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I booked the wrong studio for a documentary shoot in Bermondsey about four years ago. The brief was a sit-down interview, low-light moody aesthetic — the kind of thing you'd see in a serious investigative series. The studio looked right in the photos. It had that raw concrete thing going on. What the photos didn't show was a high-gloss epoxy floor that bounced every light source back at the lens, and a ceiling at 3.1 metres that made the room feel like a cupboard once we had two camera positions, a key light, a fill and a practical on a boom arm.

We made it work. Badly. The grade in post cost us half a day extra to fix the floor reflections, and the DoP still brings it up occasionally.

So now I have a spec list. I send it to every studio before I put a deposit down, whether it's a one-day interview or a three-day product shoot. This is it.

Ceiling height — and why the number you're given might be wrong

Studios lie about ceiling height. Not always deliberately — sometimes it's the height at the apex, not at the usable working area. Sometimes it's the height before a lighting grid that drops 400mm. Sometimes it's the old measurement before they put conduit runs across the ceiling.

My minimum for a proper video or film studio booking is 4 metres of usable height below any fixed infrastructure. That's the height from the floor to the lowest obstacle, not to the ceiling. For car photography or fashion work where you're rigging HMI fixtures or SkyPanel arrays overhead, 4.5 metres is where I start to feel comfortable. Below 3.5m and you're making compromises on every lighting setup.

Ask: what is the clear working height below the grid? What is the highest fixed point? Are there any overhead sprinkler heads, ducting runs or cable trays that reduce the usable zone? A photo of the ceiling tells you more than any spec sheet.

Floor covering and finish

The Bermondsey problem. A studio floor should match what your production actually needs, and they vary enormously.

For interview work: matte concrete, raw wood, or painted floor. No high gloss. No polished epoxy. Gloss floors create an almost impossible situation for close-up lighting because every soft box, every window, every practical shows up in the floor plane. The grade doubles in length.

For car or product photography: a smooth, seamless transition from floor to the backdrop is standard in a purpose-built cyc. But the floor material matters for reflections too — a car shoot in a high-gloss white cyc needs polarisation on the lens and careful light positioning to stop the floor doubling every highlight.

For fashion and e-commerce work: a white or light-grey matte floor tile is the easiest to work with, but the most useful studios have interchangeable floor options — a roll of vinyl, a timber section, a painted concrete area. Flexibility over the shoot day is worth paying for.

Ask for photos of the actual floor surface, not the marketing images. The marketing images were shot on a light morning when everything looked clean. Ask what it looks like at 4pm on a Friday after three other shoots this week.

Power supply

I've covered this elsewhere but it bears repeating because it's the thing that catches people out most often, especially on the first booking at a new studio.

Standard UK domestic wiring: 13A sockets on a ring main. Each circuit is protected at 32A. That sounds like headroom but in practice a studio might have its kitchen, its changing room, its corridor and its shooting space all on the same ring. Run an Aputure LS 600d Pro at its 720W draw and a hair dryer (1200W) and a kettle (2400W) and you'll trip the ring and take the studio's internet connection with you.

What I ask now: how many independent circuits does the studio have? Are the shooting space and the kitchen on separate circuits? Is there a 16A or 32A commando socket available, and if so, where is it? For heavier kit — HMI ballasts, Arri SkyPanel SX arrays, large tungsten fresnels — can they provide three-phase supply? Three-phase at 100 amps gives you around 69kW of capacity, which is enough for most commercial production lighting rigs without anyone worrying about load.

Small studios often run on two or three 13A circuits with nothing more. That's fine for LED-based shoots using battery-backed Profoto B10s or Godox AD600s. It's not fine for a full production lighting package.

Loading access

Ask before you book: what is the door clearance, in centimetres, for the main loading entrance? Is there step-free access from the loading area to the shooting space? Can a 3.5-tonne Luton van park directly at the entrance, or does kit need to be trolleyed from a car park?

This matters more than it should because studios in converted industrial units — which is most of the interesting ones in East London, Bermondsey, Peckham, Hackney Wick — often have complicated loading situations. A narrow staircase that works for a photographer with a pelican case and a roll of backdrop paper will ruin a production day when you're trying to get a 9ft cyc stand, a four-box HMI case and a camera cart up to the second floor.

If there's any kit that's heavy or awkward — an infinity cove you're hiring in, a period vehicle, oversized props — send the dimensions to the studio and ask specifically whether they'll fit. Obvious, maybe. But I've seen it go wrong.

Acoustic treatment

Most studios that call themselves 'photo studios' have done nothing acoustic. Most studios that call themselves 'film studios' have put egg box foam on one wall and called it treated. Neither is adequate for sync sound on a drama production or a corporate interview where the audio goes out unprocessed.

For proper sync audio, you want either a purpose-built stage with mass-loaded vinyl walls and a floating floor, or at minimum a room with soft wall treatment on two sides and no hard ceiling directly above the talent. Ask the studio about background noise rating — an NR30 or better is a reasonable target for dialogue recording. Below NR40 is workable. Above NR50 is a problem you'll hear in every take.

Also ask about external noise sources. Is there a road outside? A loading bay on the other side of the wall? An industrial fan in the adjacent unit? Studios in converted warehouses in East London have been known to sit next to businesses with forklifts, compressors and enthusiastic kitchen extraction. Go and visit at a similar time of day to your shoot time — not on a Sunday morning when everything is quiet.

Changing and production facilities

Talent changing room — separate from the shooting space, lockable, with a mirror and decent lighting. Sounds basic. Not all studios have it. A curtained corner counts for some productions and not for others.

Hair and makeup area: natural or colour-corrected artificial light, a chair at the right height, and a surface for a kit bag. Again, sounds obvious. The number of studios with a windowless back room and a bare bulb is remarkable.

A production office or client area separate from the shooting space: nice to have for anything with a client in attendance. Clients who are stood on set watching every take generate more pressure and more pickups than clients who have somewhere comfortable to sit with coffee, a monitor feed and some distance from the action.

Broadband and connectivity

For tethered shooting, you need enough bandwidth to push previews to a client laptop without the connection dropping mid-burst. For video production, you might need to upload dailies. Ask what the studio's upload speed is and whether it's shared across all studio spaces or dedicated to each room.

Also check the Wi-Fi router location. If it's on the same circuit as the kitchen kettle and it goes down every time someone makes a brew, you'll find out in the middle of your first card backup.

Rates and what's included

In London, a properly kitted film studio with all the above in order — 4m+ ceiling, separate circuits, good acoustic treatment, loading access — runs £200–£400 per hour or £1,200–£2,500 per day on a straight dry-hire basis. Studios that include grip, lighting infrastructure or kit rental as part of a package push higher but can save money if you'd otherwise be hiring that kit separately.

Outside London — Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Sheffield — comparable spaces tend to run 30 to 50 percent lower. A full-day at DARE Studios outside Leeds, for instance, covers a 4000 sq ft production space with high ceilings at a rate that would be hard to match in Zone 2. If your production can absorb the logistics of working outside London, the budget case is usually clear.

The questions I always ask

Before signing any booking, I ask: What is the cancellation policy? Is the deposit refundable if the shoot date moves? Are there quiet hours that restrict production? Is there an additional charge for overtime beyond the booked window, and if so, at what rate?

And the one everyone forgets: is there a caretaker or facility manager on-site during the booking? If something goes wrong — a fuse trips, a light fitting needs moving, the loading door sticks — you want someone with keys and knowledge. 'Here's a number to call if you have any problems' is not the same thing.

Finding the right space

Take this list and run it against any studio you're considering. Most listings on platforms like Peerspace or Giggster don't include all this information in the description — you have to ask. Studios listed directly on creativestudiohire.com tend to have more production-specific details in their profiles, but still call ahead and go through the checklist. A ten-minute call before booking saves a lot of problems on the day.

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