NFL Films

RBDG was commissioned as design architect and acoustician for NFL Films’ new world headquarters, a ground-up 200,000 sq. ft. complex in Mt. Laurel, NJ. Designed to meet growing production needs of NFL Films and the constantly changing worlds of audio, video, and film technology, the facility is a combination of two buildings linked together with a two-story office bridge element.

The technical building houses all of the spaces where audio and video are recorded, edited, combined, broadcast, and archived. The audio area features three mix rooms, each with a studio, a mix-to-picture room, three pre-mix rooms, three music edit rooms, two sound transfer rooms and two large MIDI composition rooms.

Studio A, the largest of the three studios, can accommodate an orchestral ensemble. Studios B and C are smaller recording studios, each with a dedicated control room. The audio area’s central machine room holds racks of technical equipment that is accessible from any of the edit or control rooms.

The video area includes eight online edit suites, six of which use video projection for master monitoring. All suites are equipped with 5.1 surround audio and are designed for eventual conversion to nonlinear editing. Six telecine rooms allow NFL Films an astonishing capacity for transferring film to tape.

The large video central machine room has the capacity for 200+ racks of equipment, and provides NFL Films the capacity to integrate the next generation of HDTV hardware without taking current systems offline. A 6,500 sq. ft.  fire-proof concrete videotape vault in the technical building allows NFL Films to safeguard its extensive video library.

A 60′ x 80′ Sound Stage includes a two-wall cyclorama, motorized lighting grid, ‘drive-in’ access, and dressing and make-up facilities. A smaller 30′ x 30′ insert stage, as well as stage-area audio and video control rooms, surround the larger sound stage. Support spaces for set construction and production storage are also nearby.

The administrative building includes a 150-seat screening theater for previewing work in progress. A film processing lab develops the many miles of film that NFL Films shoots each year. Eight decades of football film history will be preserved in a 3,200 square-foot fire-proof, climate-controlled film vault.