You will be able to create designs and as a result of those designs, create accurate proposals and BOMs. As well, the designs can be added to your quotes with a margin, like every other product or service you deliver.
With TCD,you can show a client their new system in a matter of minutes.
TCD creates in minutes what would typically take a cinema designer weeks to design. TCD allows cinema designers to quickly produce technically accurate designs that adhere to industry standards. Users spend less time on wasted man hours for projects that might not take place should the client change their mind. Visit our features page for a breakdown of TCD's full output functionality, outlining how much time is saved on each aspect of the cinema design process, and overall.
A recent quote from UK integration firm, Just Add Popcorn:
“To say [TCD] is quick, easy and accurate is not doing the software justice. We recently had to design a cinema for a client with a £250K budget, and using TCD, we could easily and quickly provide detailed information giving the client three different initial ideas to choose from, and taking only 15 minutes to produce all three. Going forward, TCD is now our go-to software when designing our cinema and media rooms, and with more manufacturers being added all the time, it's only getting better."
TCD is web-based software and can be used anywhere in the world.
All you need is an internet connection and a device to access TCD: No need to install any software or plugins, just a HTML5-capable browser like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.
TCD offers a simple two tiers of subscription options: Media Room and Cinema Room Pro.
Click here for complete pricing and features information for each subscription.
CEDIA 'Home Technology Integrator' Company members have access to the Media Room software for the year (a £425 value) as a benefit of CEDIA membership, as well as a 40% discount on a purchase of Cinema Room Pro.
We are very pleased to offer CEDIA 'Home Technology Integrator' Company members discounted access to TCD. For more information, please email TCDDISCOUNT@CEDIA.ORG. CEDIA will then equip you with a discount code, which you can enter back here in the TCD tool during sign-up.
A subscription gives you unlimited designs/edits, subject to fair use. Visit our pricing page for full subscription and pricing options.
Yes, when you subscribe to Cinema Room Pro, you also have access to the lower subscription option tier and features of Media Room.
Check out the features for Media Room and Cinema Room Pro levels in the table, here.
TCD is designed to be easy to use and generates salable documents that add real value to your business. The subscription fee is modest, especially compared to the time and money spent creating these designs, modelling 3D CAD of the room, seating and speakers and writing specification documents 'long-hand.' Please visit our features page to see how much time is saved, and the 'how to use' page for a wealth of comprehensive tutorial videos. If you have any questions prior to subscribing, please email us and you will receive a prompt reply.
The pricing was set as a direct result of understanding exactly what this tool generates. What usually takes days can be done in just a few minutes. It can help any company deliver the very best documentation as part of the proposal process, as well as adding real value to the design process. TCD catapults users into a whole new level of documentation and professionalism. It isn’t software that you need to set up: it works online, in real-time. In minutes, you will have a full set of design documents that could otherwise take weeks. Of the monthly subscription (3 months minimum commitment) or yearly subscription options found on our pricing page, the one year option is the best value for the money.
New for 2023 TCD 2.0 is the support of adding your own preferred prducts to your own personal account libary. This includes loudpseakers, subwoofers, projectors, flatpanels or for electronics including amplifiers, an AVR or Processor. This will enable you to complete your design with the equipment you require.
Alternatively, even if your loudspeakers aren’t yet in the database, you can still manually add some generic details, which will allow the design tool to crunch the numbers. The advantage of using the product database is that it will bring the manufacturer's tech specs through into the PDF and Word document at the finish. You can manually input figures for lumens and loudspeaker sensitivity, making it possible to provide a very comprehensive design. Please get in touch with the team if you are a manufacturer or TCD user wishing to have new brands join the software.
With TCD, each calulated design is a 'use' of the design tool. A new design project will count as one of these uses, as will editing a previous design. An edit will also rev an existing room project ('My project' becomes 'My project v2' and so on).
You must complete each design by calculating it and prducing the 3D CAD DXF in order to save it.
Editing is intended to allow all aspects of a fixed screen, dedicated cinema room or a motorised drop-down screen room, or a luxury living space micro LED screen room to be edited – title, room dimensions, RT60/acoustic treatment, fixed screen size/manufacturer/material/model, projector, seating, and all the speaker, subwoofer, and electronics. The channel count can also be changed.
Media Room designs can also be edited.
TCD will automatically re-load your equipment and design choices when you re-open, or 'edit', a previous design, and you may alter any other part of the design and re-calculate.
It’s important to realize that stepping through a new design with the tool creates a huge number of permutations before getting to the calcs/CAD. Edit is really opening a previous design and recreating the steps in order, which gets to the configuration the user had before they pressed calculate. With this in mind, it’s not feasible to anticipate and code up all aspects as being changeable – such as edit a dedicated cinema room into a media room, or going from a high render channel count theater with four different subs back to a Legacy 5.1 design with a single subwoofer. This would be more efficiently done with a new design.
Subscribers can either edit any design in their account history or re-run the tool to refine any design in their account history as many times as required (subject to fair use).
Currently this requires a new version of CAD/PDF on the account page to display the renders against.
In the future, it will be possible to edit the render as part of TCD's edit functionality.
TCD was designed to allow residential theater designers to create designs quickly, and as such is optimized to create cinema and media room designs in one session. The software times out after six hours of inactivity, and in that instance all design data will be lost.
The reason for this particular speaker placement is because TCD’s theater designs are based on speaker positions at angle ranges within
CTA/CEDIA CEB-22 and CEB-23 Home Theater Audio and Video Recommended Practices, as well as several ITU documents on audio and video criteria. Users can open the finished cinema room design in AutoCAD or a similar program and move the speakers anywhere they wish. And, TCD will soon be launching an option that will automatically position speakers inside the acoustically transparent screen area.
When this goes live, loudspeakers will be positioned behind the screen if they are within the polar coordinates for the frontal soundstage. Where applicable, TCD will align a loudspeaker inside the edge of a projection screen (within the 22 degrees guidelines).
See the video of a typical PDF output from TCD.
The software is designed for use by professional home theater installers, so having background knowledge and experience is key. For instance, knowledge on how to use AutoCAD or a similar computer-aided design software is beneficial. However, it is possible that an advanced home theater enthusiast, or similar could make excellent use of the software.
Yes. As part of its 35+ page PDF/Word output, TCD's render tool accurately reflects the room designed by the TCD user, allowing installers to show clients exactly the way the finished cinema or media room could look based on the equipment and decor choices the installer has made – before the install has even been approved. TCD creates two (facing front and back of room) 'blank renders' – which have proven to be beneficial with interior designers and architects – and two renders reflecting potential decor selections and equipment choices. View some examples, here.
Dimension-wise, the render replicates exactly what the room will look like, reflecting the exact dimensions of the room as entered by the user in the initial design, the screen size and position, whether the projector is in-room or on a lift, or whether the room has a coffer or starlit ceiling, for instance. The render tool lets users select which seat to render the view-to-screen from, and all seating will appear exactly as specified in the design. This will not be a generic representation of a chair; the render now shows the manufacturer’s seating as it looks in real life (with all color options from each brand available), and in the correct location and correct configuration. Users can also choose from an ever-expanding list of fabrics, colors and textures for the walls, carpets, and ceilings. TCD will soon offer everything from fabric swatches to Pantone pickers.
Renders takes just a few minutes, however should the TCD user need to send off a design right away, the placeholder renders TCD creates are produced automatically.
If your room is not square – an L shape, for instance – you are advised to 'square off' the room and to enter these dimensions into TCD. The cinema and all equipment will exist within the specified room dimensions.
The room measurements required for the tool are the inner, finished surface measurements of the room structure. Think of it this way – if you are selecting in-wall speakers throughout the design, these will be recessed INTO the walls so that the front face of each speaker will be level with the walls of the dimensions specified. If you were selecting on-wall speakers throughout, these would be fixed TO the wall of the dimensions specified.
Some of the dimensions, such as room dims and seating distance, can be found on the PDF that TCD produces.
However, you will need to open TCD's CAD file in AutoCAD and use the dims tool to measure the equipment distances within the room.
No, the integrator needs to subscribe to TCD.
The combination of D-Tools’ estimation, design, and documentation capabilities, along with TCD’s cloud-based home cinema design tool provides system integrators and installers with a complete solution to streamline the manual, labor-intensive process of designing a technically perfect residential theater, while taking care of all estimation and project management – allowing both D-Tools and TCD customers to realize substantial cost savings and return on investment.
Any TCD project can be exported in a 'CSV' file format specially designed to be imported into D-Tools System Integrator 2017.
Each design located in a user's TCD account history has an 'Export CSV to D-Tools' button.
All equipment specified within the design will be exported: speakers, processor and amplification, electronics, screen/projector/flat panel and seating.
Locate the design you wish to export within your account page and click to download and save your CSV file; the file is ready to go, just save it for import into your D-Tools project.
Within your D-Tools software, your exported TCD file is an 'import' integration, meaning that data comes from TCD into D-Tools; there is no setup needed.
The only required step is to create a project in D-Tools, then import the Project_Items from the TCD export (csv) file.
Visit the D-Tools website here and here for further details.
Yes. Trinnov Audio’s recommended speaker whitepaper has been incorporated into the cloud-based design tool, allowing home cinema installers to confidently design technically accurate High Render Channel Count designs up to 38 channels, Dolby Atmos and DTS:X home cinemas in a matter of minutes. Using TCD is the only way home technology professionals can accurately design technically perfect high spatial resolution home theaters in such a short space of time.
The TCD high render channel count update eliminates the guesswork when it comes to placing all the required loudspeakers accurately in a room in a way that is relative to the listening area, while eliminating equipment combinations that simply won't work.
When making any design or equipment changes in a TCD design (projector placement, seating configurations, seating distance from screen/walls), the user must click the blue 'calculate speaker placement' button after each modification in order to automatically update the speaker placement design.
“Designing high channel count theaters for optimal results is something few people have much experience doing,” said Jon Herron, High End Audio, Director of Sales, Americas, Trinnov Audio. “Even within the high-end theater community, most systems have been stuck at around 11 channels, plus subwoofers. Many designers are not entirely comfortable with the naming conventions, much less the use of all the ‘new’ speaker locations available to them, nor which ones are the most important when deciding to increase the channel count beyond 11.1. This fact is not helped by the fact that Dolby, Auro, and DTS all use different nomenclature for their ‘extra’ speakers. TCD incorporates industry standards and Trinnov’s own experience in designing these high channel count theaters into its design algorithms. It's quite remarkable.”
Click here for more details on TCD's high render channel count functionality.
Your credit card payments are collected through our Shopify store. If you have an existing Shopify account with TCD, then login to access your ‘Manage Subscriptions page’. If you need to create one, let us know and we will send you a Shopify account activation email. You can then login to your Shopify account to manage payment card details and view your billing and order history. PDF copy invoices are also available to download from within your TCD account. You can also contact us to assist with managing subscriptions.
We are committed to making this design tool an industry game-changer, and our dedicated team are on hand to answer all of your questions and to help with any issues. Contact us and we will return your emails within 24 hours, not forgetting that this is a global design tool and there are time differences.
Please visit our how to use page under 'about' for a series of informative and in-depth tutorial videos. This page will soon be updated with a series of videos addressing each part of the design process.
TCD holds monthly webinar training sessions - keep an eye on our social media and newsletters for future dates and times.
TCD is headed up by one of the UK's most experienced home theater designers, and as such the software is constantly being updated with new features to benefit residential cinema installers. TCD is a web-based design tool and all future updates are part of the subscription process; there are no 'new versions' – you will always be using the newest version and updates will happen automatically. Keep an eye on our social media, newsletters, and blog page for all update announcements