What Control Room Design Advice Costs and What Moves the Price
A plain account of how a control room review is priced, which parts of the room and the brief change the fee, and what you hold in your hands when it is done.
What the fee actually buys
When a producer asks me what a control room review costs, I start by describing what arrives at the end, because the fee follows the work. You receive a written plan: a description of how the room runs now, where time and attention are lost, and a set of changes in a sensible order. It is not a sales document for equipment, and nothing in it depends on buying anything from us.
Behind that plan sit a visit to the room, a conversation with the people who work in it, and time spent watching a rehearsal or a live show where that is possible. Most of the effort is looking and listening. I have learned that the layout drawings rarely tell the whole story, so the hours spent on site are what the price is mostly made of.
Our prices page gives the current figures in pounds sterling, and the quotation we write after your enquiry confirms them for your particular room.
Size of the room and number of positions
The first thing that moves the price is how much there is to review. A compact gallery with a switcher, an audio desk and a small monitor wall takes less time to assess than a room with separate positions for direction, vision mixing, replay, graphics, audio and engineering. Each position has its own sightlines, reach, comms and habits, and each deserves a proper look.
Monitoring is part of this. A wall with many sources needs checking for labelling, grouping and viewing distance, and that takes longer than a wall of a few screens. The same goes for the number of cameras and feeds that arrive in the room.
None of this is complicated, but it adds up honestly. When you send us a rough list of positions and sources, we can say fairly quickly which side of the scale your room sits on.
- Number of operator positions
- Number of incoming sources and monitors
- Separate engineering or machine area
Signal flow and the state of the documentation
Signal flow is the second driver. If you have a current diagram showing how cameras, routing, the switcher, graphics, replay and outputs connect, the review moves quickly. If the room has grown over several years and the real wiring differs from the drawing, someone has to trace it, and that tracing is billed as time.
I would rather say this plainly than hide it. A tidy room with a tidy diagram is cheaper to review, and the review itself often ends with a better diagram, which is useful to you long after we leave.
Mixed generations of equipment add a little more time, because each piece has its own limits and habits. We do not need to replace anything to comment on it, but we do need to understand how the pieces talk to each other, and sometimes that means opening a rack with your engineer beside us.
How much observation you want
A review can be done from a walk-through and interviews alone, or it can include watching the room during a rehearsal and a transmission. The second is more informative, because many faults only show under pressure: a cue given too late, a monitor nobody can read from the director's chair, a comms line that fills with chatter.
Observation during a live show takes more of our time and sometimes means an evening or weekend, which is part of why the fee differs between two rooms of the same size. If your shows run in the evening, it is worth asking us to be there for one.
If budget is tight, a shorter visit with a focused question can still be worthwhile. Tell us which problem hurts most, and we will say honestly what a limited review can and cannot answer.
Travel, depth of the written plan and follow-up
Our office is in Salisbury, and travel to your site is a separate and visible line in the quotation, since a room in the next town and one across the country take different amounts of our time. We do not bury it in the fee.
The depth of the written plan also matters. A short plan listing priorities is quicker to produce than one with annotated floor drawings, revised signal diagrams and a suggested order of works for phased fit-out. Tell us how you intend to use the document, whether for your own team, for a facilities manager or for a contractor, and we will shape it to suit.
Follow-up is optional. Some clients want a call a month later to talk through what they have changed; others simply file the plan. Either is fine, and any follow-up is agreed and quoted before it happens.
- Distance from Salisbury to your site
- Level of drawings in the written plan
- Optional follow-up call or return visit
How ordering and payment work
The process is simple and entirely on paper. You send an enquiry through the contact page describing the room, the shows it serves and the problem you want solved. We reply with questions if we need them, then send a written quotation setting out the scope, the fee and anything that could change it.
Once you confirm the quotation in writing, we agree dates. After the work, we issue an invoice, which you pay by bank transfer. Nothing is bought on this website, and no payment is taken here.
If plans change, cancellations and refunds follow our payment and refund policy, which you can read before you commit. I would encourage anyone weighing up a review to read it alongside the quotation, so that nothing about the arrangement is a surprise.
The price of a control room review comes down to the size of the room, the state of its documentation, how much we observe, the distance we travel and how detailed you want the written plan. None of it is mysterious. Send us a description of your room through the contact page and we will give you a written quotation that shows exactly where each part of the fee comes from.
