bike. That's what I'm going to buy for my first bike. I tell them, get on Craigslist, buy a $500 piece of junk

because you have no idea what kind of bike you like until you get on and ride every motorcycle ever made. Then you can intelligently decide what your preferences are. Get into a bunch of different rooms and figure out what you like that way. It's the same things with guitars, right? I can't believe how many people just buy guitars a sight unseen from an online retailer. I'm like, you know, they get a guitar and I'm like,

oh, well, this guitar is like twice as big as I thought it was and it's uncomfortable to play. Like, no, you got to make the right fit. So, no, that's a very good point. All right, well, some things to think about there. Like I said, we'll pick this up in some more detail in part two about some sweet considerations. But thanks for listening to this installment of the Offset Podcast. I'm Robbie Carmen.

And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.