June '08 Social Event
On Saturday, June 21st, our new chapter President-Elect Rick Davis hosted a swim party and cookout at his home near the Dayton Mall.  Everyone who came had a great time - the food was delicious and the pool was wonderful - a refreshing and fun way to spend an early summer Saturday afternoon!  Many thanks to Rick for hosting our summer social event, and to our June Sponsor of the Month Panasonic.
 

May '08 Meeting
Every May, we take a virtual tour of the giant NAB Tradeshow that's held in Las Vegas in April.  This year, our NAB Review was held at the offices of ROSCOR Ohio in Sharonville.  After enjoying food graciously provided by our host, Rich LaRue presented his famous slide show of his and MVCC associate Carl Suchomel's trip to NAB.  Rich's slideshow and commentary are the next best way to experience NAB without being there, and a whole lot easier on the feet! 

After the slide show, ROSCOR Ohio president and our host Tom Navaro made a few introductory remarks, which were followed by presentations by reps from three major equipment suppliers.  Tom Shirilla of JVC, Tom Parrish of Panasonic and Jim Bales of Sony talked about their companys' new products, which featured a number of new lower-priced HD cameras and related equipment.  Following the three manufacturer presentation, Tom Navaro led a lively discussion about the NAB show and some topics from the attendees, including 2K vs. 4K video and the future of videotape in the evolving digital world.

Many thanks to Tom and his staff at ROSCOR Ohio for hosting our NAB Review meeting, and thanks to Industrial Video Corporation who was our May Sponsor of the Month.

Meeting Drawing - WE HAVE A WINNER!  Neil Sharrow from the University of Cincinnati RWC was in attendance when his name was drawn from the "golden bag of fortune" - and he pocketed a cool $110 just for attending the May meeting.  Congratulations, Neil!
 

April '08 Meeting
We welcomed the arrival of Spring by taking a road trip up to the SW Ohio countryside to visit Cedarville University.  There, Production Services Group Director Dave Winn gave us an overview of the well-equipped media facilities of this leading Baptist university.  His groud oversees the IMAG video support in the main chapel, video and audio production, and staging of large events such as commencement.  Although not in his group, WCDR-FM radio has a number of repeater transmitters to cover much of southern Ohio and surrounding states with their Christian programming.

Dave mentioned during his introductory presentation that Cedarville has a four year plant to replace and update all their major A-V equipment.  Dave took our MCA-I group into the huge 3500-seat chapel, which has multi-camera IMAG coverage with 2 large video projection screens.  We saw the open audio control area in the balcony with a large audio board and wireless mikes, and then went up to the video control room which houses the video control gear for the chapel IMAG system, as well as video editing system with Adobe Premiere.  Dave's production group also operates a full recording studio, but it was in use during our meeting and unavailable to tour.  Dave manages the staging of many large events, and has a 20' gib arm for breathtaking shots of commencements and other ceremonies.

Many thanks to Dave Winn of Cedarville University for hosting our April meeting and for providing the delicious food from Qdoba, and thanks to Tape Central who was our April Sponsor of the Month.
 

March '08 Meeting
In March, we visited Media Bridges - an award-winning public media and cable access facility in downtown Cincinnati.  Christian Appleby, Non-Profit Services Coordinator talked about all of the services that Media Bridges provides the community, including several public access CATV channels, video production for community-based programming, an on-line radio station (soon to add low-power broadcasting), and a bunch of Mac computers that can be used by community residents to access the internet.

After Christian's presentation, we took a tour of the facility, which is built in an old 4-story automobile dealership building which is owned by an architecture firm.  We saw the main TV studio and its control room, the edit and graphics carrels, the administrative offices, and a really cool outdoor patio on the third floor that overlooks downtown Cincinnati. 

Many thanks to Christian for the presentation and tour of the impressive Media Bridges facility, and thanks to Panasonic, our March Sponsor of the Month.
 

February '08 Meeting
With the big switchover to digital TV coming in a year (Feb. 19, 2009), we got an inside look at the issue by visiting WHIO-TV in Dayton (Channel 7).  Chief Engineer Chuck Eastman gave an extremely enlightening presentation about the impending switch from analog to digital broadcasting.  Chuck talked about the basics of digital TV (DTV), what you need to receive DTV off the air, multicasting on the DTV channels, the pros and cons of digital-to-analog converter boxes, and answered many questions from the meeting attendees in a lively discussion of DTV broadcasting.

After Chuck's presentation, we were treated to an extensive tour of the WHIO-TV facilities, including a visit to the news set in the main studio, the fully-automated news control room, the newsroom and its recently-upgraded video editing cubicles.

Thanks to our meeting host Morgan Howard of WHIO-TV, presenter Chuck Eastman, and to our February Sponsor of the Month Audio-Rabius for providing the meeting food and drinks.
 

January '08 Meeting
We started off 2008 by visiting the home of Norm Kern and Kern Video Productions in the Dayton suburb of Centerville.  KVP has recently installed a new video post production system based on Adobe Production Studio Premium, which centers on the editing software Adobe Premiere.  What makes this system so powerful is that Premiere can seamlessly interface with the other industry-standard Adobe programs like Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects.  Norm showed how Photoshop files can be placed on the Premiere editing timeline and manipulated as individual layers.  Also, vector graphics files created in Illustrator place on the timeline and rasterize to video on the fly while maintaining the image quality. 

When the video project is complete, Production Studio Pro makes it easy to create a variety of video files as well as burn DVDs without leaving the system.  Norm runs the software on a powerful new dual processor, dual core AMD computer equipped with Matrox Axio LE hardware subsystem and drivers.  Norm showed some samples of productions done on the Adobe system, including an industrial training video and some TV spots. Everyone in the audience was able to see what Norm was doing on the system thanks to a huge 60" Pioneer plasma video display brought in for the meeting by Dayton Media Technologies. 

Thanks to Norm Kern and Richard Penner of KVP for their presentation, and to Mike Makenzie of Dayton Media Technologies for bringing the large video display.  Also thanks to our January Sponsor of the Month Tape Central for providing the meeting food and drinks.

Read recaps of our 2007 chapter meetings