It’s not so much a makeover as a way of seeding and enabling the next generation of breakout video hits. More than one traditional New York producer I spoke to has an eye on what YouTube is doing in Chelsea, analyzing both the nature of the threat and the opportunity.

Actual shooting in the space is weeks away, but there is already some test shooting going on in a Halloween set that was designed by Guillermo del Toro, the director of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “Hellboy.” It’s a bit of a fantasy world even without those touches. It will be chock-full of expensive equipment wired for collaboration all over the world, and it will all be available at a cost of exactly zero.

Creators can easily gain access to the space. YouTube artists need a minimum of 5,000 subscribers to their channel and must be part of the company’s Partner Program, in which ads are hosted and revenue is shared.

Partners are given access to better cameras, production spaces and editing facilities as classes train them not just in shooting video, but also in makeup, design and anything else that might make programming pop online.

Artists of all stripes have created or established careers on YouTube, but sticking out in the ecosystem requires chops, guile and no small amount of enterprise. One billion unique users visit YouTube every month to watch some six billion hours of video.

Think of YouTube’s studios as akin to film schools in which students delay graduation as long as possible for access to first-rate cameras. Since the studios opened in other cities two years ago, more than 30,000 people have attended 450 workshops and created 6,000 videos that were viewed for 47 million hours.

In one of the many nooks set aside for collaboration, I visited with Charlie Todd, the founder of a channel based in New York called Improv Everywhere, which has 1.7 million subscribers.