Cardiff Metropolitan University Produces Industry Ready Broadcasting Students with NewTek Solutions posted: 25/07/2019 Cardiff Metropolitan University traces its roots back to 1865, when they opened their first school in an old library. Now Cardiff Met is a global, practice-focused and professionally oriented institution, committed to ensure every student fulfills their potential to make outstanding contributions in their future industries.
Cardiff Met is also one of the leading universities for student sport in the United Kingdom. To highlight the success of their student athletes, and create real life experience for broadcasting students, leaders of the Cardiff Metropolitan Sport Broadcasting Course created unique coursework involving live production, powered by NewTek solutions like the TriCaster , one of the most comprehensive video production systems available.
Starting from scratch two years ago, Cardiff Metropolitan had no media facilities at all for the upcoming Sport Broadcasting Masters Course. Joe Towns, Senior Lecturer of Sports Broadcasting, and Lukas Burks,Technical Demonstrator of the Sports Broadcast Master's Degree, had a big challenge; to source equipment that was cost effective, versatile, offered a complete production workflow, and overall, was student friendly.
We have partners in America at Ball State University in Indiana. They run one of the top sports broadcasting programmes and have been consistently giving us help and advice regarding the implementation of our sports programme. Ball State has a TriCaster, and a mobile TriCaster. We did some online research as well, and the TriCaster stood out from day one, explained Joe Towns.
What we are doing is fairly unique in Britain, and the fairly obvious place to look was the American colleges. I was looking around for courses similar to what we were trying to create, a live sports broadcast production degree, and there are not many in Britain, those are more journalism based. That is how our relationship started with Ball State. Now we do virtual lectures back and forth, their students watch our live streams, and our students watch theirs and they give feedback to each other and collaborate globally, added Towns.
Both Ball State and Cardiff Metropolitan University use NewTek TriCaster technology to serve as the centre of production for their sports broadcasting courses.
Using the TriCaster, and other NewTek products has been such a joy for us. We use a TriCaster 8000 Advanced Edition in our studio to broadcast a weekly sports roundup and entertainment show, as well as live sports from around campus. Everything comes naturally using the TriCaster. As someone who comes from a background involving camera operating, and editing, more than live broadcasting, it has been extremely easy for me to pick up and pass that knowledge onto our students, remarked Lukas Burks
In order to produce industry-ready students, Joe and Lukas designed the Sports Broadcasting course after speaking with industry leaders from sports broadcasting including: Sky Sports, BBC Sport and BT Sport. They asked them, What sort of students do you need?'. Some of their biggest requests were prospects with studio experience and discipline, an understanding on how to work timings, the ability to work under pressure, and know-how to work and adapt in live environments.
Our Sports Broadcast course hashtag is #IndustryReady. We want to expose students to as many real-world, authentic scenarios as possible. When our students finish the course we want them to step straight into entry level media production jobs. To do this, we give them industry tasks, using industry tools. We try to create situations where we can replicate industry scenarios and workflows. TriCaster allows us to do this perfectly, in a live, authentic real-world environment, explained Towns.
We created a weekly sports show called Up The Archer' which we stream live on Facebook through the TriCaster. TriCaster gives our students the full live hands-on broadcast experience. We have a director live-cutting three studio cameras and rolling VTs, a producer in charge of the running order, a graphics operator running in social media details and pre-designed lower thirds, someone monitoring sound, presenters, guests, floor managers, camera operators. It's a full production. The TriCaster allows us to do all this and more. It's been a game-changer for us, he added.
The students love creating these productions as well. The Cardiff Metropolitan Sports Broadcast students behind the Up The Archer' weekly sports show took home the Best Video of 2019 in the NewTek UK Education Awards. The annual awards recognise excellence in creating engaging videos or live streams with NewTek technology from students and staff at colleges and universities across the country.
The students particularly like using the powerful media and entertainment features, and virtual sets. It allows them to compile professional and realistic-looking sets for news segments using only a green screen and the chroma keying within the software. They also comment about how great it is to use the control surface, getting hands on, professional grade vision mixing hardware, preparing them for their future careers, added Burks.
Cardiff Metropolitan University students do not just use the TriCaster for their weekly sports show and assignments, they do weekly press conferences with whichever University team has had the biggest results that week, or weekend, and have recently been approached by semi-professional and professional sports teams to stream their press conferences.
The Cardiff Devils got in touch and asked if they could send a few players and a coach up every week to do a press conference. We have also done the same for the Celtic Dragons, a local semi-pro netball team, who play in the B
