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Murdoch University claims its US $1.5 million HD production facility is designed to make students ready for the professional market. Digital Studio tours the facility
With the huge deficit in trained staff within the media sector, production houses and broadcasters are increasingly looking to fresh graduates to fill these vacancies.
Seeing the potential to address this shortfall while also wanting to make themselves more competitive in an increasingly crowded university space, academic institutions are seeking to distinguish themselves from each other by deploying state-of-the-art technology in the hope that this will attract more students to their facilities. The most recent academic institute to venture into such an installation is Dubai-based Murdoch University, which claims to be the first to deploy a ‘true HD’ installation at its facility. Dubai-based systems integrator, Oasis Enterprises, undertook the US $1.5 million project.
“One of our primary objectives in setting up this media facility on the campus was to cater to the job and skill requirements in the region’s media sector,” says Raghav Lal, strategy and business development manager of Murdoch University. “The media sector has been booming for the last seven to ten years but there’s always a skills shortage in terms of the people working in the television studios and radio stations here in the region. Also, there’s no one offering a Bachelor’s Degree in Media and Communications as we are.”
Murdoch University is affiliated to its namesake in Australia. The local university has attempted to replicate the studio facilities – but on a smaller scale — at its campus in Dubai.
“They have about 257 hectares of land with about 16 schools in the same campus. They have about two studios and about 15 to 20 edit suites. Ours is a much smaller facility but more state-of-the-art in that we have gone with HD. In fact, we are the first college to have true HD in terms of production, recording as well as visualisation,” explains Lal.
The installation includes a production studio, a control room, an edit suite, three radio stations, a master audio recording room and a screening room fitted with a True HD projector.
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Murdoch’s main selling point is a three-camera setup expandable to five in the future. Equipped with JVC’s GY HD 251 cameras, this studio is fairly large and can accommodate about 10 to 15 students at one time.
“We have mini DVs for the students to use but we chose these cameras because they are easy to unplug and take out for field shoots,” explains Lal.
The university has also invested in different types of tripod systems including Miller’s two-stage tripods, a Libec pedestal as well as a three-foot fully motorised Jony Jibb arm.
The cameras are linked to the control room through a 26-pin HD CCU cable that is connected to the HD RMP-HD 250 camera control unit. Each of the cameras is supplied with focus manual controls and Servo Zoom power control units. Murdoch has also equipped one of the studio cameras with an EZ prompter teleprompter that is controlled from the control room.
One interesting aspect of the studio is that it has a fully retractable lighting bar system capable of connecting up to 48 studio luminaries. This is different from most studios in broadcast stations that have manual pantographs.
A mix of Desisti’s Magis Fresnel lights as well as Dulux 2 compartment fluorescent lights act as key lights while there is a Desisti Dulux Cyc background lighting for cyclorama. The 48 circuits terminate on the other side of the studio and are controlled by an ETC Smartpack dimmer. The studio lights are controlled from the control room using ETC’s Smartfade light controller.
Murdoch has also invested in two 360-degree curtains and one 180-degree chromakey curtain provided by Datavideo.
Adjacent to the production room is a large control room. The input/output patch located on the wall of the production studio comes from or into this control room.
All of the video inputs are routed to this patch as well as to a vision mixer through SDI and Component Matrix switchers from Extron. A multi-format HVS 600 vision mixer from For-A supports both HD as well as SD video formats. The HD signals from the CCU as well as other sources are connected to this vision mixer.
Part of this installation is also a CG 100 character generator, which is SDI-based and integrates with the vision mixer using BlackMagic Pro cards. The software on the teleprompter also acts as a source that inputs into the vision mixer via the BlackMagic Pro cards. “With this, you can now put a ticker like you would for a proper news channel. We also have a chromakey screen so that the students can work with the CG and put in whatever they want into the background,” explains Lal.
All of the sources are displayed in the control room on five JVC 46” LCD monitors using four, four-channel HD/SD multi viewers from For-A. A fifth multi-viewer is used to preview programmes.
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