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 Warsaw Community High School offers students an enhanced vocational curriculum including broad-cast production training. In the last five years, the radio and TV program has grow from a few cameras and VCRs to a three-camera production studio, complete with the latest technology. Our latest additions include an Edirol V-440HD video mixer, five Edirol DV-7DL editors and three Sony HD cameras.
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More than 50 students apply for the 30 positions in our television broadcast program each year. We create a daily news broadcast called Tiger Eye News, which is broadcast throughout the school, on YouTube and also on a local radio station’s Web site.
Students are assigned jobs just like those in a traditional television operation including floor director, cameraman, graphic designer, switcher, studio manager and anchor. We’ve created a mini television production studio, complete with a control room.
The students come into the classroom with little knowledge of broadcast technology. In order to get them rolling quickly, we looked for tools with a short learning curve and reliable technology.
We worked like cavemen back in 1996 to make this program happen. With the help of ESCO Communications, we’ve made a gradual build-out, which extends to the present with the addition of five new edit bays. Instead of PCs that crash all the time, we went for Edirol’s dedicated editing machine, the DV-7DL.
 The Edirols are perfect for us, as they are fast, reliable and not subject to viruses and system conflicts. We have them in all five of our editing bays, as we can count on their stability, high quality video and ease in doing voiceovers. Also, students feel safer putting content on to the DV-7DL hard drives, as they have automatic file backup features.
We find that students are spending more time being creative and learning about broadcast technology, rather than configuring video hardware and dealing with software compatibility because of these wonderful video production tools from Edirol.
We know there are areas of our production that will improve over time. Currently we are broadcasting in SD, but we chose equipment like the V-440HD switcher that can grow with us, as can seamlessly mix SD and HD video formats. It allows us to do broadcast quality production with music, graphics and professional transitions. It has direct VGA inputs for computer sources, so you can keep your graphics and text in its native resolution format. Some of the students are even way ahead of me with the switcher operations.
This year we have two students accepted into the broadcast program at Indiana’s Vincennes University, and I have a former student graduating from Ball State with a degree in television broadcasting.
Dave Baumgartner is Radio & Television Instructor at Warsaw Community High School in Warsaw, Indiana.
Reprinted from TV Technology Magazine
June 13, 2007
Copyright 2007 IMAS Publishing (USA), Inc. Reprinted with permission.
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