Florida State University

The Florida State University is a place where learning and creativity are nurtured through instruction, research, experimentation, and practice. Florida State University’s arts programs—Dance, Film, Music and Theatre—rank as among the finest in the world. The University requires that production equipment be able to create and output absolute highest broadcast quality finished work, with the most flexible set of capabilities, and found that NewTek's VT System was an ideal solution. NewTek recently spoke with Rob Levine, on the incorporation of the VT system into their production studio.

Rob, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Florida State University.
I manage the production equipment and facilities for the College of Communication at Florida State. I also teach a course in Computer Graphics and Animation as part of the Media Production Major offered by the College. I use VT4 to create some of the computer graphics we generate for various projects. We are a LightWave house so LW is our 3D animation program of choice. In addition, I cover Photoshop, After Effect and VT4.

What equipment do you use for production?
We purchased our VT system from Video Hardware Services. The system is a Dual PIV 1.7 GHz system with original VT2 card and SX-8. It has two gigs of ram, dual Samsung flat panel monitors, Sony dual layer DVD burner, 120 gig system drive and 340 gig of IDE storage space and 130 gigs of SCSI storage space.

What convinced you to purchase your VT system?
The original reason for the purchase was to re-establish a control room for our existing TV Studio. The College TV studio had been shut down due to budget cuts and the old 3/4" and SVHS equipment was sold or surplused and the room cleared out. Our TV studio became just another big classroom. Newtek and VT came along and gave us back our studio by allowing us to re-create our control room for a fraction of the cost.

What impact has this had on the University?
Having a functioning TV studio again allowed us to expand the opportunities for our students. We were able to switch multi-cam events for our various production courses and other College projects. With the VT3 upgrades we decided to make our VT system portable and the host computer now sits in an Anvil travel case that also houses the SX-8, a Sony monitor and Fore-A quad split unit. This allowed our more advanced students to checkout the system for on location shooting and production work.

What current projects are you using the VT[4] system for?
In August of 2004 we moved into brand new facilities in our football stadium complex and since we had brand new control rooms in the new facilities, we were able to expand the role of our VT4 system for field and location work. We recently used our VT4 system to do a live switch at our annual Golden Nole Awards Banquet. On home game days our VT4 systems serves as a back-up for the "Click Effects" unit in our main control room. Since the VT4 has an easy to master interface it's a natural as a back-up for click FX. The system also appears as a source on the main router system in our facilities and can be punched up from any router panel. Being on the router system also allows us to send anything to the VT4 system.