California High School Delivers Award-Winning Broadcast Media Program with Wirecast
By Jim Bask
The broadcast media program at Whitney High School, a public high school in Rocklin, CA, stands out as one of the most impressive and successful programs of its kind in the country. Using Telestream’s Wirecast live video streaming production software, the students produce a 15-minute daily newscast, that features news, sports and lifestyle segments. Called Unleashed, the award-winning program has now expanded into a full-fledged community television station, branded as WCTV19, which is watched on the school’s campus-wide TV channel, as well as on two local cable channels, and on the school’s social media outlets.
“I want our students to develop classroom-to-career skills, and to get a feel for every aspect of broadcast news production in a very professional atmosphere. This program is designed to teach them broadcast journalism skills, and then apply those skills to actually producing all of the features and content that we need to make Unleashed a professional looking newscast,” explains Ben Barnholdt, Teacher/Director of the Broadcast Media Program at Whitney High School.
As an all-in-one live production and streaming system, Wirecast is now central to the school’s broadcast studio and remote production workflow and distribution. By continually expanding and upgrading their facilities, WCTV19 now looks like a professional television station, complete with a studio with a news set, HDTV studio cameras, a teleprompter, microphones, and a bluescreen background. During the production, a student crew runs the cameras and teleprompters in the studio. In the control room, a separate student crew handles the technical execution of the show.
While Wirecast integrates the functionality of video production switcher, Barnholdt has one student switching the four camera feeds using a third-party production switcher. Then that switcher’s output flows in real-time into Wirecast where the show’s finishing touches are added.
“Wirecast is a very user-friendly program that our students pick-up quickly, including how to bring in media files, such as graphics and video clips, from hard drives. Because of its many pre-sets, our Wirecast workflow is fairly automated, and we can now have a show put together and ready to roll in just 40 minutes,” says Barnholdt…[continue reading]