14 November 2006

Media Production Area

The summer break gives the Technical Services Unit the opportunity to do maintenance of facilities.

The television and radio facilities on the A floor in Building 9 are undergoing a refit over the summer. Final student work should be completed by now, with a marketing exercise for Year 11 students from Alfred Deakin High being run over a couple of days this week the last commitment for the facilities until Semester 1 2007.

The radio area will have new desks in the studio and control room, providing all ‘balanced’ wiring and equipment to reduce the possibility of electrical interference with recordings.

The television studio will be cleaned out, with the property store regaining its original function and losing its store-room and junkyard status that it seems to have acquired over the years.

The television control room will be revamped to provide better accommodation as a teaching area, with equipment upgrades, rewiring, a new desk and better monitoring facilities planned. The control room will also join the University computer network to make it easier to manage some of the resources down there, and to move content to and from the studio electronically rather than by ‘sneaker-net’. A separate high-speed fibre network linking the editing workstations in 9B23 with central storage to video will be extended to the control room to remove the need to carry videotapes or mass-storage devices between the editing rooms and the studio.

Work is expected to be completed by the time the facilities are required for teaching in Semester 1 in 2007.