Lindenwood University Chooses Hitachi SK-HD1000 HD Cameras For Local Newscasts

Lindenwood University
in St. Charles, MO, has installed three Hitachi SK-HD1000
1080i HDTV Studio/Field cameras with Fujinon HAs18x7.6BRM lenses in its new
Charter Communications HD Video Studio. Designed as an environment where
communications majors can hone professional broadcast skills, the studio and
its adjacent control room were funded by Lindenwood University
and Charter Communications.

Located in
the J. Scheidegger Center for the Arts on the Lindenwood campus, the HD studio is
used by the students to produce “LU News Update,” a 15-minute newscast that
airs on Charter Cable channel 989, serving St. Charles County on Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. While this news show was pre-recorded during
the fall semester 2008, starting with the spring semester 2009 it will be transmitted
live from the HD studio and eventually offered on the local AT&T U-verse
IPTV system as well as Charter Cable.

Under the
supervision of the Lindenwood faculty team — Peter Carlos, station manager; Ben
Scholle, department chair; and Edward Voss, director of operations — students
produce virtually all of the programming seen on the Charter channel.Among
the regularly scheduled shows are three local public affairs forums: “Topics in
Education,” “Insight,” and “Business Roundtable.”

“When we
began outfitting our new HD studio last August, the goal was to fill it with
state-of-the-art HD equipment that would enable our students to fit seamlessly
into any broadcast operation upon leaving here,” Voss says. “The Hitachi cameras have
exceeded our expectations of quality and reliability and proven to be an
excellent value.They are user-friendly and produce a consistently
beautiful picture under varying lighting conditions.”

While the
HD studio is brightly lit with a mix of tungsten and color corrected
fluorescent lights, the 250-seat “Black Box Theater” across the hall has a
combination of tungsten and theatrical lighting with a dimmer package.The
students occasionally move the Hitachi
cameras into the “Black Box Theater” to shoot game shows, band performances,
and other specials. With remote setup using Hitachi CU-3300 camera
control units, Voss says, “the cameras handle this dramatic lighting change
very smoothly without quality compromises.”

With a
set-up that rivals many TV stations, Lindenwood’s HD facility features a
tapeless newsroom with Avid iNews newsroom control system, Avid AirSpeed ingest
and playout server, and dual-channel Avid Deko 1000 HD character generator with
Deko Select for browsing the asset library. The control room has a Grass
Valley Kayak 200-C HD 2-M/E, 24-input switcher that feeds a 52-inch Sony LCD
flat screen with Miranda Alto for multiviewer monitoring, as well as auxiliary
outputs feeding three 46-inch Sony monitors on the news set.

“With the
outstanding customer support we received from Hitachi
and our dealer, Bill Johnson of Modern Communications in Fenton,
MO, the whole process of evaluating,
purchasing, and installing the Hitachi
cameras was a pleasure,” Voss says. “When the cameras arrived, Hitachi sent a tech team here to set them up
and check them out; and everything worked perfectly.”
For more
information, visit Hitachi’s
web site at http://www.hitachikokusai.us.