My engagement with Lampasas ISD in Texas started the same way many of my studio consultation engagements do, a teacher and administrator reached out via my Rosa Media website – school video studios page after finding some of my school broadcast related Youtube content. They had been given the greenlight for their high school video production upgrade to add to their career readiness program.
Lampasas ISD teacher Cathy Kuehne was the Career and Technology Teacher at the time. Lampasas High School already had Video production classes, working with the traditional plan, shoot, edit workflow. Her students were engaged and she had an established track record of her students creating videos for the school. They had not begun doing a live streaming video broadcast yet. This high school video production upgrade was an effort to empower their students to work with a live video switcher and practice the different set of skills involved in live video production.
We discussed their particular vision and what gear and training they would need to get there. Their district was a Windows-based district, so we prepared a gear list that would be compatible with the Windows OS and related applications. The Blackmagic Design ATEM HD is a switcher that actually has the controls the traditional switcher controls built into the console like this updated model. It’s about the size of an old typewriter. We set up one computer to act as the streaming and switcher settings computer and the other to the serve media during the broadcast.
Ms. Kuehne also had a fairly large room with different sections that her students and she had set up with three or four different sets. So the multiple camera inputs on the switcher came to good use with the main anchor set plus one of the Alternative sets that looked kind of like a breakfast nook to me. With additional budget allocations, they could add more cameras, and incorporate more of the sets into their high school video production upgrade over the next few years.
Our online set up and training sessions were efficient using a little less than 90 minutes per session. As a career and technology teacher, Cathy wanted her students to be involved in the training, so I was talking through preparing settings with students, explaining live production workflow, and having these high school students attempt their skills for live production. I very much enjoyed working Ms. Kuehne and her class.
