McGeorge School of Law

McGeorge School of law

• Editing in the Classroom

McGeorge School of Law
University of the Pacific
Sacramento, California
Ronald Marcroft, Director of Media Resources

Since 1997 McGeorge has used Casablanca products to edit all their video productions. Using the KRON PLUS and AVIO in a university setting has it’s pluses & minuses. I’m going to start with the minuses.
1. It’s too darn good, the quality is indistinguishable from the original.
2. It’s fast.
3. It’s easy to make changes.
4. Job security is out the window.

Now for the Pluses. At McGeorge we edit at least two programmes per week during the academic year. These programmes range anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 hour or longer in finished length. We sometimes shoot the footage or the professor will supply the footage for use in their programme. The professor will either give us an edit list, sit and edit with us or edit the programme themselves. They are impressed with the KRON’s short learning curve, and remark how clear the picture quality is, as they remember the old day’s before Casablanca where we edited on 3/4" tape decks and doing layering meant a real drop in picture quality. The university personal have become used to the fast turn around time which the KRON provides so now they wait to the last minute to ask for the tape to be edited and put on a DVD for playback in class that afternoon or evening. When we edited on a tape based system making changes meant a lot of extra time and quality loss. We would typically have to edit in the middle of a programme so that everything after that point would need to be redone. We frequently let law students edit programmes on the KRON which frees up the full time employees to handle other needs of the school.

A programme we recently produced contained over 6 hours of digitized material from DVCAM, Mini DV. S-VHS & 3/4" footage. We also utilized Digital Juice, CD Material via PC Link, and music from Music to hue’s audio CD’s input using the KRON built in DVD burner. The production contained lot’s of Chroma Key using Blue Box World, Titling and audio manipulation. We had two weeks to produce this 8 minute presentation for the Governing Board of Regents at the University. This included re-shooting an individual who the "powers to be" didn’t like in the first shoot. We produced a rough edit within 1 week, did the re-shoot and had a finished production two days before playback on the big screen. The DVD video was well received by the close to 100 people in the audience.

Produced this past summer was our 2004 commencement video programme which was two hours in length including cutaways, titling, and audio effects. A DVD was produced for our graduates.

After seeing the new Casablanca Solitaire NLE at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention I am convinced the Solitaire will enhance McGeorge’s heavy production schedule with innovation, speed, quality, & reliability which MacroSystems is known for.

The KRON Plus gives us the advantage of bringing in audio cuts off CD-ROM which definitely speeds up the editing process. All programmes which are going to be played back in class are burned to DVD. Each classroom is equipped with DVD playback

You can find McGeorge School of Law on the web at http://www.mcgeorge.edu