Film Production Glossary: Studio Hire Terms Explained

Every studio quote is written in a dialect. Producers speak it fluently, first-time hirers nod along, and the gap between the two is where a booking goes wrong: a half day that turns out to be a full day once the rig is counted, a dialogue scene planned for the room that is not sound treated, a set build with nowhere to leave the set overnight. This is the vocabulary, defined plainly, with what each term means in practice for a film, commercial, interview or short-film day at Scope.

Where a definition mentions a room, a price or a policy, it is the one on the rate card and in the FAQ — nothing here is a spec we have not published. Ceiling heights, cove dimensions and power are on request; ask and you will get the exact figure. And the one line that applies to every lighting term below: in every room but the DJ room, lights are charged separately from the room rate, so please enquire about our lights and we will quote for what your shoot needs.

The room

Infinity cove

A studio wall that curves into the floor with no visible join, so a camera sees seamless white (or whatever colour it is lit) with no horizon line. Studio A's cove is drive-in, which means a car or a set build can be placed on it; Studio B's is colour-washable.

Cyclorama

The older stage word for the same curved backdrop — often shortened to cyc. In a hire studio the two words are used interchangeably; what matters is whether it is white, how it is lit and how big it is.

Blackout

A room that can be sealed against daylight completely, so the only light on set is the light the crew rigs. It is what makes a night scene possible at noon and what keeps the wide shot matching the close-up three hours later. Studio A has full blackout curtains and Studio B is blackout capable.

Drive-in studio

A studio with a vehicle-sized door at ground level, so a car, a van or a large set piece can be driven or wheeled straight onto the floor rather than carried in. At Scope that door is Studio A's roller door off the yard, where the parking is.

Room within a room

A sound-treated room built as a separate structure inside the shell of the building, so that outside noise does not reach the microphone. Studio B is built this way, which is why it is the room for dialogue and interviews.

Sound stage

A large, soundproof, hangar-like stage with a lighting grid overhead, built for feature and television production. Scope is not one: it is a small stage with a 1,200 sq ft cove room and a sound-treated room, and the film hire page says so in its first line.

Lighting grid

A fixed framework of pipes or trusses in the ceiling that lights are hung from on a large stage. Smaller studios, Scope included, rig from stands and floor-standing supports instead; ceiling height is the number to ask for when a rig needs to go high, and at Scope it is on request rather than published.

Green screen

A flat, evenly lit green (or blue) backdrop that software replaces with another image in post — the process is called chroma keying. Studio A is the room used for green screen work at Scope; whether the screen is supplied or brought is confirmed when you enquire.

Load-in

Getting the kit, the set and the crew from the vehicles into the room, and the same journey in reverse at the end of the day (the load-out). Stairs, lifts and distance from the parking are what make it slow; at Scope the load-in to Studio A is at ground level from the yard.

Edit and playback area

A corner of the studio where the director and the client can watch a take back without leaving the floor. Studio B has a dedicated one — bring your own monitor unless we confirm otherwise — and the workshop room's ten iMacs are the fuller edit room.

The shoot

Set build

Constructing scenery — flats, a kitchen, a bedroom, a counter — inside the studio for the camera to shoot against. The build and the strike (taking it down) both happen inside the booked time, so a built set is usually a full-day booking.

Set

The dressed scenery the scene is shot in, whether built from scratch or assembled from furniture and props in front of the cove. On a hire page, a room that takes a set build is one with the floor area and the door to get the pieces in.

Set-up

One camera and lighting arrangement. A commercial is scheduled by its set-ups — the pack shot, the presenter wide, the product close-up — and the number of them is what decides whether a half day or a full day is the honest booking.

Pack shot

The clean, product-only shot that ends most adverts: the bottle, the box or the device, usually on seamless white and lit to show every edge. On a cove it needs no retouching to remove a background.

Talking head

An interview framed on one person speaking to camera or to an off-camera interviewer. It is the most common piece of corporate and documentary video, and it needs a quiet room more than it needs a big one — which is why Studio B and the podcast room are the rooms for it.

B-roll

The supporting footage cut over an interview or a voiceover: hands at work, the product in use, the room, the detail. Shot after the main interview on the same set-up, or on a second camera during it.

Behind-the-scenes

Footage and stills of the shoot itself — the crew, the rig, the build — made for the client's channels or the production's own promotion. Worth scheduling: a day's content on a cove makes its own behind-the-scenes piece for free.

Crew

Everyone working the shoot who is not in front of the camera: director, producer, camera, sound, lighting, art department, hair and make-up. Capacity for the studios is on request at Scope (the workshop takes twenty), so tell us the crew size when you enquire.

Call sheet

The one-page schedule issued the night before a shoot: who is needed, where, at what time, with the address, parking and the day's running order. A studio day's call sheet should carry the load-in time, because the booked time starts when the booking starts, not when the lights are up.

Recce

A visit to a location or studio before the shoot to check the space, the power, the access and the light. Ask when you enquire whether a visit before the day is possible.

Continuity

Keeping everything the camera sees consistent from one shot to the next — the light, the props, the costume, the time of day. A blackout studio solves the hardest part of it, because the light at four o'clock is the light you rigged at nine.

Closed set

A shoot with nobody present who is not needed for it — for a talent with security requirements, a product under embargo or a sensitive piece to camera. The whole-building buyout is Scope's version: five rooms, the kitchen, the dressing room and the parking, with nobody else on site, from £1,500 a day. The DJ room sits outside it.

Pre-production

Everything before the camera rolls: the script or treatment, the budget, the schedule, casting, the recce, the kit list, the call sheet. The studio booking is a pre-production decision, not a shoot-day one.

Treatment

A short written and visual pitch for how the piece will look and feel — the document that tells a studio which room you need. Send it with the enquiry.

Storyboard

The shots drawn in order, frame by frame. For a commercial it is the contract with the client; for the studio it is the fastest way to count set-ups and so to size the booking.

Shot list

Every shot the day has to capture, with size, angle and movement, in shooting order rather than story order. The AD runs the day from it.

Wrap

The end of shooting. On a studio day it is not the end of the booking: the strike and the load-out still have to fit inside the block.

Light

Key light

The main light on the subject — the one that decides where the shadows fall and what the shot's mood is. Everything else in the set-up is placed in relation to it.

Fill light

A softer, weaker light placed opposite the key to lift the shadows it leaves. How much fill you use sets the contrast: none for drama, plenty for a clean corporate look.

Backlight

A light behind the subject, aimed back towards the camera, that draws a bright edge along hair and shoulders and separates them from the background. On green screen it is also what cuts through the spill.

Three-point lighting

Key, fill and backlight: the standard starting arrangement for a person on camera, and the one most interview set-ups are a variation of.

Softbox

A fabric box with a diffusing front that turns a hard lamp into a large, soft source. The parabolic and octagonal versions seen in most studio photographs are the same idea at different sizes.

Diffusion

Any material — a silk, a frame of fabric, a sheet of gel — put between the lamp and the subject to spread the light and soften its shadows. The large overhead frames in a cove studio are diffusion on a big scale.

Flag

A black panel on a stand used to stop light going where it is not wanted: off a wall, off the cove, out of the lens. Flags are how a lit set stays dark where it should be.

Bounce

Light reflected off a white or silver surface — a board, a wall, the cove itself — rather than aimed directly. A white infinity cove is one enormous bounce, which is why it reads so evenly.

Gobo

A stencil placed in front of a light to throw a pattern — window bars, foliage, a logo — onto the set. A logo projected across a cove is a gobo at work.

Colour temperature

The warmth or coolness of a light source, measured in kelvin: around 3,200K for tungsten-warm, around 5,600K for daylight. Mixing the two without meaning to is the most common reason skin looks wrong in a studio.

CRI

Colour rendering index: how faithfully a lamp shows colours compared with daylight, out of 100. Cheap LEDs with a low CRI make skin and fabric look dull in ways the grade cannot fully fix.

HMI

A daylight-balanced metal-halide lamp, bright enough to stand in for the sun through a window or a silk. Power-hungry, which is why the supply is the first question on a big rig — and at Scope that figure is on request.

High-key and low-key

Two ends of the contrast scale. High-key is bright and even with few shadows — product, beauty, most corporate. Low-key is dark with hard, deliberate pools of light — drama, music video, anything lit from black in a blackout room.

Practical

A light that appears in the shot as part of the set — a lamp, a screen, a neon sign — rather than rigged out of frame. Practicals sell a built set as a real room.

Camera

Frame rate

How many frames a second the camera records: 25 for UK broadcast and most online delivery, 50 or more for slow motion. The frame rate and the shutter together decide whether studio LEDs flicker on camera.

Shutter angle

The length of each frame's exposure, written as an angle; 180 degrees — half the frame interval — is the convention for natural motion blur. Narrower is sharper and more staccato; wider smears movement.

Depth of field

How much of the scene, front to back, is in focus. Shallow depth of field — a sharp face against a soft background — is what makes a cove disappear into a wash; it needs a wide aperture, a long lens or both.

White balance

Telling the camera what colour temperature to treat as neutral, so a white cove records as white rather than orange or blue. Set it for the lights you rigged, not for the room's own fittings.

Log profile

A flat, low-contrast recording setting that keeps more of the camera's range for the grade. It looks washed out on the monitor by design; a LUT puts the contrast back for viewing on set.

LUT

A lookup table: a small file that maps the flat log image to a finished-looking one, used to preview the grade on set and sometimes as the starting point of the real grade.

Codec and bit depth

How the camera compresses the picture and how many colour steps it keeps. For green screen and heavy grading, record the highest bit depth and least compression on offer — a keyer cannot find an edge in colour the camera threw away.

Aspect ratio

The shape of the frame: 16:9 for most video, 9:16 for vertical social, 2.39:1 for a cinematic letterbox. Decide it before the shoot — a cove framed for widescreen may not cover a vertical crop.

Safe area

The part of the frame that will survive every screen and crop the piece is delivered to. Keep titles, logos and the pack shot inside it.

Gimbal

A motorised, self-levelling camera support held in the hands, for smooth moving shots without a dolly or track. A floor the operator can walk freely across is what a gimbal needs most.

Tripod and dolly

A tripod holds the camera still; a dolly moves it smoothly on wheels or track. A dolly move needs floor length, which is one reason a 1,200 sq ft room shoots differently from a small one.

Master shot

The wide shot that covers the whole scene from start to finish, which the closer angles are cut into. Shoot it first: it is the insurance every edit falls back on.

Over-the-shoulder

A two-person shot framed past the back of one head onto the face of the other — the standard grammar of a filmed conversation, shot once each way.

Insert

A close shot of a detail — hands, a product, a screen — cut into the scene. Inserts are cheap to shoot and expensive to forget.

Coverage

The full set of angles and sizes a scene is shot in, so the editor has choices. Under-covered scenes are the ones that come back for pickups.

Pickups

Shots filmed after the main shoot to fill gaps the edit found. In a studio with a repeatable set-up they can match; on location they rarely do, which is an argument for the studio in the first place.

Sound

Boom

A microphone on a pole held just out of frame above or below the subject, the standard way to record dialogue without a mic in shot. It needs headroom, which is one reason to ask about ceiling height.

Lavalier

A small clip-on microphone hidden on the subject's clothing, usually radio. The usual back-up to the boom on an interview and the first choice when the subject moves.

Room tone

Thirty seconds of the room's own silence, recorded with everyone still, so the editor has something to fill gaps with. Record it in every room you shoot in, before the lights go off.

Timecode

A running clock stamped onto every frame and every audio file so picture and sound line up automatically in the edit. On a multi-camera interview it saves hours.

Clapperboard

The slate: a board naming the scene and take, clapped shut on camera so sound and picture can be synced by the spike. Still used when timecode is not — and often as well.

Foley

Everyday sound effects — footsteps, cloth, a cup on a table — performed and recorded in sync with the picture after the shoot. A treated booth is where it happens.

Sync sound

Dialogue and effects recorded at the same time as the picture, by a sound recordist on set. It needs a quiet, treated room; Studio B is built for it and Studio A is not, so a scene with dialogue is planned for B.

Wild track

Sound recorded on set without the camera rolling — a line repeated cleanly, the room's own tone, an effect — for the editor to lay under the picture later. The cheapest insurance against a take ruined by a passing van.

ADR

Automated dialogue replacement: re-recording lines in a booth after the shoot, in sync with the picture, to replace dialogue that was unusable on the day. At Scope it goes into the music studio's treated vocal booth, dry or with an engineer.

Voiceover

Narration or commentary recorded separately from the picture and laid over it — the voice of an advert, a documentary or a training module. Recorded in a booth with a large-diaphragm condenser microphone, which is what the music studio's booth has.

Dry hire

Hiring a recording room without an engineer: you bring the person who runs the desk. The alternative is booking with an engineer, who records, monitors and hands over the files. The music studio sells both — dry from £80 for a half day, with an engineer from £140 a half day.

The crew

Producer

The person responsible for the whole production: the money, the schedule, the people and the delivery. The producer is usually the one who books the studio and reads pages like this.

Line producer

The producer who runs the budget and the logistics day to day — the one who knows what the room, the lights and the overtime actually cost and whether the load-in fits the morning.

Director of photography

The DoP, or cinematographer: in charge of the camera and the lighting, and the person who decides whether a room's cove, blackout and ceiling will give the look the director wants.

Gaffer

The head of the lighting crew, who rigs what the DoP asks for and who needs to know the power supply before the truck is packed — at Scope that is a question to ask, not a number to find.

Grip

The crew who build and move the camera's supports and the lighting's rigging: stands, frames, dollies, flags. In a studio without a grid, grips are how lights get high.

Assistant director

The first AD runs the floor: the schedule, the calls, the quiet, the wrap. On a studio day the AD is the person watching the clock against the booked block.

Production designer

Head of the art department, responsible for how the world of the film looks — the sets, the dressing, the colour. The person who sends the ground plan for a set build.

Art department

The crew who design, build, dress and strike the sets: production designer, art director, set builders, props. Their day starts before the camera's and ends after it.

Props

Everything handled or seen in the scene that is not scenery or costume, and the person — the props master — who sources and looks after it.

Hair and make-up

The department that gets talent camera-ready and keeps them that way between set-ups. It needs a room with a mirror, light and a chair — the dressing and prep room, and Studio B's make-up and styling zones, are that room at Scope.

Stylist

The person responsible for wardrobe — sourcing, fitting, steaming and tracking every look. On a fashion or commercial day the stylist needs a rail and a room, which is what the prep room is for.

Sound recordist

The production sound mixer: records dialogue on set, chooses between boom and lavalier, and is the person who will tell you Studio A is not the room for the dialogue scene.

Runner

The most junior member of the crew and often the busiest — doors, drinks, deliveries, the car park, the kitchen. A good runner is the difference between a shoot day and a long day.

Post-production

Offline and online

The offline edit is the creative cut, made on low-resolution copies; the online conforms it to the full-quality footage, adds graphics and finishes it for delivery.

Colour grading

The finishing pass on the picture: matching shots to each other, correcting what the camera got wrong and giving the piece a look. Log footage from a controlled studio gives the colourist the most to work with.

Deliverables

The list of finished files the client needs: lengths, aspect ratios, subtitled versions, cut-downs for each platform. Agree the list before the shoot, because it decides the framing on the day.

Post-production

Everything after the shoot: the edit, the grade, the sound mix, the visual effects and the delivery. Studio pages talk about it because the room decides how much of it there is — a clean key and clean sync sound are hours saved in post.

Edit

Assembling the shot footage into the finished piece. An on-set edit pulls selects and checks coverage while the crew is still there; the full edit happens afterwards, in a room with workstations — at Scope, the workshop's ten iMacs.

Key

The chroma key: software separating the subject from a green or blue screen so a different background can be placed behind them. A key is made on set — by an even screen, a subject stood well off it and a room with no stray light — and only finished in the edit.

Grade

Adjusting the colour and contrast of the finished edit so every shot matches and the piece has a look. Shooting on a controlled, consistent cove gives the grade less to fix.

Casting

Choosing the people who appear in the piece, usually by seeing them read or perform in a room. A casting day needs a waiting area, a quiet room and sometimes a camera to film the reads; the workshop room, the client lounge and Studio B cover the three.

Booking and paperwork

Half day and full day

The blocks a studio sells. At Scope a half day is four hours and a full day is eight, with set-up and pack-down inside the block; the podcast room is sold by the hour at a flat rate, the DJ room is hourly with a four-hour minimum, and the music studio books in half days and full days only.

Set-up and pack-down time

The time the crew spends rigging before the first shot and clearing after the last. It is inside the booked time, not added to it — so a four-hour shoot with an hour of rig each end is a full-day booking, not a half.

Buyout

Taking the whole building rather than a room. At Scope it covers Studio A, Studio B, the podcast room, the music studio and the workshop, with the kitchen, the dressing room and the parking, from £1,500 a day. The DJ room is booked separately.

Cancellation notice

How far ahead a booking can be cancelled without charge. At Scope it is 48 hours; same-day cancellations and no-shows are non-refundable.

Production insurance

The public liability and equipment cover a production carries for the day. Scope requires clients to hold appropriate insurance and is not liable for personal injury or for loss or damage to client property.

Release form

The signed permission from anyone who appears on camera — contributor, model or passer-by — allowing their likeness to be used in the finished piece. A studio keeps strangers out of the frame, but the people you invited still need to sign.