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Fitting out a small regional news studio: Marcus and the first week on air

A short account of one studio fit-out from the lighting side: how Marcus's compact news set was cabled, tested and handed over so the first live bulletin ran without drama.

Callum Whitby · 15 October 2026 · 6 min read

The brief Marcus brought us

Marcus produces a regional evening news bulletin from a converted function room, and when he first rang us the room held little more than two borrowed cameras, a folding desk and a tangle of extension leads. His crew was small: a floor manager, two camera operators who also doubled as riggers, and a presenter who had never worked from a proper set. He wanted a studio that would run the same way every evening without anyone having to remember a dozen workarounds.

I joined the first visit alongside Oliver, who leads our setup projects, because the room had to serve picture and light at once. We walked the space with Marcus, measured the ceiling height, noted where the daylight came in, and asked what the bulletin actually needed: two presenters, a weather wall, and a single wide shot for headlines.

The most useful thing Marcus said was that he did not want clever. He wanted a studio his team could switch on at five o'clock and trust. That sentence shaped almost every decision that followed, from where the control desk sat to how each cable was labelled.

Converted function room with mixed daylight
Two presenters, one weather wall
Small crew who each cover several jobs

Planning the room before touching a cable

Before anything was installed we drew the room on paper. Camera positions came first, because everything else depends on where the lenses sit. We settled on two pedestal positions facing the desk at a gentle angle, with a third fixed wide shot for headlines. The control desk went in a corner of the same room behind a low screen, which suited a crew this size, since the director could hear the floor directly.

Cable routes were planned next. Marcus's room had a raised threshold and a door that opened inward, so we routed runs along the wall and across the floor only where a ramp cover could protect them. Every run was measured, with a little spare length left for repositioning, and we wrote the lengths on the plan.

Power was treated separately from signal. Lighting and camera supplies were kept on their own circuits away from the audio runs, which cut down on hum before it could start. It is dull planning work, yet it is where a studio is quietly made reliable or left fragile.

Installing cameras, desk and cabling

Installation took three days. On the first we fixed the camera positions, set the pedestals level and ran the signal cables to the control desk. Marcus's operators helped, which mattered more than we expected: they learned where each cable went because they had laid it themselves, and that knowledge stays in a crew far longer than any handover document.

On the second day we built the control desk layout. The vision mixer, the monitor wall and the intercom were arranged so the director's eye travelled left to right in the same order as the rundown. Each input was labelled with a plain name rather than a number, so a stand-in director could find the weather wall camera without asking.

The third day was for testing. We ran every source through the desk, checked sync between the cameras, and left the system powered for several hours to watch for anything that drifted or overheated. Nothing did, but the exercise gave Marcus confidence that a quiet room meant a working one.

Pedestals levelled and locked off
Inputs labelled by name, not number
Several hours of soak testing before handover

Where lighting met the setup

My part in Marcus's project came in the middle of the week. With cameras in place we could see how the room really looked on screen, and the daylight from the side windows was the first problem: it changed the colour of the presenters' faces between the afternoon rehearsal and the evening broadcast. We hung simple blackout panels and relied on the studio lights for everything the camera saw.

A three-point arrangement on the desk gave both presenters an even face with soft shadows, and a separate pair of lamps lit the weather wall so it never fell darker than the desk. Because the rig was low and light, Marcus's crew could adjust it themselves without a ladder.

What I value in a joint project like this is that the lighting plan is made after the camera positions are known, not before. Light placed for imagined shots tends to be moved three times; light placed for real ones usually stays where it was put.

The first live bulletin

The first live bulletin went out on a Thursday. Oliver and I stayed in the room at the back, out of shot, with nothing to do but watch. The countdown ran, the presenters opened on the wide shot, and the cut to the weather wall landed exactly where the rundown said it would. A small timing slip in the second item was absorbed without anyone noticing.

Afterwards Marcus told us the quiet was the thing he noticed most. In the old room there had always been a low panic before going live; now there was a routine. His operators moved between positions without looking down at the floor, because the cables lay where they were supposed to.

We left a short written sheet beside the control desk listing the switch-on order, the labels and what to check if a source went dark. It is a single page, written in plain language, and it has not needed rewriting since.

What we took from the job

Marcus's studio is modest, and that is partly why it works. Every item in it has a reason, and the crew understands all of them. We have since used the same order of work on other rooms: measure first, place the cameras, route the cables, then light for what the lenses actually see.

One lesson is that a small crew benefits from a setup that explains itself. Labels, tidy routes and a sheet of switch-on steps do more for confidence than extra equipment would have done.

Another is that testing time should be booked, not squeezed in. Those few hours of soak testing in Marcus's room were the cheapest part of the project and probably the most valuable. A studio that has been left running before it matters tends to behave on the night it does.

Marcus's studio shows that a reliable set does not need to be large, only planned in the right order. Camera positions, cable routes, the control desk and the light were each decided once and written down, so the crew could stop thinking about the room and concentrate on the bulletin. If you are fitting out a news or live space this autumn, start with the plan on paper and let the installation follow it.

About the author

Callum Whitby

Lighting Designer

Callum designs lighting plans for news sets and live stages, balancing look, safety and speed of rigging.