TV Magic Completes Digital Studios for Titan Multimedia Center at Cal State Fullerton
Mar 7, 2007 8:45 PM
TV Magic recently designed and installed two diverse-use digital control rooms for the College of Communications at California State University, Fullerton. TV Magic worked closely with the faculty and administration at the university to create state-of-the-art digital facilities that offer students the valuable hands-on experience that will prepare them for the professional broadcast industry.
“Use of digital media is commonplace in the broadcast environment, and the new facilities envisioned by our faculty and designed and installed by TV Magic will allow us to provide our students with a nice balance of theory and practice,” says Dr. Fred Zandpour, associate dean of the College of Communications at Cal State Fullerton. “Incorporating digital production studios into our campus is a real milestone for the university, and we were fortunate to have TV Magic as a partner in this project. The company got the ball rolling quickly and helped us to find a sophisticated solution that met our needs and fit our budget.”
The new facilities, located in the Titan Multimedia Center in the university’s Pollak Library, include a broadcast journalism studio and a television production studio, each of which uses 16:9 format, digital video, and AES audio and is furnished with its own control room. Both new control rooms are equipped with Apple G5 workstations running Final Cut Pro. Students will use these systems for encoding and decoding video and audio, as well as for editing. The systems supplement the facilities’ video tape recorders and make production material available to the facility server for future editing, archiving, and duplication on DVD or VHS for student portfolios.
The Production Control Room is designed to accommodate a maximum number of students and allow all of them to be actively involved in the production process. TV Magic installed cameras over the technical director and audio mixer positions to enable students in the back of the room to follow their movements during production. The Journalism Control Room is designed for minimal staff, as the emphasis is on the art of producing a newscast, not the technology. To this end, TV Magic used robotic cameras with teleprompters and tally, along with an integrated Broadcast Pix switcher, which has an internal character generator, DVE, camera control, still store and clip player, and a Yamaha D1000 audio mixer.
The new studios and control rooms are situated near a sound stage, an analog studio, a postproduction area, a Web streaming facility for Internet radio, and the cable head end for the campus cable TV station. Programs created by students will serve as valuable additions to their portfolios, and some will be broadcast on the university’s Titan News or “On the Edge” campus and community news program for cable TV and Internet distribution.
“With students who are about to hit the job market, it adds to their credibility and prestige if they have a portfolio that includes digital production work,” says TV Magic President Stephen Rosen. “We’ve had a strong relationship with the university for some years now, and we were pleased to provide guidance throughout this important and very ambitious project. The feedback from professional visitors to the new studios has been very positive, and I believe this success is the result of our shared dedication to provide Cal State Fullerton students with first-rate facilities.”
