Desktop Video Group - help

Description

HRTV was founded in 1992 by Emily Brodsky, now a Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz . HRTV is a loose collection of small production groups with their own shows, some series that ran for several seasons, such as Ivory Tower (a serial soap opera created by Sara Alexandra Bibel and Andrea N. Moore), Crimson Edition (a news show), Great Performances (showcasing theater, dance, and music events at Harvard), The Common Room (a situation comedy show), Survey Says! (a game show created by Peter Pinch, now Director of Technology at WGBH), and Yard Tails (an animated cartoon show created by Justin Massengale). HRTV Honorary Board of Advisers included many individuals prominent in the entertainment industry , including Jack Lemmon , John Lithgow , Conan_O'Brien , Elizabeth Shue and Mira Sorvino . In the early years (1994-1996), many shows were edited in a special HRTV edit facility in the basement of Bob Doyle's Desktop Video Group. Back in 1975-76, a predecessor to HRTV, the Harvard Radcliffe Film Workshop, offered a house filmmaking course in the basement of Holmes Hall when Bob Doyle was Research Fellow in Harvard's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at the Carpenter Center. In 1996, Doyle revamped the old Harvard Radcliffe Film Workshop to become the new HRTV studios. With the help of Kathleen Kouril, a Boston-area filmmaker and Non-resident Tutor at Pforzheimer House and with financial support from Pforzheimer House masters Woody and Hanna Hastings, a lighting grid and cycloramic blue screen were installed in the former Morse Music Library. As the screening room for Harvard Radcliffe Film Workshop, it was equipped with a large pull-down screen. This became the main HRTV studio. All the walls of the old music library were sand-filled cinder block construction to provide maximum sound isolation. The walls were placed at odd angles to prevent resonances, and one room included a set of double-paned wide glass windows with a view into the screening room. This became the studio control room. Adjacent to the control room were the edit suites. which offered four computer-based non-linear editing systems - two Avids, one Media 100, and a Fast Video Machine, supported by a combination of hard drives and removable media Jaz drives. A rack held a monitor and dubbing decks for making videotape copies. Three large equipment closets stored the tripods, portable lighting kits, camcorders, and archived tapes of HRTV productions. Hi-8 camcorders, lavalier microphones. tripods, intercoms, editing decks, a Panasonic MX-10 switcher, and digital video title generator were the key production components. A Panasonic LCD projector was mounted on the screening room ceiling. The switcher, title generator, four video monitors, and the intercom master were installed on a large roll-about cart - a "studio on wheels" - that could be taken around the Harvard campus for multi-camera recording of university events. The Great Performances series, which documented university events, produced a modest income for HRTV.

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