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Does your school have a video production studio?

mikemodena

mikemodena

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 30, 2005
552
0
Connecticut
I'm just interested to know how good other member's school's video studio at school is. My school is rated the top in the northeast. We have about 25 eMacs, a PowerBook, my personal iBook, extremely top of the line broadcast equipment, fiber optic connection to the cable company, 5 GL1's, 2 XL1's, quite a few budget miniDV cameras. We just found out today we were given an 8k grant to buy whatever we want. The teacher and I spent it all today. We bought 4 GL2's, a few budget cams, a few 300GB HDDs, and I'm going to have my own personal iMac Core Duo workstation next year when I get back from summer vacation. This year for my workstation I use my iBook, hooked up to a DV Deck, Soundsticks, and two 250GB HDDs (One for the morning announcements, one for the tv show we do.)

Every morning the second period class is Writing and Producing News For TV and they film the announcements. I set up a "budget" blue set a few months ago. I pretty much wiped a few fabric stores out of blue fabric. We have a 16' x 10' set that is covered with blue, along with the same on the floor. I have an independant study 3rd period (and 5th, advanced video production 6th, and work study 8th) I come in 3rd period, and edit the announcements. Every morning they are played right from the Final Cut timeline on my iBook to the school. We also have 1TB RAID server upstairs in the tech office that I use to store files back and forth.

Our former superintendant who just retired loves Apple. He has a quad with dual 30" displays, and is good enough at Flash and FCP to write a book. When he retired he moved to Cali and went to work for Apple. Last year, all the teachers in the school got iBooks and the school runs on PowerSchool, so you could imagine that the video department is his favorite and he sends us anything we want.

What is your school like?
 
We um... er... have 2 gateways with Premiere 6.5... *Ducks for cover*

Yeah, it sucks right now, but next year, after my four years of convincing, we're getting 2 GL2s and an iMac with Final Cut Studio.
Unfortunately, I won't be using them as I graduate this year. *sigh*
 
AliensAreFuzzy said:
We um... er... have 2 gateways with Premiere 6.5... *Ducks for cover*

Yeah, it sucks right now, but next year, after my four years of convincing, we're getting 2 GL2s and an iMac with Final Cut Studio.
Unfortunately, I won't be using them as I graduate this year. *sigh*
Click to expand...

Hey now--don't forget about the middle school's computer. They have a nice Sony desktop. Too bad we're basically the only two people who know how to turn the damn thing on.
 
matperk said:
Hey now--don't forget about the middle school's computer. They have a nice Sony desktop. Too bad we're basically the only two people who know how to turn the damn thing on.
Click to expand...
Not true, Couture can turn it on, just can't do anything with it besides play games...
 
AliensAreFuzzy said:
We um... er... have 2 gateways with Premiere 6.5... *Ducks for cover*

Yeah, it sucks right now, but next year, after my four years of convincing, we're getting 2 GL2s and an iMac with Final Cut Studio.
Unfortunately, I won't be using them as I graduate this year. *sigh*
Click to expand...

We have 2 gateway's too... they used to run Premiere 6.5 up until last year when Dylan and I took the place over. Now everything is Mac only except for one Gateway that is Mr. Ped's computer to play poker on all day, and the other Gateway that I turned into a smaller secondary server.
 
And so we see the disparity in education and opportunity in America.

I teach at a large public high school in Providence. Test scores are in the dumps, mostly because kids -- some of the smartest I've ever taught -- don't believe they can succeed (or simply don't care to succeed on standardized tests). Or because, smart as they are, they only have 2 or 3 years of experience with English.

We don't even have enough books for every student to have their own copy, so we definitely don't have a video studio. And when our funding gets cut because of our low test scores ... well, you see where this is going.
 
thedude110 said:
And so we see the disparity in education and opportunity in America.

I teach at a large public high school in Providence. Test scores are in the dumps, mostly because kids -- some of the smartest I've ever taught -- don't believe they can succeed (or simply don't care to succeed on standardized tests). Or because, smart as they are, they only have 2 or 3 years of experience with English.

We don't even have enough books for every student to have their own copy, so we definitely don't have a video studio. And when our funding gets cut because of our low test scores ... well, you see where this is going.
Click to expand...

My school has crap test scores also. Have you heard of the CAPT test? Only 14 kids (I was one, thankfully) passed with the highest level of 5 in each of the 4 sections. I think only 30% got all 4's or better (which is passing.) In regular academics, I don't think the school is that bad, but it's the video and athletics that the school is known for.
 
I go to Syracuse University, which has the Newhouse School of Public Communication, it is arguably the best Communications school in the Northeast, if not the US. As for editing equipment I need to do some exploring, but I have seen a few labs. One lab is all Powermac G5s with 20in Apple Displays. I know they use both PC and Mac, and both FCP and Avid.
 
we have 8 emacs running teh whole apple suite and adobe suite, 6 dells running all adobe products, 3 gl2s and 8 lower end cameras. 1 powermac daul 2 g5 with 2 20 inch lcds. all the comptuers have 2 lacie 160 gig external drives. A whole production studio with 2 high end cameras with telepromptors. back room has 5 monitors, audio swithcer, video swithcer, dv/dvd deck, cg dell, graphics dell, audio dell, light swithcer and more. our school is brand new also.
 
mikemodena said:
What is your school like?
Click to expand...

When I was in high school, back in the stone age ;) (1999-2001), we had several G4 Cubes, PM's, etc.

My high school is the first in the world to have a radio station. They broadcast on 88.1 FM in the greater Louisville, KY area (Total audience with access is approx. 1 million people). Along with that, our high school television station is the educational access channel for four counties in Southern Indiana (Total audience approx. 100,000 people). So, it was pretty cool to direct and produce shows that got to be seen by people outside of school.
 
RBMaraman said:
When I was in high school, back in the stone age ;) (1999-2001),

Along with that, our high school television station is the educational access channel for four counties in Southern Indiana (Total audience approx. 100,000 people). So, it was pretty cool to direct and produce shows that got to be seen by people outside of school.
Click to expand...

Our district has our on local cable tv station, its only in our county wich is alot of people. most of the time its a cheesy powerpoint slideshow that runs threw each school adn shows the student of the month picture, i just helped do a student of the month show thats going to be aired soon.
 
My school does a kid's show called A Half Hour of Sunflower Power. It's pretty much kid's dressed up in these crappy sunflower costumes. We shoot blue set, and the premise of the show is each Sunflower has their own bedroom (which I designed with the help of the friendly people at IKEA that put together kid's rooms and let me take pictures and photoshop different elements around) and in their room they do a different segment (dancing, drawing, games, music, etc.) and I set the whole thing up (live import straight from the deck to the iBook which stores it on the LaCie as it's being shot) and then I sit down and chroma key the rooms in then when every seperate segment is edited I go to Motion, AE and FCP and lay out the show for the week. I do it so the virtual camera moves about the house to the different bedrooms. Since I do so much editing and VFX I get to just relax during the filming, I just set up the computer to store footage where I want it and it's all set from there.
Before we had it this way we did it so each kid took a camera home and brought in a segment on Friday and then I took them all and put them together in FCP... It was OK but obviously inconsistent and I was tired of doing it half-assed and came up with the new plan. I went to 3 different fabric stores and cleaned them out of blue fabric.
This week's show aired today so I'm pretty much able to chill during the shooting until I start editing on Friday.

Edit: I forgot to mention we have a teacher dress up as a mailman and he answers letters on the front lawn of the sunflower house I made in Photoshop and Motion (gotta love that cloud render) and we also have another teacher who is Mellow Yellow, and he wears a turbin, a beard, and he is a floating head that tells riddles. All it takes is sitting in front of a blue screen with a piece of fabric draped around your shoulders, and you're a floating head :D
 
are you guys talking about HS? well...let me see...back in 1998, I was in the Media Academy at my school (Pacific Palisades High School), and my class room had 3 nonlinear Media100 editing machines running off of 266mhz G3. We had about 10 of those in our class room. We had a green screen room as well as a sound room with a powermac. There were a bunch of imacs as i can recall...and some other stuff.
 
we have 1 mac, and it's as old as some of the students. Nobody, i doubt even the librarian/techie knows how to efficiently work it. My high school is sucks in that department. Our film club relies on the at-home power of the students, such as my friend with a PB (and dad's PM) with Final Cut Pro. Every piece of tech is a dell sad to say, uploaded with the finest windows movie maker capabilities :rolleyes:
 
GyroFX said:
are you guys talking about HS? well...let me see...back in 1998, I was in the Media Academy at my school (Pacific Palisades High School), and my class room had 3 nonlinear Media100 editing machines running off of 266mhz G3. We had about 10 of those in our class room. We had a green screen room as well as a sound room with a powermac. There were a bunch of imacs as i can recall...and some other stuff.
Click to expand...

Yeah we're talking about HS.. shoulda made that clear in my first post, sorry. It's funny because I'm thinking how did those old machines do that stuff, but then I realized 5 years from now I'll wonder how I ever managed with a dual G5. Technology moves sooo fast.
 
rockthecasbah said:
we have 1 mac, and it's as old as some of the students. Nobody, i doubt even the librarian/techie knows how to efficiently work it. My high school is sucks in that department. Our film club relies on the at-home power of the students, such as my friend with a PB (and dad's PM) with Final Cut Pro. Every piece of tech is a dell sad to say, uploaded with the finest windows movie maker capabilities :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

My school is currently moving to all Mac. We have an all Mac library, all teachers have Macs, and the only thing still PC is the CyberCafe which will be Mac soon. As I said in my OP, our former superintendant loved Apple.
 
I went to a stupid private school with lots of money so we had quite a video lab. When I left we had 45 dell (I know... our school hated apples) workstations in the video lab. They all had the adobe video suite thing with premiere, photoshop, aftereffects, etc...

I'm not sure what kind of cameras we had. I think we had about 10 of these sony things. I know they had 3ccds and sort of looked like those big canons I see around. They took pretty nice video.

I was part of our schools news show. My intrest was mostly constructing set equipment but I occasionally switched when they needed me. I think my only real lasting contributions were the teleprompters I made.... oh well. We had some pretty impressive video students so the show was pretty professional. I know some of our intros were better then then those on the local news, and we actually won a bunch of awards for them. The show streams on the internet everyday and is archived... I just can't find the link right now.

Computers overall were pretty impressive at my school... we had more computers then students. I think about 700... and out of all of those only one ran linux and it was the server for the web club. Our school was connected with SAS institute so we had quite a network with a full time IT department of about 10 people.

Its awesome to hear you get all that stuff in a public school though. Have fun with the new stuff.
 
dualcore said:
15 e-macs, one iBook, lots of iMove, and a very depressed high school student:mad:
Click to expand...

Why were u depressed??

My school was really into its sports, mostly rugby, the typical South African rugby jock doesnt really do technology (they need help tying their boots) so we didnt have any form of video production studio... :( :( :( Would have loved it though if we had!
 
My school had a PowerMac G5 dual 2GHz... Setup as a data transfer drive, school server, recording studio and render machine.
Poor machine never got a break :(

Rest were:

10 eMacs 700Mhz-1GHz running Final Cut express and After Effects with only 128MB or RAM :eek:
 
The school I'm going to next year has a whole bunch of goodies. For starters, it's got a 30 foot wide green screen, a sound booth, an editing booth, a photo studio as well as sever SLR's you can rent along with the entire Canon L series lens line. Computer-wise, the school has several PC labs which feature Dual Opteron's and top-end Quadro FX's. They also have several Mac labs with PowerMac Dual G5's and top-end Quadro FX's as well. Each of the machines have an ample amount of RAM and hard drive space. Also available is large-format printing, negative scanning, and some other cool stuff.

AS for my high school, we have a TV production facility, such as one you could find at a TV station, several labs featuring PowerMacs and Dell workstations. There are several presentation rooms, one featuring a screen that had to have been at least a couple hundred inches, there is also a darkroom that is open all day.
 
Today they gave me a 17" PowerBook G4 to use instead of my iBook :D :D 1.67 with 2 gigs of RAM. It's the rev before the high res I'm pretty sure.
 
We have a brand new £500,000 UK pounds, full blown Sony HD studio suite, with sound recording room, high end multi-cam and a whole arsenal of dollies and steadicams. I will never use any of it. Not my kinda thing.

We also have 4 x PowerMac G5's, 2.3 Dual Core with 4 GB of RAM and 1TB HD in each.

...and 4 x Hewlett Packard monsters with Dual Processors and 3.5 GB RAM and 980 GB HD's.

All PowerMacs have dual 20" Cinema Displays, and Final Cut Studio with Combustion and Avid DV.

All PC's have capture devices and studio monitors, Avid and a whole host of other video production programs that i've not had any time to fiddle with.

We also have a room with some eMacs and some PowerMac G4s all with iMovie and Premiere 6.5.

Rich.
 
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