FLIX Manchester Studio Project Case Study
In early 2015, Flix Facilities, one of the UK’s leading post production facility houses commissioned Smart Studio to build a number of dubbing studios and a VO booth. With both audio and video facilities at Media City and central Manchester, Flix currently have a combined offering of 23 offline suites, 6 online suites, 6 dub theatres, three spacious voice over booths and a bespoke Da Vinci Resolve Grade suite. The following is a brief overview of this UK studio build.
“They delivered on everything on time to a very high standard at good price. The guys at Smart Studio were extremely easy to work with and always took a can do approach in design and on-site. Great people who went the extra mile and delivered a project everyone is absolutely blown away with”
The Challenge
Access to the site was going to be an issue
As the new facility was located on the 7th floor, access to the site was going to be an issue if the project was to be completed via traditional construction process. The service lift which served this part of the buildings was limited in relation to the size and weight of materials it could accommodate. The modular aspect of the Smart Studio system therefore made it the obvious choice to overcome this limitation.
With 90% of the Smart Studio system manufactured off-site the complete system was delivered to site on a just- in-time basis. This was an essential requirement as storage space on-site was very limited for this UK studio build.
Materials were able to be delivered to site with minimal fuss for installation.
Integration of local equipment rack.
Also included in the project was the integration of local equipment racks in each control room. While most of the equipment installed within the dubbing suites was remoted to CAR, it was still necessary to provide local access to certain equipment within each control room.
The experience Smart Studio has in the requirements of SI’s (System Integrators) provided for a seamless inclusion of these critical services.
Speaker Calibration
Once the interior fit out was completed the final stage of the project was the calibration of the 5.1 monitor speaker system in each control room. With the base
acoustic design delivering a clean and accurate room acoustic environment the final phase was the alignment of the Genelec speaker system. Using the Smart Studio BBX5.1 DSP processor the monitor speakers were time aligned to ensure an accurate monitoring sound field at the mix position. With a Smart Studio project, we take care of all the detail as this is the only way to deliver a fully functional critical audio facility.
