The Studio – B&H, Sony Bring 4K to Syracuse Campus

4K isn’t just for the big dogs anymore.

Early this month, The Studio – B&H teamed up with Sony to offer a special workshop at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications to educate students and faculty on emerging 4K-acquisition technologies.

Approximately 100 students and six or seven faculty members were in attendance to speak with The Studio – B&H and Sony professionals and interact with five Sony 4K cameras as part of the 10th Annual Syracuse International Film Festival. The goal is to keep the department up to date on the latest technology in video-content creation.

“State-of-the-art equipment is what we try to maintain as much as possible,” says Owen Shapiro, a longtime professor at the university’s Department of Transmedia in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. “We are a university, we aren’t a corporation. So we can’t keep up the same way that some professional film-production companies can keep up, but we do our best in both postproduction and production.”

At the center of the presentation were Sony’s latest 4K CineAlta cameras, the PMW-F5 and PMW-F55, which Michel Suissa, manager at The Studio – B&H, said gathered the largest number of inquiries during the event. Also available was the NEX-FS100, a more affordable, entry-level camera.

The event, which consisted of a stage presentation followed by informal hands-on workshops with the Sony large-sensor cameras, was developed as part of a long-standing relationship between the university and B&H.

According to Shapiro, the Department of Transmedia has a pool of annually granted money that is used to replace equipment, buy new equipment, and expand the program. Syracuse regularly turns to B&H for those purchases. Shapiro added that his department will be looking to buy 10-15 cameras within the next few months.

To continue to foster that relationship with the university, The Studio – B&H contacted Syracuse a year ago and put together a workshop on new audio equipment and microphones. Its success led to the development of the 4K event. Now the partners are planning to run a new workshop every semester.

“The more we help educating our customer base, or what could be our future customer base, the better off we are, because education is golden,” says Suissa. “It’s critical to have people who understand their medium, as opposed to trying to launch themselves into something that’s really an unknown. We have a vested interest in ensuring that people are educated. It’s a lot easier to engage people to help them create compelling content if they are educated.”