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Building a Home Video Studio

A 12 part series of articles on the making of aviaTV.com

by Darren Smith, CFII/MEI

Electrical

A video studio seems to have a hundred little electrial needs. From cameras to teleprompters and computers to lighting everything needs an outlet and everything needs to be balanced so circuits don't pop. In the typical television production, the production company has someone on staff called a gaffer. A gaffer is a professional electrician responsible for lighting and electrifying a movie set.

In my world, I don't have a gaffer (or grip, or audio tech, or even the magic man who pays for everything. So here's my efforts to electrify the aviaTV set.

Analyzing & Balancing the Load

Everything draws power, and a well equipped studio is going to need more than one electrical circuit to connect it all to. Luckily, I had 3 circuits available in my studio space. What was important now was to be sure I understood the power requirements of all the gadgets and space them out on the various circuits I had access to. Turns out I only needed 2 circuits.

So a quick tutorial on residential power. The typical residential electric circuit can carry 15-amps of load. You can find this out from the breaker itself. It's usually printed on the tip of the switch -- see graphic to the right.

If you try to draw more than 15-amps on the circuit, the breaker will "trip" and shut down the circuit so you don't overload the wiring and cause a fire. For our purposes, we'll assume that we don't even want to come close to that 15 amp limit. In fact, circuits should only be loaded at 80% of the possible load. That means on a 15-amp circuit, the safe operating amperage is no greater than 12 amps or about 1400 watts.

That means an analysis of everything I'll be using in the studio is required. This includes figuring out how much wattage it all uses and distributing it all among the various circuits that are available. This is what I came up with:

Circuit #2 would handle all the post-production video editing equipment, camera, teleprompter, and studio monitors
Circuit #5 would handle all the lighting requirements

If your devices don't tell you how many watts they consume, you can calculate it yourself if you know how many amps it consumes. To figure out the wattage, simply multiply amperage times voltage. Here's how I distributed everything with the calculations when all of the information wasn't provided.

Circuit #2 - using 811 watts or 56% of safe load (811/1440 watts)

Teleprompter & Computer

80 watts

Studio Monitor for Talent

83 watts

Camera

30 watts

Camera Harddrive

72 watts

Computer

120 watts

Computer Harddrive

1.2 amps * 120 volts

144 watts

Computer Monitor

150 watts

Studio Monitors (2)

.55 amps (each) * 120 volts = 66 watts each

132 watts

811 watts

Circuit #5 - using 1180 watts or 82% of safe load (1180/1440 watts)

Green Screen Lights (2)

80w each

160 watts

Infinite White Lights (2)

80w each

160 watts

Key Light (1)

200 watts

Fill Light (2)

180w each

360 watts

Hair Light - Color Spot

300 watts

1180 watts

Electrifying the Set

To review from the first article in the series, the graphic to the right diagrams the electrical usage. There are three areas of electrical need:

1. Lighting - We need some outlets for the pair of green lights. We need some outlets for the pair of white lights. We need some outlets for the talent lighting.

2. Camera - We need some outlets for the camera, teleprompter, studio monitor, and camera hard drive.

3. Video Editing/Post - We need some outlets for the computer, external computer harddrive, studio monitors (2). It would be nice if all the computer stuff was on an Uninterruptible Power Supply to protect this sensitive equipment from electrical power quality problems (surges, brown/black-outs).

The primary consideration here is now distribution. I decided that I'd like to be able to control the different types of lighting from a central point. For example a switch for the green, a switch for the white, a switch for the talent. I went to home depot for inspiration. This is what I came up with.

Basically it's an extension cord with switches at the beginning of the run which control the corresponding outlets all along the run. This would allow me to snake electric up along the left wall, against the back wall (under the green screen), and then down along the right wall. The green switch would control the green outlets which have the green screen lights plugged in there. The white switch would control the white outlets which have the white screen lights plugged in there. The red switch would control the red outlets which would have all the talent lighting (backlight, fill, and key lights). The blue switch is extra in case something else pops up that I didn't think of. The shopping list for the electrical consists of:

Sacrificial Extension Cord (orange)

$10

Internal wiring

$12

5 metal outlet boxes

$25

5 metal switch plates

2 double switches

$11

8 electrical outlets

Paint (not including what I had on hand)

$10

Flexible conduit (thrift store)

Conduit Connectors

Wire nuts

$90

I probably could have saved here because I noticed home depot had 25 foot extension cords that had outlets every 8 feet. That would have been perfect. They were $25 each and I probably would have used 3 (green lights, white lights, talent lights) and come to $75 instead of the $90 above. I wouldn't have had switches and I wouldn't have had enough electrical outlets to plug in the 3 extension cords. So for the extra $15, I got some customization, with extra capacity (blue switch) that perfectly fit my needs. I plugged this contraption into the wall outlet for circuit #5 which was just where I needed it.

For the power to the camera, camera harddrive, and studio monitor, I used a simple 4 outlet box made mostly from parts I had around the house. The only thing I needed was a sacrificial heavy duty extension cord to bring the power to the box. That cost me about $10 + $1.25 for a metal outlet coverplate and wire nuts I already had. If you had to buy the other parts I already had, it would include a junction box ($5), 2 outlets ($1), and a crimp connector for the junction box ($1). I plugged this into the wall outlet for circuit #2 and secured the cord down to the carpet with gaffer's tape (black duct tape).

For the computer, external computer hard drive, I plugged those directly into a UPS that I already had on hand. I plugged the monitor and the 2 studio monitors into another electrical box (see picture above right) which was plugged directly into the wall.

Total cost for this phase of the project: $112

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