Every month or so someone books me for a shoot, sends me a studio link, and says the room has 'a cyc'. Half the time it's an infinity cove. A quarter of the time it's a painted wall with a slight curve. Only the last quarter is an actual cyclorama in the sense I'd use the word.

This ambiguity doesn't matter for most small jobs. It matters a lot for car shoots, 3-wall green screens, and anything where you're going to post-produce a pure colour out. So — here's how I actually separate the two, and what I've learned about booking each.

The short version

An infinity cove curves on two planes: floor-to-wall AND wall-to-wall in the corners. Usually three walls. You step into it and it's like standing inside a pebble. Shadows die at every junction.

A cyclorama (or 'cyc' — same word, casual spelling) curves on one plane — floor to back wall. The side walls meet the back wall at a right angle. Sometimes the side walls are curved too; sometimes they're just drywall and don't feature in the frame.

Most UK studios marketing a 'cyc' mean option two. If the listing says 'infinity cove' specifically, you can usually trust it — nobody uses that phrase by accident.

What each one is actually for

I use infinity coves when:

The client wants a perfectly clean isolated subject on a colour — a person, a car, a piece of furniture — and I don't want to spend an evening cloning out corner shadows.
I'm shooting video and the camera is moving laterally. Any seam becomes a visible line when the camera tracks.
It's a green-screen pull and the actor is walking across the space, not just standing in the middle.

I use regular cycs when:

I only need one clean plane — standard studio portrait, product on a table, fashion against infinity.
The side walls aren't in the frame anyway.
I want to use the side walls for lighting setups — flag stands, pre-rigged HMIs, a 12x12 diffusion panel on a C-stand without it showing up in shot.

Here's the thing people miss: a good cyc is often BETTER than an infinity cove for standard work because you get flexibility with your light placement. Once you're inside a three-walled cove, every flag and stand you put up is either in-frame or has to be rigged from the ceiling. That's fine. It's also fiddly.

Size differences I see on UK listings

Roughly — and this varies — I'd expect:

Small cyc: 4–6m wide, 3–4m deep, 2.8–3.5m ceiling. Good for one person, one product.
Medium cyc: 7–9m wide, 5–7m deep, 3.5–4.5m ceiling. Group portrait, small car, fashion with movement.
Infinity cove (small): 5m wide, 4m deep, 3m ceiling. Often in Shoreditch and Hackney Wick. Fine for people, tight for any vehicle.
Infinity cove (proper): 10–14m wide, 8–12m deep, 4.5m+ ceiling. Park Royal, one in Deptford, a couple in Manchester. This is where you shoot cars.

I've paid £450 for a small infinity cove day rate, £850 for a medium cyc with 32A three-phase, and as much as £1,800 for a full day in a proper car-scale cove with HMI prelight.

The corners question

Here's what actually makes an infinity cove either good or lousy: the radius of the corner curves. A sharp radius (say 20cm) gives you a visible line where the curve meets the flat wall. A generous radius (60–90cm) genuinely disappears under soft light.

If you're booking a cove for a high-end car shoot, ask the studio for the corner radius. If they don't know, send someone to have a look, or plan to eat some retouching time on the backend.

A trick I've picked up: stand in the middle of the cove, take a photo with the available house lights, and post-production won't lie to you. If the corners are visible at the lowest-contrast setting they ever will be, they'll be visible worse at full strobe.

How the light behaves differently

This is the bit that catches people out.

In a cyc, the side walls absorb light. If they're white, they bounce softly — almost free fill. If they're matt grey (some studios paint their side walls out to stop bounce), the room is darker and you're doing all the work with your main light.

In an infinity cove, light bounces everywhere. You're essentially in a giant reflector. That means:

Less contrast. Getting a deep shadow on a subject inside a cove takes more flags than you'd expect.
Colour casts matter more. If the cove is painted white and your key is gelled, the gel fills the whole room. Great for a total-colour treatment, problematic if you want a coloured rim on an otherwise-neutral subject.
You can get away with smaller key lights. A Profoto B10 Plus at 500Ws is often plenty inside a small cove where you'd need a D1 1000Ws to punch through a standard room.

Car shoots specifically

I wrote something recently on the 4.5m ceiling rule for cars — same logic applies here, doubled. For a full-car shoot, you want a proper cove, 10m+ wide, 4.5m+ ceiling, and you want to see pictures of the last car shoot that happened in there.

A cyc with a 90-degree side wall will never work for a driven-in car you want to shoot on three sides. The corner between the cyc curve and the side wall will show up in any three-quarter angle. You can retouch it. It takes hours. I've done it twice and wouldn't again.

On the plus side, a proper cyc with only the back wall curved is absolutely fine for a front-on or side-on hero shot of a car. The side walls aren't in frame. You save the cove budget.

Green screen in each

Cove wins for walking shots, full-body rotation, and any tracking camera move. Cyc wins for standing subjects on a locked-off camera where the chroma pull is a two-minute job in After Effects.

Small note: a 'green cyc' that's been painted over a few times can develop an orange-peel texture that pulls badly. Ask when it was last repainted. Good studios repaint their green between shoots or at least every couple of months. One I used in Deptford had painted theirs three days before my shoot — the pull was clean in seconds. One I won't name had last painted in October; the pull took half an hour per clip with spill suppression.

What to ask before you book

My checklist, in the order I ask it:

Is it a cove or a cyc? (I ask plainly. If the answer is vague, I keep pushing.)
Width, depth, ceiling height — in metres.
Corner radius on the curves.
When was it last painted and with what (latex / chalk / specialist cyc paint)?
What's the power load? 13A is useless for HMI.
Is there pre-rig points in the ceiling, or do I need to floor-mount everything?
Any noise restrictions? One studio I use has a cove directly under a rehearsal room, which matters for video.

Painting costs and why they matter to you

A proper cyc or cove repaint — done right — is a two-day job. The studio has to sand back any scuffs, prime, apply two coats of specialist cyc paint (standard eggshell emulsion cracks at the floor-wall junction within a month), then leave it to cure before anyone walks on it. The paint itself is £50–£70 a litre, and a medium cyc will need 20–30 litres.

Why this matters to you as a booker: some studios repaint monthly, some quarterly, some only when visible damage demands it. A recently painted cyc is a different photographic surface from one six months deep into a busy calendar. If you're shooting anything that'll end up on billboards or pack, ask when the last paint was, and book either within the first three weeks of a repaint or accept you'll be cloning out a few scuffs. Studios that really care about this post repaint dates on their listings. They're worth the extra.

Real job examples

Two recent ones, for context on how this plays out.

First: a fashion e-commerce shoot in February. 14 looks, flat lay and on-body, single talent. Booked a medium cyc in Hackney Wick at £580 for the day. White cyc, side walls white, 3.6m ceiling. Shot everything on the cyc with one Profoto D2 in a 150cm octa, zero corner shadow issues because my widest frame was 7m wide and the cyc is 9m. A cove here would have been ovekill by 45%.

Second: a furniture hero shoot for a Danish brand's UK launch. Five pieces, each shot on pure white with clean shadow separation, photographed on a rotating floor plate so we could get four angles per piece in about 90 minutes each. This absolutely needed a cove — any cyc would have put a corner line into at least one angle per product. Booked a proper cove in Park Royal at £1,450 for the day, which sounds steep until you consider we saved approximately 14 hours of retouching at £45/hour on the backend.

A quick word on 'L-shape' cycs

Seen this term a few times lately. An L-shape cyc is a regular cyc with one side wall also curved into the floor — so you've got two curved walls meeting in the corner, but the third wall is straight. Halfway between a cyc and a cove. Fine for certain angles, disastrous for others. If the listing says L-shape, assume the third wall is standard and plan your lighting angles around that.

A note on DIY cycs in rented spaces

I get asked every few months about building a cyc in a rented warehouse rather than hiring one. It's doable. It's also more work than most people budget for.

A proper curved cyc needs steel framing, timber formwork, plaster or MDF sheathing, and multiple coats of specialist paint. Labour is 3–4 days for a competent carpenter-plasterer pair, materials are £600–£1,500 for a medium size. Then you need to repaint for every shoot, or budget retouching. For a one-off campaign where the same space will be used for a week of shooting, building a cyc sometimes pencils out cheaper than renting a proper one for five days. For anything less, hire the room.

Why this all matters for the invoice

The price delta between a cyc and an infinity cove in the same size range is about 40–70%. You can pay £650 for a medium cyc or £1,050 for a medium cove in the same postcode. That's a lot. Don't pay for a cove if a cyc will do the job. Don't cheap out on a cyc if the job genuinely needs a cove and you'll eat the difference in post.

Honestly, most studios are happy to walk you through which one suits if you tell them what you're shooting. The good ones will steer you away from their more expensive room if it's overkill. The ones that don't — well, that's information too.

If you're trying to pick a room and can't tell from the listing what you're actually getting, have a look through the cove and cyc filters on creativestudiohire.com. I've flagged the rooms where I've confirmed the spec in person.