Why School Newsrooms Are Moving To PTZ Workflows
A school tv-station needs to reflect and emulate real-world studios in an effort to realistically prepare students for the workforce. Since the late 1990s, there has been an upswing of PTZ camera-based newsrooms popping up all over the world. Following suit, schools have also been switching to PTZ workflows. PTZ-based school newsrooms offer high-quality video, use the same technology as the professionals, and increase consistency and efficiency.
A PTZ camera is a Pan, Tilt, and Zoom camera that is fully operational from a control room. This means you can tweak camera movements and focus on the talent without physically manipulating the camera.
The days of camera operators in the news studio are becoming rarer and rarer. In 2017, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo completely transformed their broadcasting studio from analog gear to a state of the art PTZ centric workflow to capitalize on this broadcast trend.
At Cal Poly, journalism students are not broadcasters by trade, so they rely on the PTZ cameras to keep their workflow simple. Since the PTZ cameras arm them with efficient recording technology, the students can instead focus on learning the different roles in a tv station and honing their storytelling skills.
According to Cal Poly’s Broadcast Engineer Specialist, Thomas Morales, using PTZ cameras improved the quality of his students’ demo reels and helped their tapes stand out in the eyes of future employers.
“Students creating demo reels were getting negative feedback from potential employers that the quality of their demo reels was lacking. Their analog gear just wasn’t cutting it anymore. This inspired one student to seek the funding and donations to revamp their school broadcasting studio. They connected with TekSkil to fit out the studio with new PTZ and teleprompter technology. The PTZ cameras increased broadcast-quality because they have 4K broadcast-quality resolution. The integrated teleprompter adds additional benefits because it allows students to maintain eye contact with the camera and not be caught looking off-camera during filming,” Morales said.
In addition to quality, PTZ cameras make creating student newscasts more efficient. You can pre-program camera angles to capture your subject in focus and in-frame.
Additionally, multiple PTZ cameras don’t require multiple camera operators like standard broadcast cameras. You can have one producer in the control room pulling all the strings.
The power of camera movement presets increases consistency in the student-run tv station. This paired with the self-contained teleprompter allows students to create consistent broadcast quality with half the effort.