New television studio for student training

The project to create a television studio at the Universidade Lusófona do Porto (ULP) marks a new qualitative step in the audiovisual infrastructure of our University. If in Lisbon, at the Lusofone University of Humanities and Technologies, we have a park of equipment and an enviable set of infrastructures, which positions us as a reference University in this area, we now want to reinforce the conditions that we can offer our students. students in the city of Porto. In fact, our degrees in this area at ULP are more recent than those in Lisbon. Gradually, the investments made have been reinforcing the quality of our offer.

If the first steps were focused on ensuring a base of shooting and post-production equipment, considered essential for the development of students' projects, the time had come to move towards an infrastructure with different characteristics that would allow us to significantly improve the training component for television and audiovisual production.

In the development of this project, different types of solutions were tested. The framework we seek always favors the pedagogical component, from this point of view it is not so much the final product that concerns us, but the working conditions that we can provide to our students. We want to give students excellent learning conditions in a context close to what they may find in the professional market.

This being the goal, we would have to find a way to make it possible in a context of economic and financing difficulties that we all share at the moment in the country.
In any case, our specifications were ambitious. We wanted to work in high definition and we wanted a completely digital and “tapeless” environment. We also wanted to have a work context similar to a professional television set.

After a long time of research and contacts with suppliers and manufacturers, it became clear to us that Blackmagic solutions would be the ones that best fit the quality / price parameters we were looking for.

In this way, together with Pantalha, we developed a solution based on Blackmagic technology that allows us to fit all the initial objectives of the project, exceeding in some moments our expectations, within the budget that we had for the development of the project. Thus, we chose the Atem 1 M/E Production Switcher mixing solutions and the respective Atem 1 M/E Broadcast Panel, ideal for creating a broadcast environment. Taking advantage of the multiviewer output of these solutions, we feed 2 42 ’’ monitors with all the necessary video signals in class. We also opted for the Hyperdeck Studio Pro SSD recorder, maintaining our goal of working in a totally “tapeless” environment. Pantalha was also awarded the RTS/TELEX intercom solution with base and 4 mobile stations as well as the entire audio mixing component with a Yamaha console and audio monitors.

At the moment we have had the studio in operation for about six months. The feedback from students and teachers is very satisfactory.
Students have a very robust and reliable professional work environment. From the pedagogical point of view, we can offer you a technologically current context of development of your skills. It is our belief that with this studio we are preparing professionals who will be prepared to integrate the professional market with the knowledge and practices necessary to reinforce the needs of audiovisual content producers in the north of our country.

Filipe Roque do Vale
Lusofone University

2016