BCIT Television & Video Production students will be producing a live webcast of this year’s First Lego League BC Provincial Championships, held at the BCIT Burnaby Campus on Saturday, January 15, 2011.
The FIRST LEGO League is a robotics program for 9 to 14 year olds, which is designed to get children excited about science and technology — and teach them valuable employment and life skills.
Tune in to our live stream URL to watch the action beginning at 9am PST!
This week has been the first time we’ve taken our new first-year students out to work with their equipment around the BCIT Campus in a “production capacity”.
Students have been out practising the camera, audio, and composition skills they’ve learned over the last few weeks to produce short segments about some of the trades and technical students at BCIT. We’re looking for proper technical control of the camera (focus, aperture, white balance, audio levels), proper use of microphones (which mic to use, where to place it for optimum pickup), and how to compose shots to make it interesting for viewers.
After shooting, we head back to the broadcast centre to spend the afternoon in the edit suite with Final Cut Pro, putting all of the footage together so we can do some critiquing in class and learn about what worked and what didn’t.
A fairly busy day, but great hands-on experience!
The Max Headroom TV series premiered back in 1987 and was one of the first “Cyberpunk” television shows. The story lines having to do with huge international television / broadcast networks controlling culture and politics were at least 10 or 15 years ahead of their time.
Nobody would argue that mainstream media has a vast influence on these things today!
One of the fascinating things about the fictional “Network 23″, was the idea that all of the camera operators would have continual real time feeds from their portable cameras back to the network. Directors could see the output of any camera at any time, and see their exact location on a map – all in real time.
This type of portable technology was unheard of back in the late 80s, when large satellite uplinks and microwave vans were required to get video back to the station from remote locations.
Fast-forward to 2010, and an update to Sony’s “Location Porter” system looks to be enabling exactly that kind of connectivity, now on a large-scale basis.
Broadcasters have had the capability to use small mobile transmitters and VOIP systems to deliver video for a few years now, but this system takes it up a notch with a turnkey system that enables real time video/audio streaming for up to 12 sources (cameras, remotes, etc) at the same time at the push of a button.
Because it uses high-speed mobile data networks for connectivity, it’s relatively cheap compared with conventional systems. It’s no longer a matter of shooting a story and delivering media back at a later time, but realtime capture right onto a live show, or into an editorial system.
Maybe the future of broadcast news isn’t getting a single camera to an event and trying to cover everything at one, but to get a “swarm” of networked realtime cameras that feed everything and anything back simultaneously.
I need to post a list of things that students in the Television & Video Production program won’t be able to touch from this point forward:
- 3/4″ VTRs
- Black and White Monitors
- Video Typewriters
- Amiga Computers
- Cassette Tapes
- Audio Carts
- …and more
And the reason for the inability to touch this equipment is that we’re getting rid of it all. This is what our hallway looks like right now:
The guys who have to dispose of all of this old analog gear have their work cut out for them.
While some of this equipment has served us well over the years, we’ve been replacing it with networked video servers, new character generators, iMac edit suites, and High-Def Cameras.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been assembling a “yearbook” of sorts, from the behind the scenes production photos I took during our commercial productions this term.
When everyone is back in September I’ll be taking orders if anyone wants a high-quality hardcopy version for themselves.
