The Telecommunications Technology Department is enhancing its curriculum by acquiring a digital video computer editing lab. Over the past 5 years, the use of high-speed computers in specialized configurations for manipulating video, print, and sound has rapidly come into its own. In combination with sophisticated software packages, these computer systems have moved into increasing use in the teleproduction industry, where they can be made to perform a variety of tasks, including the creation of educational multimedia CD-ROMs for interactive training. Acquiring a digital video computer editing lab makes it possible to assign students digital video experiments in four current courses: Video Techniques, Video Production, Electronic Media Systems, and Informational Video Design. Through these courses, students are learning the technical and methodological processes by which video images are conceived, captured, and edited temporally using analog tape processes. With the digital lab in place for experiments, students are able to experience for themselves how transforming analog video to digital form makes possible highly complex manipulations performed rapidly and with perfectly controllable precision, control of variations of almost any image parameter through software, layering of images and sounds in multiple generations without quality degradation, and design of variations without destruction of prior versions.
