If you only cut video occasionally and casually, you almost certainly belong to the close-the-lid category. In other words, you have a laptop that you shut once the footage is cut, and that’s the end of it. So that kind of setup isn’t what I’ll be covering here. I also won’t cover the opposite end of the spectrum, the professional studio. Kitting out a professional edit suite is a subject for a book rather than an article — and above all, professionals already know what they need and why.
So in this article I’ll offer a few tips on setting up a workspace if you run a small video production outfit, or if you cut weddings, vlogs and corporate clips. Put simply, if your job puts you in the edit suite several days a week, at least some of these tips should come in handy.
The room — lighting
An editing room should meet certain requirements, mainly to help with colour consistency. Windows are one example. When the sun is shining into the room, the brightness and colour cast are different from when a storm cloud passes over the house. If you happen to be grading at that moment, it can affect your work in both colour and brightness.
That’s why, for more demanding colour work, it helps if you can black the room out. It doesn’t have to be complete. It’s enough if most of the daylight is suppressed. Working in the dark like this isn’t healthy for the body, so only do it when you’re actually working on colour.
At the same time, bear in mind that you want artificial light in the room. Not just any light! Ideally it would be soft daylight. That usually isn’t possible, so reach for artificial lighting instead. Tubes with a daylight colour temperature have proven themselves here — somewhere between 5000 and 6500K, depending on what you can get hold of.
I found Philips MASTER TL-D 90 Graphica tubes to be a good compromise between quality and price. They have a colour temperature of 6500K (give or take, depending on how long you’ve been running them). Aim them so that they work as indirect light.
Lighting ties in directly with how the room is furnished and painted. The desk, along with the wall and furniture colours, should be grey. Ideally not white and not black. Definitely not coloured. If you had green walls, for instance, they would influence your eye, and every colour decision you made in the video would be affected by that environment. You want to avoid that, which is why you need to give your eye neutral surroundings — through both the lighting and the colour scheme. Your video will end up colour-neutral as a result.
The room — acoustics
Audio often gets worked on in the edit suite as well. If that’s your case, you need an acoustically neutral environment. No, you don’t need laboratory conditions or studio-grade treatment. But if you’re working in a block of flats and sound bounces off the walls, it can throw off your judgement.
Make sure that at least most of what you hear arrives directly from the speakers, with minimal reflection from the sides or the walls.
Why? Because when sound from the speaker reaches your ear directly and is joined by sound reflected off a wall, you get what’s known as phase cancellation. If the reflected path is longer than the direct one, certain frequencies in the reflection and the direct signal cancel each other out. The result is that some frequencies seem louder and others quieter than they would in a properly treated space. If you don’t account for that distorted listening environment, you’ll set the audio according to what you hear — compensating for the flaws of your room — and the finished mix will sound odd.
You don’t have to rush out and buy expensive acoustic absorbers or bass traps. You can start simply by putting furniture, bookshelves or other irregular surfaces along the walls. Bare walls can be covered with a blanket, a few hoodies on hooks, and so on. That’s plenty for video editing and a basic audio mix.
The desk
Ideally, the computer workstation is laid out on a large, height-adjustable desk.
Editing and grading are jobs that run for hours on end. Sitting that long isn’t good for you. With a height-adjustable desk, you can alternate between positions. When cutting interview footage you can comfortably stand, and you can even take a few steps while a speaker is talking and no cutaways are needed.
Working standing up is well worth arranging — not only does it help reduce the risk of back trouble, but often haemorrhoids as well.
You need a desk that will take three monitors and, in some cases, speakers too. So going cheap and flimsy may not be a good idea.
The chair
Even with a standing desk, you’ll spend part of your time sitting. Here I’d recommend an ergonomic chair. You don’t need some engineering marvel costing over a thousand euros. Those exist and some of them are very good. But a cheap chair can serve you just as well. It’ll last a bit less, so over a few years you’ll probably go through a couple more of them.
An exercise ball is also worth considering — it’s comfortable to sit on and it looks after your spine. You don’t have to sit only on the ball; alternate.
Put simply, if you can change position every half hour while editing, that’s perfect.
Audio
If you deal with audio mixing, it’s worth setting up properly. When planning, remember that with a sit-stand desk, the point the speakers need to fire at moves too. In an ideal configuration you’d have three different systems:
- Studio monitors. You’re not in a studio, so even the cheapest models from proven brands will do the job.
- It’s good to have quality headphones at hand, but they aren’t the right tool for mixing — treat them as a check.
- Finally, it’s useful to be able to hear the video on some piece of misery like a portable boombox (one of those little all-in-one hi-fi units).
- And sometimes it’s worth hearing at least a bit of the audio on a mobile phone.
That’s why it helps to route the audio from your edit suite through a mixing desk (again, something basic will do), so you can switch to mono, to different speakers and so on.
The picture
Ideally you’d work on calibrated monitors. But the price puts that out of reach even for a smaller video production. A monitor can be calibrated at home and the solutions aren’t expensive, but I’d warn against it. If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, your calibration can introduce errors. And if you don’t know your setup is wrong, you’ll unwittingly grade your videos around that error. I once saw a video where a beginner colorist had monitors running green and had no idea. He delivered an hour-long video to the client with everything pushed unusably towards red. So:
If you have a decent budget, one of the higher-end LG OLED monitors counts as a solid image. At least as a preview solution.
On a smaller budget, go for a monitor from a trustworthy brand that claims 100% coverage of at least the sRGB space, or comes close to it. Some monitors are declared factory-calibrated.
On a tight budget, don’t take on grading for clients — or grade, but check the result on multiple devices.
I know, the professionals are grinning from ear to ear right now — working blind is hard. But if you’re starting out, check your work using tools like the vectorscope, parade, histogram and similar scopes. TRUST THE NUMBERS! If the scopes show the image is grey, then it’s grey. And if you nevertheless see a colour instead of grey on your monitor, your monitor is set up wrong.
- To work efficiently, use two monitors for editing and a third as a reference preview. That third one has to be first-rate.
- An alternative is one very wide monitor for editing and one for preview.
If you can manage it, it helps to have another display dedicated purely to false colour or other technical views.
At your fingertips
We were already using a keyboard and mouse routinely back around 1994. By 2000, video editing had moved on to more specialised keyboards. Grading uses panels, editing uses controllers. These toys cost rather more than a five-euro keyboard.
Bear in mind that if you make your living editing and grading, you’re doing it for several hours a day, several days a week. If you buy a piece of kit that saves you half an hour a day or more… It’s much like a graphic designer using a pen tablet (the pointing device that replaces the mouse, not the tablet that eats your time).
Internet connection
And now the problem:
- A video editing workstation shouldn’t have an internet connection. Let the computer put 100% of its power into the work. Let yourself be 100% certain you’re not under attack. Let no new messages interrupt you.
- A video production workplace needs the fastest internet money can buy in your area. You’ll be sending data constantly. Most connections have reasonably fast downloads but agonisingly slow uploads. And slow may not cut it. An example: we shoot an interview in the morning, cut it in the afternoon, and it’s due to go live on the client’s YouTube channel that evening. The video runs to about 15 gigabytes. How long will the upload take? On a slow connection, a day or two. On fast fibre, you might manage it in half an hour.
So draw your own conclusion — the editing machine shouldn’t be online, but given the constant need to reach your source material, you probably won’t avoid it. In which case you want internet that’s fast and well secured.
Mobile phone
This little device is best left outside the edit suite, free to ring, vibrate and quietly seethe that you aren’t reading its notifications.
If you want to work, you can’t let yourself be interrupted.
Compensation
This isn’t equipment as such, but a few tips anyway. If you spend long stretches editing video — often under time pressure and therefore stress — your whole body feels it. Stiff muscles, stress, poor digestion and similar delights. That’s the job.
- Compensate for the static body position. Exercise after work, go for a walk, stretch.
- Compensate for the stress. Take a relaxing bath, meet up with friends and enjoy yourself.
- Compensate for the time. If you’ve worked hard for a few hours, allow yourself a little doing-nothing and quiet.
Remember that compensation means the OPPOSITE of what you’ve been doing.
- Sitting at a computer? That tightens your chest muscles. The compensation is stretching the chest and strength work for the back.
- Fully focused on video? Your eyes and ears take the brunt. Going to the cinema won’t compensate for that. A walk in the woods and some silence will.
- Work is a pressure cooker? Then coming home to another one isn’t a good idea.
Related to this is limiting the number of inputs. If the radio doesn’t need to be on, leave it off. Don’t have the television running if you’re not watching it.
Mental hygiene
So we’ve covered a few tips on how to arrange your workspace so that the finished work meets expectations. I know, doing it perfectly means your investment goes through the roof. If you’re earning from video, put part of the profit into improving your workspace. Especially if you’re young — you can take a lot of discomfort. More precisely, you can sit through a lot of it. But that can come back to haunt you later in the form of back pain, for instance.
So clearly almost nobody will build this perfectly, but at least you have some pointers on which direction to think in when you’re rebuilding something, or planning changes and adjustments.