(For those new to the column, Forward Migration is our term for companies moving from Wintel machines to Macs — or at least adding or increasing the number of Macs they use. A Forward Migration Kit is an overview of Mac OS products for a particular occupation, such as photography, optometry, etc.)
This fall DePaul University in Chicago will be opening a US$500,000 Media Center, using Macintosh G4s, Dan Kiss, vice chairman of the Student Executive Organization, told MacCentral.
DePaul University is an institution founded by the Vincentians in 1898. The largest Catholic university in the nation and the largest private institution in Chicago, it serves over 20,000 students who reflect a broad diversity of ethnic, religious, geographic and economic backgrounds.
As reported on the DePaul.com media site, the “state-of-the-art” media center will be located on the fifth floor of the Schmitt Academic and will have professional digital cameras, private editing rooms, high-end Mac G4s for graphics work and digital editing, equipment for advanced sound recording and facilities for DVD authoring and Internet uploading. It will also offer classroom space with computer workstations for students and large screen video monitors for screening films.
“We’re going to be using the cutting-edge equipment feature filmmakers in Hollywood are using,” Matt Irvine, a film professor in the Communication Department and the center’s director, said in the DePaul.com article. “You could do all of your pre-production, production and post-production for a feature film in this lab, and then distribute it on the Web.”
Extra adjunct instructors will be hired to teach more production courses. DePaul’s existing film lab will become a digital production studio where students can build computer-generated sets and backgrounds using blue-screen technology.
Michael L. Mezey, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said the media center would offer an unprecedented multidisciplinary resource to attract students studying communication, art, theatre, music and English.
“The effort here was to bring together the people who do technical writing, computer graphics, online editing, audio and film and video to create a space where these three separate disciplines can come together to create a new curriculum,” he added.
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Requests for help
Now it’s time for our weekly requests for help from folks who need your advice and/or assistance in forward migrating — or at least being able to keep the Mac platform alive and thriving in their businesses. Contact the requesters directly at their e-mail addresses.
Jim McCullough: “My middle school is desperately seeking a class scheduling program to replace the archaic one provided through our educational management and information system. Recommendations, anyone? Also, I could use a Mac computerized baseball score book program if anyone is aware of any.”