 Hi everyone, we are so happy to be here at the annual conference 2022 and our talk today is titled Post-Pandemic Video, Finding the Neesh and Filling the Gap. My name is Grony McGraw and I work in the Centre for Learning and Teaching and I'm a member of the Learning Technologies team here and I'm Bloneth McSherry so I'm on the Learning Text team too and between us we run and manage this studio facility on campus. Well what is our campus? Good question. So up until recently we were called the National University of Ireland Galway but in the last week we have been completely rebranded and have a new identity as of September 1st. We are now the University of Galway, also called the Galway because we're a bilingual institution even and we're based in the west of Ireland. Yeah so that's hot off the presses, our exciting news here. So today's talk what we want to do is explore how we used video pre-pandemic, what we do now that's different and how our studio space has allowed us to do that. We'll explore how we work with colleagues and how we manage the production process from planning through to post-production and hopefully we'll share a few tips and ideas about what's worked and what hasn't worked and what challenges we've had and perhaps there might be a few snippets that you can share and learn from and apply to your own context. For a little bit of background on the studio just to let you know that the studio that we're talking about today has been around for 20 years and then I suppose in the last three years we've had a complete refurbishment, a complete overhaul of the physical space and the technology within the studio and we did this in collaboration with our department of journalism. So if we head back three years 2020, start of 2020 we had this new space, we had it as a collaboration, we were ready to go, we'd been trained, so exciting and we all know what happens next. We had COVID so we were off campus I guess nearly a year and a half then this time last year pretty much exactly, we were already excited again take two off we go into the studio. Two weeks into term we had a big cyber attack on campus so everything was down, we had no network, no access to our systems and this had a huge effect on the studio because cameras are networked between our control room and our recording space that's how all of the communication occurs. So it was not until the end of the year start of 2022 that we were really in a position to get back on campus. But there's always a silver lining and we have taken this as an opportunity to re-examine our role promoting and facilitating the production of in-house video guided by good pedagogic practices and strong production values. So really I guess the structure that we have now is we think of our recordings on campus as with three levels really. So we have our level one recording so that might be basic lecture capture, simple teaching aids, student assessments, these are managed locally by lecturing staff and then we have level two recordings as we say so that might be a video conference within reusable e-learning materials lessons, might be simple promotional videos or research dissemination that do require the input of a learning technologist and these are managed at the college level which has only really been possible because of the recruitment of additional colleagues. Then thirdly we have our level three recording so that's where we come in and where the studio comes in. So these are high profile, high impact type of recordings where it's really important that the output would be really high end, you need that strong production values and that it's worth putting in the work that that requires. Let's take a quick tour of the studio. So we have two rooms within the studio, the control room and the recording room or the studio floor as we call it. The control room is where we facilitate the recordings and there are a few key pieces of technology in here. We have the TC1 tricaster and this is our vision mixer, our studio in a box and where we can control the cameras and bring in lots of different content. We also have the lighting desk where we can control the lighting that is ceiling mounted on the studio floor and also the LED lighting behind the silica backdrop. We have our machine that we can upload our script to and that links to our auto prompter on the studio floor and we have our audio desk. In the recording room or the studio floor we have a number of different areas that we kind of think of as broken down into zones. We have the news desk zone. We have the green screen zone. We have the e-glass zone and we also have the ceiling imaging camera which is a wolf vision camera. We also have a roadcaster and this is an all-in-one audio solution for recording podcasts and audio. So that's that's a tour of the studio. So I guess the next thing that we will chat you quickly about is how has it all worked? What's worked? What's not? Challenges and tips and what's next with us? Yeah so let's start with some positive things. So I suppose from the tour you'll have noticed that we have a whole load of new technology and that's been the biggest change for us to have this great technology and equipment that's meant that we're able to give a much much better output. It's of course been a challenge to upscale and get to know all of this equipment but it's certainly meant that we can offer a much much better quality content and output to our colleagues who is who are working with us. It's given us lots more options so as long as I mentioned earlier we're really really open to trying new things but these options come with you know a bit of thought and also some of them work and some of them don't work. Another positive thing is that we've found that we've both had a really big appetite to come back so we've told you about the things that have held us back and similar to yourselves I suppose. It's just meant we really really when we came back wanted to get going we really were ready to to start the studio and make sure everything went well and that appetite came from both sides. Our colleagues who started to come into us with queries on how they could use the studio they were really really enthusiastic and really really wanted to get going too and you know the new equipment, the new space they were really really happy to see this and excited and it stirred up lots of new ideas for them. Yeah and this is a fun space to work. We enjoy it you know it's interesting projects and everything is new and it's always different so we were really happy to get back. But of course there's been challenges along the way a few of them we've mentioned. We've had COVID, we've had the cyber attack. One of the other big challenges has been there's so many systems in here that it's been a really steep learning curve I would say technically and we would both be very used to learning new systems and working with lots of types of systems but this has been so much to learn and pretty quickly to you know we might have a staff member who has a fully new type of scenario and really need to figure out how to do everything but yeah lots to learn but it's great. Yeah I would say so and that in itself just meant managing our time because we've become more dedicated to the studio so because it's been completely overhauled it isn't something that we can come and go from. We really need to devote you know time to it. We schedule the days that were in the days that were not. We work on our workflows to ensure that we can get from the planning stage to the post-production stage so we could be in here for a day or two recording but we really need to know that if staff have a deadline if there's a course or a module that needs that content we need to ensure that we can get to the post-production stage for a finished piece of content for that module. Yeah we've also really tried to work and this is ongoing I guess on policies and procedures so yeah how best to do things the planning process the post-production process so that we can work together with staff and they understand when they should use the studio how it works and so that expectations are set in a manageable way on both ends. So a few tips we might want to pass on to you. So firstly really important to know when to use the studio when you can do things at home and when to advise staff either way and to manage that. Secondly I guess the importance of planning that's huge and again that staff will recognise that this is not a you book as you're in on the day and you leave and that's all there is to it that it's a process and the better planning that there is the better outcome better output that they will have and again I guess linked into this is scripting we use not have an autoprompter in our old studio but we have here certainly with the shorter type of recordings having a script I think and I think we both think has been really really useful to get that professional output that we all want. Yeah I think so I suppose the script is a new thing so that we fact that we ensure and we try to really strongly encourage the staff to do that so it's meant that before staff come to the studio a number of things might have happened we've shared with them the things that we'd like to get from them before they come we shared guidelines what not to wear what to wear and also another thing that we found really works well for us is that we've offered them to come in for a tour so this is nice because we've all been you know working from home for so long and there's colleagues that we haven't met in ages so the tour is a chance to I suppose meet each other in person which is exciting in itself but also it and that expectation piece is met again the staff are in here they're not saying to a school can you explain to me what a green screen is we're standing in front of the green screen we can turn on the tech you know we can show them a little bit about how a background works and we can have a chat with them and as Blonde said we both really enjoy this it's fun for us so having met them in advance you know it makes it easier on the recording day too obviously it takes a little bit of time but I think building it in in the long run makes things much easier and one much more smoothly for us in the studio. Yeah I think two last tips firstly post-production takes time and you need to you need to manage that so we need to let our staff know and know what's their deadline how will that work how will we fit the post-production in we can't do 20 recordings a week and turned around the 20 the 20 finished files in the week too so that's you can try though you can try and then our last tip is to try new things and not be scared of it so if a staff comes with an idea we're no idea how to do it we try and figure it out and we try and stretch ourselves in here so that we can get really good outputs and use new tech in in ways that we might not have thought of and not to be not to be scared of that not to not to stick with what we know but to really stretch our our goals in here. If you have any questions we'd be so happy to answer them we'll share our contact details and if anyone wants to get in touch with us if you have feedback if you might be working on a refurb of your studio you have any further questions about any of the tech we'd be so happy to hear from you it's great to share and it's great to learn from each other.