November 2006 — Features
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Display Technology :: Picture This!
The products include the TriCaster, a simplified live switching and audio mixing device with real-time output to video, and the VT[4], a software tool that offers web streaming, realtime keying, titling, editing, two-dimensional video painting, three-dimensional modeling, and animation. Highland students learn how to use the tools in class and practice operating them by using them to film school sporting events. Faure says the students record an event live, and after they edit and add graphic touches to the video, the production is broadcast the following week on a local cable station.
“Students are camera operators, they handle audio, they do graphics and just about every other aspect of the broadcast,” says Faure, who adds that the school has gathered all the equipment together in a mobile trailer the students take to athletic events. “This certainly isn’t the way you or I would have learned this stuff.”
Highland students also use the NewTek products to film a weekly television show called RamTV News; at Thornapple- Kellogg High School in Middleville, MI, the same tools are being used to similar ends. In his digital-media production class, teacher Jerry Robinson guides students through the use of the technology as they put together a weekly newsmagazine show with features on teachers and trivia, and regular reports on school sports teams and plays. His budget for the project: a cool $20,000, which was able to cover cameras from Hitachi and Panasonic, too. New for this year, Robinson is adding a section about weather forecasting. In this class, students will become meteorologists and incorporate the TriCaster and VT[4] to record their own weather reports. The reports will include the chroma key screen just like real weather reports do, and that will require students to learn how to overlay a weather map onto a blank screen. The goal, says Robinson, is to make students entirely self-sufficient in taping a weather broadcast by the time they graduate.
“Some kids can get into art but not academics, and this is a way of doing both,” he says. “One of the great things about video is that it allows students to be creative, which, ultimately, is what we’re really striving for anyway.”
:: web extra :: Interested in a free projector? Make your case and learn more about new display technology here.
Matt Villano is a writer and editor based in Half Moon Bay, CA. He also serves as senior contributing editor to T.H.E. sister publication Campus Technology.
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