Upgrading the TV studio

I wrote this original series of articles back in 2010, based on the TV studio I set up in 2008.   Well, the march of progress or time or whatever has begun to catch up with the equipment. The trouble with a TV studio is that everything works with everything else.  I couldn’t just replace

Build your own teleprompter

Now then, let’s clarify some straight away.  Autocue is a brand name. Ok, that said, what is a teleprompter?  Well, it’s an autocue 🙂 Basically, if you want your presenters/students to be able to read their script directly into camera without having to memorise it (and trust me, they never will memorise it) then you

Camcorders – the return

This post is both a tip and a “how to build your TV studio”.  Navigating the world of camcorders and their uses in school has been something I’ve commented on before.  For those of you who’d prefer not to reread my rants a quick up-to-date: Ideally in a school we’d use a professional video camera, but

Lights

When painting a window-less room dark, matte green, its surprising how dark it is.    Lighting becomes and interesting issue.    You need to provide the camera with even light on your green wall to give it as close as possible, one single shade of green for the computer to be able to remove the colour. You

Tripods!

No the War of the Worlds invaders, but the things to keep your camera steady. Tripods are really awkward things to get your head around.  The big problem is so many places sell cheap photography tripods as something you can use with a camcorder.    And you can, if you never want to move the camera

Dublin Bay green

In my last post on this topic I talked about digital cameras and how green works best.  But then, what green should you use. The technology has improved greatly from a couple of years ago and exact colour doesn’t matter as much as it once did.   You can certainly avoid the specialist paints for chromakey

What camera? (and a bit of expo)

Building the TV studio 2 years ago, it was relatively easy to choose the cameras.   At the time, Standard Definition was still the prevalent form, although High Definition was quickly taking over. Panasonic spotted a gap in the market and released a series of 3-CCD camcorders capable of shooting in much better quality than normal

Edirol LVS-400 Video Switcher

The hardest part about designing a TV studio was finding the right mix of technology to ease-of-use.   Before I ordered anything, I spent a lot of time visiting other schools and looking at their solutions.   The problem I frequently saw was that a school would go to a professional company who would provide the exact

TV studio

So typical, after just promising that there would be no drop off in blog posts, I’ve been away from WordPress for a week! I do have a good excuse though, we’ve spent the better part of the first week of the holidays rewiring our greenscreen TV studio. I’m very proud of that studio, which unlike