So back on June 3rd, a few TV faculty members had the opportunity to attend the Adobe CS5 launch event downtown at the Sheraton Wall Centre. A number of members of the Adobe After Effects team had travelled up from Seattle to attend the event, and to talk to users directly.
It’s a pretty rare event to be able to talk directly to the programmers and designers of a piece of software that plays such a pivotal role in the post-production industry.
We were thrilled that the team wanted to meet BCIT faculty and students to discuss Adobe’s products, and to find out how to even better work with the educational market to make the software even stronger for the needs of instructors and students alike. Today, we had that opportunity.
We spent a good 90 minutes talking with the team about After Effects and throwing out wishes and ideas. It’s really refreshing to put faces to such a great product. Even though Adobe is a vast company, it really speaks well for the pride their staff takes in their product that they’re willing to take time to reach out to customers directly.
The other side of this coin is that BCIT Broadcast will be upgrading all of our PCs and Macs to offer Adobe CS5 products for instructional and student use in the fall term. Once you play with Content Aware fill in Photoshop and the Roto Brush in After Effects, you’ll be hooked.
Oh yes, and I got an email about a contest that’s running right now – that can result in a free copy of Adobe CS5 Production Premium if you’re a student! You enter the contest and recut a scene with the trial version of Adobe Premiere. 3 Finalists will get a free educational Production Premium Package, with the winner also getting a trip to the festival in Utah.
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.
My colleague, John Mills, and myself had an opportunity to head downtown last Thursday to check out the Adobe CS5 roadshow.
(Apologies for the picture, the iPhone 3G just isn’t that good in low-light.)
While I still prefer Avid or FCP for editing, the tight integration between products in the Adobe lineup has always been one of their primary strengths, and they obviously know it…
With the new CS5 suite, they’ve taken it a step further. From script development, through capture, post, and output, it’s a pretty incredible workflow. If you need an all-in-one package to do everything, I don’t think it can be beat for the price (the academic price for CS5 Production Premium is $481.95)
The other item that caught my attention was the display at the Canon booth…
More Canon DSLRs being kitted-out for video. While I still prefer the workflow with a full-size professional rig, these cameras pack a pretty amazing punch for the price.
The Canon 7D is still relatively expensive at $1750 for the body (without lens); a more inexpensive option is the Canon T2i, which can be purchased for under $1000 including an 18-55mm lens, and has similar video capabilities as it’s big brother.
I love my Nikon DSLR, but Canon has refined their video offerings quite a bit more at this point in time.
A number of software companies are also coming out with plugins and applications which perform automatic sound-sync between the audio recorded on the DSLR and a secondary recording device (Zoom recorder, DAT, etc). Much easier than doing it by hand.
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.
Summer reno time is here!
First up is a new install for TV Audio 2 to replace the old audio board with something a bit newer, including a new iMac 24″ for playback.
Thanks to all of the students and staff who volunteered their time on Sunday, as BCIT Television & Video Production took our portable production system “on the road” down to Stanley Park to handle video Production for the World Partnership Walk.
World Partnership Walk 2010
Everyone had a great time and we put on a show that the crowd really enjoyed, helping to showcase the events of the day, as well as producing short video vignettes telling “walk stories”.
Thanks to our tapeless production workflow (and some great work from our camerapeople & editors), we were able to turn the segments around and push them directly to the server for playback onto the bigscreen in a matter of minutes
Special thanks to the crew that helped bring the equipment back to the broadcast centre, and spent some time washing the mud off of the tarps and cabling.
Also, special thanks to Tim and Sandro at ProShow Vancouver for helping out with some extra broadcast cabling to make the production run even more smoothly!
