LSU’s Manship School Bridges the Distance from Classroom to Workplace
Louisiana State University’s (LSU’s) Manship School of Mass Communication, located in Baton Rouge, La., attracts more than 900 undergraduate and 50 M.A. and Ph.D. students each year. To give its students competitive advantages in the job market – where graduates routinely land jobs in broadcast journalism, sports production, and promotions – LSU provides students with real-world learning environments. This training includes access to a digital news production setup with Avid systems. “The Manship School has invested in Avid technology to provide students with the best that the industry has to offer,” says Andrea Miller, assistant professor in mass communications. “Using Avid [systems] helps to keep our students ahead of the game.”
Today, students have access to 31 seats of Avid NewsCutter XP software connected to six Avid Unity shared-storage systems. The Manship School’s chief broadcast engineer, John Friscia, was part of the team that made the decision to purchase the Avid systems in 2001. Friscia, who had worked at United Nations headquarters as a broadcast and sound engineer for eight years before coming to LSU, was familiar with professional production workflows and understood the importance of providing students with direct access to reliable editing and shared-storage systems. He explains, “The group looked at other options and selected Avid systems because they provide a single-source [for a complete broadcast news production workflow] that is widely recognized as the industry standard.”
“The Manship School has invested in Avid technology to provide students with the best that the industry has to offer.”
- Andrea Miller, Assistant Professor, Manship School of Mass Communications, LSU
Technology in the Classroom
Students in the Manship School use the NewsCutter XP software in their first broadcast class. The students sample the system’s versatile toolset with features designed specifically for editing news programs, including comprehensive I/O for multiple SD and HD formats, plus visual effects features for creating attention-grabbing content. “Nonlinear editing makes last-minute changes easy. And having special effects at their fingertips is a great benefit to students’ learning,” says Friscia.
Miller, who has been at LSU for four years, teaches advanced broadcast storytelling and television production at the undergraduate level, as well as research methods to graduate students. She particularly appreciates the NewsCutter XP system’s wide-ranging capabilities, which enable students to create completely finished projects using features such as audio editing and color correction. “Because they are students, they make mistakes in the field. For example, audio issues are constant from class to class,” says Miller. “Using the Avid system allows us to correct mistakes such as color and audio.”
These mistakes - and the corrections that result - provide students with rich hands-on experiences that easily translate to real-world broadcast settings, where journalists, editors, and producers must make the most of their source material and get programs to air, fast. She says, “My students are eager to learn and are excited about the opportunities that the
Avid tools afford them. I know that they feel fortunate to have this great technology to learn and create with.”
In addition to 31 seats of Avid NewsCutter XP software, LSU has multiple Avid Unity LANshare and LANshare EX shared-storage systems connected to the university’s backbone via a Fibre Channel connection. “Using the LANshare [systems] in our work is very important as it allows any client to access all projects, which means that we are able to use our labs to their fullest potential,” says Friscia.
The multiple LANshare systems also help maximize lab usage. “With the extra storage, we can use disk mirroring without having to limit storage,” he adds.
“For us, the ability to dynamically change [storage] space size on the fly is invaluable.”
- John Friscia, Chief Broadcast Engineer, Manship School of Mass Communications, LSU
Real-World Experience
Storage and space allocation are extremely important at LSU, where the Avid Unity LANshare systems are used by both the Manship School and the Student Media group, a student-run organization that produces television and radio programming for campus distribution. The flexible Avid Unity shared-storage setup enables LSU to provide the storage required for all student uses. Explains Friscia, “Each class is broken up into three different groups and is then allocated space on three different LANshare systems.
In addition, the Student Media group’s television station is also allocated its own drive space - for news, sports, production, and so on. For us, the ability to dynamically change space size on the fly is invaluable,” says Friscia.
The Student Media group includes several media entities and employs approximately 120 students each year. The outlets include: The Reveille, the student newspaper; KLSU 91.1 FM, the student radio station; Legacy, a general interest print magazine; and Tiger TV, which broadcasts on campus cable channel 75.
Programming for Tiger TV consists of a cross-section of nationally syndicated shows and student produced programs that range from news and sports to public affairs and documentary productions. The station employs about 50 students every year and reaches approximately 6,500 students across campus. The NewsCutter systems are used to edit short-form and long-form programming, while an AirSPACE video server, also connected to the Avid Unity setup, is used to play programs to air.
Both Friscia and Miller do double duty between the Manship School and LSU’s Student Media group. Friscia works as chief broadcast engineer for Student Media’s television and radio stations, while Miller is Tiger TV’s academic advisor. This crossover of academic staff further supports the application of classroom skills to actual broadcast environments.
Continual Learning
Rich in tradition, LSU’s commitment to mass communication dates to 1912, when it offered its first communications course. Fifteen years later, it became one of the first nationally accredited journalism programs in the country. Today, using 21st-century tools, graduates from the school are leaders in film and television production across the country.
Says Friscia, “What we care about is student learning; we want to give them the experience to develop, create, and report content clearly and effectively. This means that our technology needs to be simple enough to teach and use and [unobtrusive enough] to work in the background so that the content is the focus of any production.”
He adds, “There is an ongoing concern about keeping up with technology. For us, Avid is one of the largest pieces of that puzzle.”
* Credits: Courtesy of The Daily Reveille