Newtek Helps Students Prepare For A Career Live Video Production

Students studying any form or art or media are looking to be fully immersed in their subject matter. Usually this means being surrounded in the medium their in school for. Anyone studying video production will learn this early on. Of course with any major subject there will be some book work, but if you're in a film or television broadcasting curriculum, you will most likely be working hands-on with equipment that can only be mastered by regular practice. Shawn Montano is the Video Production Coordinator and Instructor at Emily Griffith Technical College where he's enlisted help from NewTek equipment like the TriCaster 8000 to teach his students what a career in this field is like.

“I’m teaching students how to build video news stories, business profiles, and documentaries. All projects are non-fiction, with no actors or fiction scripts,” said Shawn Montano, Video Production Coordinator and Instructor, Emily Griffith Technical College. “My goal is to give them a well-rounded education with enough skills where they can work at a news station, enter the business sector doing in-house production, or start their own business.”

Montano explained that a student will start on the TriCaster, before jumping to the director position, the camera operator, the audio engineer, and so on. “The Shawn Show is produced as if it were live, so students must have all the pre-production elements ready to go in order to execute,” he said. “As with any real-world, live video production, there are a million moving parts and so many things can go wrong.”

“The TriCaster is a fast, easy and affordable tool for creating live and on-demand, multi-platform productions,” Montano said. “The department has two post-production workstations with a few TriCaster units that are shared by up to 16 students in a class. I want students to have solid experiences in producing complete productions. We utilize the TriCaster because, with it, we can bring together all the pieces in a real-time, live-to-broadcast environment. Students can’t really do a studio production like this without the TriCaster.”

While most students in the class may have a little experience with shooting video, they have no idea what’s involved with a live studio production. That’s where the TriCaster comes in as the bridge to teaching high-quality productions. Montano bought the TriCaster units about four years ago and says he still feels he’s just scratching the surface of their capabilities.

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