Thanks to all of our students and staff who volunteered their Saturday to help produce the live streaming event for the FIRST Lego League BC Championships on Saturday, January 14th.

This is the second year running where the Television & Video Production students have provided a live stream of the event for friends and family to enjoy!  This year we had viewers as far away as Europe watching the competition.

Be sure to check out our photo gallery of the event!  You can also check out the complete event coverage on Justin.tv.

We have more live projects coming up in the near future, so subscribe to our RSS feed, or follow our Twitter account, @bcittv to be notified of our new productions!

Come out and meet us at the BIG info session & Program Expo!

If you’re interested in seeing what the BCIT Television and Video Production program has to offer, drop by BCIT’s Burnaby campus on Wednesday, March 2nd from 5-8pm.

The entire Broadcast Department will be set up in TownSquare A/B so visitors can meet our students and faculty, and have a look at the Television and Video Production program’s P2-HD production workflow combined with our new Broadcast Pix and EVS replay unit for live production!

The First Lego League BC Provincial Championships were a nice opening live event production for the BCIT Television & Video Production students this year!

We had a great group of volunteers who donated their time on Friday and Saturday to produce the event.  Our students were doing everything from running the cables to switching, directing, running the cameras and streaming the signal online.  Check out the photo gallery for some behind the scenes production action!

We had a few technical issues with our internet feed that resulted in the quality being lower than we had hoped for, however a fix is in the works and we’re already looking forward to our next live event.  Stay tuned!

Television & Video Production students perform the roles of:

• News Camera (aka “Shooters”)
• News Editors
• Graphics and Animation production
• Newscast production (Director, Assistant Director, Technical Director, Audio, Floor Director, etc.)

Our Broadcast Journalism students are responsible for the stories and interviews that make up the content of our weekly BCIT Magazine production.

Practicum is an intensive 4-week process that ensures that all students get exposure to all aspects of Television & Video Production in a live environment, with the challenges and deadlines that exists in a real station.

Practicum begins another first this year, as BCIT Broadcast has installed two video servers as we move closer to gracefully retiring our tape infrastructure.

Our Facilis server is an 18 terrabyte storage server that provides us with almost 1400 hours of storage for our edit bays.  The Omneon server is a play-to-air server which takes the final edited stories and allows playback through our control rooms.

Most of our aquisition and editing facilities are currently using digital tape formats, however we’re moving towards a totally tapeless workflow that allows us to go from acquisition to broadcast without any physical media (aside from memory cards) involved in the process.

Tape, old and busted...

Our Television & Video Production advisory committee, composed of broadcast and film professionals from Western Canada are very supportive of us making these changes.

Memory cards - new hotness...

Employers demand students and alumni trained in digital and tapeless production technology.  BCIT delivers.

Day 1 - Telus World of Science - Centre Stage

So what’s this about Science?  We had the opportunity to take our production on the road and head down to the Telus World of Science to do a live production of their Centre Stage science education show.

This was our first live event production using the new Broadcast Pix production flypack that we’ve been introducing the students to this semester (check the blog history for info on our practise events back at the school).

We are actively looking for projects that students can produce with our equipment to get additional production experience.  If you have a project you’d like to submit, please feel free to contact us.

Day 2 - Our "Control Room"

Details:

• 4 camera shoot (2 x Sony DSR 370, 1 x Sony DSR 400, 1 x Panasonic AG-DVX100BP)
• Broadcast Pix Slate 100 Flypack
• Crew (15 students, 3 Instructors)
• Load-in 10:30, Full Facs 12:45, Showtime 15:20, Wrap 16:00

I have linked a copy of our SW Technical Production Manual that includes some project planning details for aspiring production staff out there (some contact information has been removed for privacy reasons).

We expect students to provide this type of documentation (and more!) when planning their projects.

We used the portable system to successfully replicate the same “Studio 1 Live” show that we produced earlier in the year with a full control room, audio room, and VTR room within the broadcast centre.  The possibilities are very interesting indeed…

We’re starting the training process in order to get students out doing live multi-camera switched productions in the near future!  Students will be looking for production opportunities (read: non-profit projects) soon!

With a small group of volunteers, we assembled our five new Panasonic HPX-300 P2-HD camera packages!  Starting next term we’re going to be moving to HD productions and tapeless workflows.

Post production will be one one of our new Mac Pro edit suites which are loaded with both Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Studio, in addition to the Adobe suite of products to give TV & Video Production students the widest possible range of options for their post-production workflow.

The TV & Video Production program will also be shifting focus somewhat – in addition to our single-camera digital produtions (film style, but without the film!), we will be producing more live event programming (such as sporting events, theatre, music, etc).

To accomplish this, we’ve purchased a portable Broadcast Pix production package that we can take out to events to enable us to do multi-camera switched live programming.  We will be looking for non-profit community events where BCIT students can bring their production skills to the project and provide clients with high quality end-products.

Exciting times!

On the equipment side of things:

• We’re in the process of purchasing five new HD camera packages (we’re getting the Panasonic AG-HPX-300), which shoot on the P2 memory cards.  This is hopefully spelling the beginning of the end of tape at BCIT.  Of course these cameras will also come with all of the supporting hardware, new tripods, etc.
• We’ve also purchased 7 iMac computers.  6 for Final Cut Pro editing stations for news, and 1 for audio control 2 for playback into the News Magazine.  We also purchased two 8-core Mac Pro systems for post-production on major projects (one for first year, and one for second year).
• In order to get more live-event production training, we’re getting a new Broadcast Pix portable production switcher package.  The idea is that we can take this out to live events (sports, plays, non-profit, etc) so students can develop more live multi-camera production skills aside from our normal news programming
• The Facilis and Omneon server installation is progressing, and we will soon have network-accessible drives available for news and project editing.  The Facilis is the “storage” server while working on your edits, while the Omneon is the “play-to-air” server that connects to the control rooms for direct digital playback (we’re phasing out tape).

All of this won’t be immediately available in September (heck, not much has actually been delivered yet).  We understand students will want to play with use the new gear.  Us too!  But we also want to make sure everyone is properly trained in it.

What this will likely mean is “in-house” use for training purposes until we get all of the bugs/workflow resolved.  Afterwards, we’ll get people using it ASAP.  Some components will be rolled-out in September, some may not be available for groups or individuals to sign-out until January.

As far as instructional staff goes, Al Klein has decided to stay on as a full-time director with CityTV in Vancouver, therefore David Griffiths will be taking on the responsibilities of teaching first-year TV students with John Mills.  Ashif Jivraj will be returning to BCIT Television as a full-time assistant instructor.