DMC Equipment

Podcasting in the DMC Audio Studio

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Rice professor Scott Solomon started a podcast of Wild World with Solomon in January 2023. Several of the podcast episodes were recorded in the DMC Audio Studio, such as Episode 7 – Launching to Space with Scott Parazynski. Tune in to listen to the interesting stories. “What separates a decent podcast from a good podcast is the audio quality, and you want to start with a good quality recording. DMC audio studio is very useful.” He said.

Katherine Wu, a Rice undergraduate student, interviewed Dr. April Carpenter, a physical therapist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, in Fall 2020. The interview was conducted over Zoom. April recorded her voice on her iPhone. Katherine’s voiceover was recorded in the DMC Audio Studio. The published podcasting episode is available to view and listen to at https://www.metastasispodcast.com/the-martini.

Both of them use the recording with GarageBand.

Rice professor Tomás Q. Morín was interviewed by Arts & Letters Radio in the DMC Audio Studio

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Rice English professor Tomás Q. Morín was interviewed about his most recent publication Machete by Arts & Letters Radio in the DMC Audio Studio on Nov. 18, 2021. The podcast episode Machete was Published on January 27, 2023 and is available to hear at  https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/show/arts-letters/2023-01-27/machete.

Portrait of Professor Tomás Q. Morín
Professor Tomás Q. Morín. Picture from Arts & Letters Radio website.

Arts & Letters Radio is located in Little Rock, AR, and is a regional NPR affiliate program that airs in the mid south.  Its podcast has a large national following. They have a total of about 500,000 listens a year. DMC was thrilled to facilitate the interview. When scheduling the interview, we mentioned that a Rice English professor was ever interviewed by BBC in 2018 and the interview was recorded in the DMC Audio Studio, Mary Ellen Kubit, the Producer at Arts & Letters Radio commented, “BBC is the industry standard, so we have great confidence on Rice’s end. ”

The interview was conducted remotely. The host at Arts & Letters Radio just needs the DMC to record the subject side of the interview . The host will record their side of the interview and they will do a tape sync.

The host called the professor over his cellphone. To have a clean audio recording of Prof. Morín’s answers, no bleeding from the host’s end, below is our settings.

To have the host and the professor to see each other during the interview, we also started a Zoom meeting. But the Zoom meeting was only used for the video. On our end, the audio for the Zoom meeting was disconnected.

FOTO 205/210 Use of the Photography/Video Studio

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Images courtesy of Zeisha Bennett

Photography Lecturer Angela Chen brought her FOTO 205 and FOTO 210 classes to the DMC for a demonstration on use of the lights and backdrops in the Photography/Video Studio. The new seamless paper backdrops and high output lights give a lot of flexibility and allow for creativity in lighting schemes, which a number of the students made use of for their projects.

Photo/Video Studio as a Resource for Department Headshots

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Student being photographed in a lighting studio

Student portrait with a blue background

As of Summer 2022, the DMC’s Photo/Video Studio has undergone a drastic transformation. We have acquired 6 high output LED lights with large soft boxes and white, black, and dark blue seamless paper backdrops which make the studio ideal for professional quality headshots. Using a simple 3 point lighting setup, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department took headshots for the incoming graduate students for their department website. The studio can be reserved up to one month in advance just as you would a piece of DMC equipment using the self-booking feature in Primo. Photo/Video Studio Reservation Page

If you have any questions about how to use the equipment in the studio, ask DMC staff or refer to our Photo/Video Studio written guides

ELEC 305 Spring 2017 Videos in Rice Digital Scholarship Archive

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The DMC staff had the pleasure of assisting the Spring 2017 “Intro to Physical Electronics” (ELEC 305) class in creating instructional videos! In the “whiteboard animation” videos the students created, you will see various clever utilizations of software and hardware available in the DMC. Examples include our AverVision document camera, Nikon DSLR, and using Microsoft OneNote in conjunction with screen capturing software. All the videos have been made available in Rice Digital Scholarship Archive.

The “Thermoelectrics” video was made with AverVision document camera and can be viewed here.

“The Ugly OLEDuckling” video was with OneNote and OBS screen capturing software. It can be viewed here.

Click here to see the rest of the videos deposited in the Archive!

Please refer to the previous blog post to get more information on how to create whiteboard animations like these!

Several Approaches to Creating a Whiteboard Animation

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A “Whiteboard Animation” is a great way to bring some fun into instructional material. Although it may seem daunting, creating a whiteboard animation can be easy – and you don’t need to be an artist to make it effective. Here at the DMC, we’ve created some guides and examples on how to create a whiteboard animation using various methods.

PowerPoint

You can use PowerPoint to make a whiteboard animation without ever leaving the application. PowerPoint has built in drawing, animation, and recording functions. To learn more, you may read the guide here.

We have also put together a two-part video tutorial that you can watch below:

Document Camera

In the DMC audio studio, we have an AverVision document camera that can be used to quickly capture drawing and voiceover. There is a written guide here and a video tutorial you can watch below:

DLSR Camera

The most advanced way of creating a whiteboard animation would be to use a DSLR camera with studio lighting. Although it is the most difficult method, using a DSLR allows for higher quality and more control over lighting.

 

There are many more methods than the three listed above. You can see a brief overview of these other methods here. Please visit our YouTube channel to view example videos we’ve created, and feel free to contact us for further assistance or questions!

DMC Supported Houston Folk Music Archive Oral Histories Project

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The video interviews with musicians were recorded in DMC Video/Photography Studio using studio equipment.

DMC staff helped to set-up the equipment, background, and lighting for each interview conducted. Training on video editing with Final Cut Pro X and iMovie was offered to the staff at Woodson Research Center. Consultation on media transfer, editing, exporting, compression, transcoding was provided when requested.

Below is the equipment set-up in the studio:

For more information about the project and the video interivews, please see https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/94056