California High School Delivers Award-Winning Broadcast Media Program with Wirecast posted: 01/02/2018
The broadcast media program at Whitney High School, a public high school in Rocklin, CA, stands out as one of the most impressive and successful programs of its kind in the country. Using Telestream's Wirecast live video streaming production software, the students produce a 15-minute daily newscast, that features news, sports and lifestyle segments. Called Unleashed, the award-winning program has now expanded into a full-fledged community television station, branded as WCTV19, which is watched on the school's campus-wide TV channel, as well as on two local cable channels, and on the school's social media outlets.
I want our students to develop classroom-to-career skills, and to get a feel for every aspect of broadcast news production in a very professional atmosphere. This program is designed to teach them broadcast journalism skills, and then apply those skills to actually producing all of the features and content that we need to make Unleashed a professional looking newscast, explains Ben Barnholdt, Teacher/Director of the Broadcast Media Program at Whitney High School.
As an all-in-one live production and streaming system, Wirecast is now central to the school's broadcast studio and remote production workflow and distribution. By continually expanding and upgrading their facilities, WCTV19 now looks like a professional television station, complete with a studio with a news set, HDTV studio cameras, a teleprompter, microphones, and a bluescreen background. During the production, a student crew runs the cameras and teleprompters in the studio. In the control room, a separate student crew handles the technical execution of the show.
While Wirecast integrates the functionality of a video production switcher, Barnholdt has one student switching the four camera feeds using a third-party production switcher. Then that switcher's output flows in real-time into Wirecast where the show's finishing touches are added.
Wirecast is a very user-friendly program that our students pick-up quickly, including how to bring in media files, such as graphics and video clips, from hard drives. Because of its many pre-sets, our Wirecast workflow is fairly automated, and we can now have a show put together and ready to roll in just 40 minutes, says Barnholdt.
WCTV19 streams to many online and social media destinations via ESE Networks, a CDN and Telestream partner. Using the hashtag #whsunleashed, any student in the school can post pictures and videos to social media, such as Twitter and Instagram, that the Unleashed team can aggregate. They capture on-screen graphics and video clips of interest from their social media sites at very high quality using ScreenFlow from Telestream. These assets are moved into Wirecast, which keys them into the bluescreen background on-set.
Wirecast enhances our show by allowing us to chromakey news graphics and videos into the blue screen behind the anchor desk. It also makes it easy to display CG text and lower-third supers, and add transitions and effects, all from a single user interface, he adds.
Data displays, such as weather and sports graphics, are created on separate laptops using Adobe PhotoShop and Illustrator. For each daily show, students update key data, like temperatures and scores, without having to recreate their many graphics from scratch.
Another student then uses NewBlue Graphics software on a separate laptop to take those static graphics and animate them quickly and professionally to make the show more visually dynamic. Once the graphics are ready to go, they're transferred over an NDI video over IP network and saved on the Wirecast laptop for playout during production.
Through a Go Fund Me campaign and a technology grant, the program recently acquired a new 25-foot broadcast production trailer that's pulled by a pickup truck. The trailer makes it faster and easier to get the student crews and the equipment out to remote sites to produce live-streamed shows. Recent remote productions include: live-streaming football from the high school's stadium and many special community events from Rocklin and neighboring Roseville, CA.
Our new broadcast trailer uses the same Wirecast-driven workflow that we use in our studio control room. In this way, I only have to teach the students one way of working, whether they're in the studio or working on a remote, like our football games. And all of our programming shares the same look and feel, and overall production quality, says Barnholdt.
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Category line-up & sponsors announced
Photo: Paul Clarke
The Production Music Awards (PMA) have announced that submissions are now officially open ahead of...
01/06/2026
New hybrid sample/synthesis instrument revealed
Excite Audio have just released the latest instalment in their Evolve series, which has been developed in co...
01/06/2026
Latest TONEX expansion captures three rare vintage amps
The newest addition to IK Multimedia's ever-growing TONEX line-up introduces a set of three incr...
01/06/2026
Musically intelligent soft synth gets upgraded
Scaler Music will be probably be best known to many for their music theory tools, but their product range al...
01/06/2026
SBS confirms its broadcast sponsors for FIFA World Cup 2026
1 June, 2026
Media releases
SBS has secured Hyundai, Hisense, Macca's, Rexona, bet365, Com...
01/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz Satellite Industry Days 2026 guided by the motto From Earth to ...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Mardi 2 juin 14h00
FilmLight (ARRI), 10 rue Ren Boulanger, 75010 Paris
Rejoignez-nous pour d couvrir comment FLAPI (l'API FilmLight) peut transformer e...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
31/05/2026
Olivia P rez-Collellmir to Premiere Original Work at Gaud Centennial in Barcelona The Berklee graduate and faculty member will debut her choral symphony with...
31/05/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Wins 15 Awards at the Canadian Screen Awards - See Pho...
31/05/2026
Taiwan is home to more than 500 NVIDIA ecosystem partners. More than 1 million N...
31/05/2026
As factories move from isolated automation to plant-wide intelligence, manufacturers need AI systems that can connect live machine signals, quality systems, wor...
31/05/2026
The NVIDIA AI Cloud ecosystem is accelerating the global buildout of AI factory infrastructure. Partners are expanding capacity to meet growing demand from ente...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
California High School Delivers Award-Winning Broadcast Media Program with Wirecast posted: 01/02/2018 
