7The director sits in her studio eyrie. A delectable bank of monitors with live video feeds awaits selection at her whim. “Fade to four then go in close on three please cameramanI and cut!” We know the language, but we’ve never had the opportunity to use it in context, until now. Yes, that visceral “in-the-moment-learning” opportunity of recording, cueing, editing and running your own TV studio, once a joy reserved for the few, now looks as if it could be open to any school. Channel Storm, a software company in Israel has launched Live Channel Pro, a piece of software that lets you run your own TV station across a standard school network.

I know how it feels because I’ve been running my own channel across the office network over the last two days, and it’s wonderful. I start my broadcast on the Mac in the office then stroll downstairs and tune in on any of the PCs to watch the clip being broadcast. Live Channel Pro’s objective is to replace a television studio, enabling anyone to produce and broadcast live media over a local network or out on to the Internet, and it looks like it might be the first step in a media revolution.

Instead of using banks of monitors, the software allows you to view all your picture options as thumbnail images in the media browser on your screen. Thumbnails are allocated to all media imported into the software for broadcast. The media used can include still images, PowerPoint slides, animations from Macromedia Flash software, sound files and pre-recorded video clips stored in Apple’s QuickTime format, as well as the live feed from two video cameras. One larger window denotes the broadcast that is currently taking place and you simply queue the clips you want and the transition you require when you move between them.

This means you could broadcast a bit of recorded video from the school sports on a Saturday, then cut to live camera to announce this week’s assembly theme before popping up a series of pictures with music from the performing arts faculty and pictures drawn in art over the previous weeks. A microphone is also supported for voice-overs and live narration: “Now we go over live to the science lab where a rather interesting experiment is taking place.”

As with any breakthrough technology the possibilities are endless because human creativity is involved. The software supports the new digital video camcorders via Apple’s built-in FireWire ports, but will also work with older camcorders if they can be connected via the USB port.

The software runs on the Apple Mac platform and requires only an iMac G3 computer or any later model with 64Mb of memory. It’s hard to believe that this can give you the functionality of a complete television studio on a desktop or laptop computer without any additional hardware, but it does, handling all production and broadcasting steps in a single software application. Setting up is straightforward.

Until now an expensive hardware and software solution known as a “streaming server” was required on the Macintosh. The breakthrough with Live Channel Pro is that it includes its own streaming software, known as Live Render, with the package and its able to operate with very small amounts of memory (that which was expensive and complex has been built in and hidden). The second clever move is that the software is built around Apple’s QuickTime format for managing digital video. This means that to tune into a broadcast from any network computer, all you need is the free QuickTime player that’s available from www.apple.comquicktime if its not already on your machine. The QuickTime player works equally well on Mac or PC and the broadcast appears in a small window, around 240 by 180 pixels.

Don’t get the impression we are talking full-screen broadcasting here - it’s small windows for now - but I’m not sure that’s a disadvantage. Tuning into the broadcast on four network stations was no problem and the lip synchronisation and sound quality was very good. Up to 30 separate views should be possible with the standard software. Overlays are also supported so that the school TV channel logo can sit discreetly in the corner giving a house style to all broadcasts.

A live microphone option is built in for the studio announcements: “And now we go to our Saturday grandstand to see the edited highlights from school netball and football team performances.”

There are three different ways of broadcasting over a network and if you want to you can also use the software to go live on the Internet. Schools will be most interested in in-house work to start with and the choice is between:

* Streaming - where each user can demand their own stream at any time;

* Unicasting - where you broadcast to one specific computer; and * Multicasting - where any number of users can tune into the same multicast stream.

Most school networks should support multicasting and it’s the most effective way of using the network for broadcasting. All three approaches leave no media on the viewer’s machine, so it’s also a very efficient way of sharing media without filling hard drives. Finding out which way works best for you will involve a learning curve, but it’s one worth having.

We have had television studios before of course, but last time they defined their environment, requiring specialist hardware and equipment. Live Channel Pro builds the same educational potential into the ubiquitous computer network.

Live Channel Pro

Special BETT price: pound;309 plus VAT for education from AT Computers, 48 Barton Street, Tewkesbury GL20 5PR.

Tel: 01684 291112

Email:sales@atcomputers.co.uk

www.channelstorm.com