With its combination of Power Macs, PowerBooks, digital cameras, giant plasma screen, and high-speed wireless networking, Kent State’s Carl E. Hirsch Media Lab provides all of the tools young journalists, videographers and producers need to cultivate skills for a new era of electronic communications, according to an Apple Hot News article.
They teach Quark, Adobe PageMaker, Photoshop and information graphics in the Power Mac and iMac labs, according to manager of student media Jeff Fruit. Though the school has three labs, everyone wants to go to the Mac-based Hirsch lab, named for Carl E. Hirsch, CEO of NextMedia, a firm which brings together the communication capabilities of radio, television, outdoor and other media.
“They’re going out and shooting video and stills, they’re making copy, they’re bringing audio back on mini-disk, and they’re sitting down and putting all this into the computer and then with either Final Cut Pro or iMovie, creating a documentary,” Fruit told Apple.
Systems coordinator Jay Frye “the Network Guy” said that students who work at the campus television station use the PowerBooks and Final Cut Pro to edit broadcast-quality video in a car or a truck on the way back to the studio.
“We’re running the fastest network on campus — gigabit Ethernet to the desktop, and the stuff just flies,” Frye said. “The PowerBooks connect wirelessly to the network through the use of AirPort, and they, too, perform flawlessly.”
The university prefers QuickTime as its multimedia platform because “when it comes to moving video around in a linear and non-linear fashion, QuickTime is the standard, he added. Plus, QuickTime video can live “other places.” You need a dedicated player for other media platforms, but QuickTime can sit inside of other applications, Frye said.
Fruit says Macs “made sense” as the platform for the new lab as “we already had a high level of comfort with the Mac. They use Macs to put out the daily Kent Stater and have long used Mac machines for Quark and Photoshop classes.