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BTS of Lotus Seattle new studios

Looks very much like a lot of studios I've seen around the country. Lots of glass, allowing flexibility for studios to be used either as combo rooms or with operators, depending on situation. The digital workstations in the open office area remind me of what I first saw at Metro Traffic and Bloomberg Radio in the 90s. No need to tie up a full studio for a brief voice report. It's a bit larger than what I'd expect for a cluster of this size, so they may be planning for expansion of their footprint at some point. Or it's just about creating more content for digital platforms.
 
Cobra14 said:
Looks like kind of a dump
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Huh? It looks clean, simple, functional, well equipped, and very professionally done and very state of the art.
 
DavidEduardo said:
Huh?
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I know, right?
DavidEduardo said:
It looks clean, simple, functional, well equipped, and very professionally done and very state of the art.
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I particularly like the news desk/cubes to be equipped for going live or recording stories without having to go into a studio. Reporters work at the same desk to write a story with a small-networked mixer I imagine for doing interviews, or covering live breaking news. It appears to be clean, and well laid out.
 
Any idea on the budget for this build?
 
bossbill said:
Any idea on the budget for this build?
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A lot. Start with the fact that this design company is based in Minnesota. Did they local construction people? I was at a station where the outside contractor wanted custom cabinetry, and they flew in someone to build the cabinets from scratch. That person was put up in a hotel with per diem until he was done. That gets expensive. This looks like several months of work, plus the equipment. My other thought was looking at all the work stations, and that means lots of employees who will use them. This is not a small budget operation.
 
TheBigA said:
A lot. Start with the fact that this design company is based in Minnesota. Did they local construction people? I was at a station where the outside contractor wanted custom cabinetry, and they flew in someone to build the cabinets from scratch. That person was put up in a hotel with per diem until he was done. That gets expensive. This looks like several months of work, plus the equipment. My other thought was looking at all the work stations, and that means lots of employees who will use them. This is not a small budget operation.
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... though in this case Wheatstone had a credit on the video so probably not custom.
But I would bet a "we'll build it for you" team that specializes in doing this over, over, etc. can probably save a huge chunk of change while giving a client a much better workspace. I had never heard of that before, but can see WHY such a service exists...
 
Cobra14 said:
Too much. None of that equipment will last 10-15 years. Over engineered computery stuff full of bugs and future bugs with updates. Wait for the 1-3 second audio drops to start.
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Not with good engineers. And Lotus does not skimp in technical areas. They don't overbuild, but definitely do things right. And they look like they are using established brands, starting with Wheatstone, in the studios.

And the build is beautiful. I love the "handlebar" restraints on cable groups, the color coding and lovely labeling. Anyone with tech knowledge could come in for an emergency and start tracking things instantly. I'll bet they have all kinds of diagrams and charts of the wiring, color coding and the like, too.

Heck, I've been running my "computery stuff" main computer with 13 hard drives and SSDs, tons of memory and other goodies 24/7 for going on 4 years with no failure. I have upgraded things when appropriate, but that is my only down time. There are no glitches, so multiply that experience into a computer network and you can have a very robust system you won't replace until the technology advances make it productive and economical to do so.

If you track hours of use on mechanical drives (45,000 to 50,000 hours is my "replace point"), percentage of bad sectors for SSDs (10% is my limit), hours of use on both case fans and CPU / Video card fans, etc., will prevent a lot of issues.

None of us plan major market gear to last "ten or fifteen years" and we plan and budget based on useful life expectancy.

Most of us learned to keep track of time back in the hollow state days where we'd give tubes a certain number of hours as modulators and then move them to RF... and then straight hours for FM RF. Then, the devices did not keep track on their own so we did it on a clipboard on pieces of paper. A good engineer anticipates as many failures as possible and stages replacements and installs backups.

We are not as stupid as you think we are.
 
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