Sitting just twenty miles east of Pittsburgh is Penn-Trafford high school and, for five hours last November, their video production class perched themselves in the school library and covered an election. This Pennsylvania high school of 1,300 students staged a mock- presidential election the day prior to the national election contest between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Using top flight equipment like the NewTek Tricaster 460 and four JVC 460U cameras, these students were professionally dressed and had the seasoned carriage of network news anchors. There was a professional looking studio set up with polished anchors who would cut to go live to reporters in the field.
As with any broadcast from the field, the reporters eyed an iPad mounted on a tripod as they broadcast early polling results as well as getting live interviews with other students who were headed to the library to vote for the next President of the United States of America. For the students involved in the production, they only had a scant three days to prepare and set up to accommodate a last minute decision to hold the election and do the live broadcast as well as to acquire some new technology.
Turns out that the last minute scrambling was due to the students being able to use new technology from NewTek. An IT specialist from the school district, along with TV production teacher Steve Vinton, were able to set up the school's network so that the production could transmit video wirelessly right to the NewTek Tricaster. The state of the art technology is known as Network Device Interface (NDI) which enables Tricaster operators to insert both audio and video productions from anywhere along any IP network. The TV Production class had been using the Tricaster 460 regularly to do their regular school newscasts but the addition of the NDI technology meant the could go live anywhere in the school to bring that added immediacy to their telecasts.
For Vinton, the new NDI technology was a step up for his students as he said that,
“I just got out of their way. They custom made their graphics, they custom made their intros. They created a Twitter account so we could have exit polling data, and we pulled that feed off a computer via NDI through the TriCaster. We were able to incorporate actual, real-time exit-polling data. It was amazing.”
Senior Matt Simkovic was used to the long hours related to a production but marveled at the technology they were able to bring to the mock election as he said that, “
We stayed after school on Thursday. On Friday, we got a little experience by taking one of our iPads outside the school and doing a live weather report. That went well, so we stayed late on Friday to check out the signal from the library. It fell together really nicely, and that made it easy for everyone to feel like the equipment was going to be reliable. Monday morning, we just went with it, and the election coverage went pretty well.”
The Tricaster and the NDI technology will bring a whole new aspect to the students broadcasting, said Vinton. They now have the ability to go live from anywhere on campus and the possibilities are exciting for everyone involved at Penn-Trafford.
“NDI has changed everything for us,” Vinton said.
“And we’re only scratching the surface. My mind races with all the things we can incorporate into our curriculum, into my classes, and into our projects. It’s going to be incredible how we can use this new technology to tell a better story, report from here or there. I can’t wait until we can actually go off this property and do live hits from another building.”
PHOTO CREDITS: Courtesy of NewTek
