Grand Rapids Community Media Center

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Welcome to GRTV

GRTV provides a televised forum for legal, non-commercial speech; a place where you can express yourself creatively at little or no cost.

We offer training programs to certify members to use our tools—which range from cameras to editing suites to studio production facilities. And we transmit your programming across Grand Rapids on cable channel 25. Get started.

PLEASE READ IF YOU ARE A STUDIO CERTIFIED MEMBER

For the safety of all staff and members, GRTV has instituted a new studio lighting policy.  Any and all lighting changes must be directly supervised by staff to ensure proper safety procedures are followed.
To help you out, here are some good lighting safety tips:

#1 Keep Your Gloves On

Lighting instruments get very hot very fast.  The best policy is to always wear safety gloves while touching any part of the fixture.  If you don’t have any, a pair of thick garden gloves can help.

#2 Safety Chains

All parts of the light should have a safety chain attaching it to the lighting grid.  No matter how tightly you secured that light or how certain you are that it isn’t going to fall, it only takes one bump from a ladder or stage prop to injure someone.  It turns out your mom was right all along, it truly is “better to be safe than sorry.”

#3 Ladder Placement

Always place your ladder behind the light and facing away from your talent so you can properly focus the light without reaching around the fixture.

#4 Think Safety

Safety should always be on your mind when it comes to lighting.  While working on a studio shoot, nothing is more dangerous than working with lights.  Treat them with respect and care.

Thank you to all who helped make GRTV's maiden voyage of the new media lab a success at this year's Festival of the Arts.  Thank you for standing on shaky scaffolding, operating a camera on the scissor lift during 25 mph winds, directing for the first time, scrambling during a short rain shower, and making sure the graphics were spelled correctly! Without you, GRTV's 30 hours of taping would not have been possible.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Looking for some information that would help you make a better video?  Check out our video tutorials at www.archive.org.  Just go to the website and search for "grtv video tutorial" and you'll find a list of videos on everything from how to use different shot types to the basics of good 3 point lighting.  But don't stop at the tutorials, you'll also find a lot of GRTV programming available on-line too.

Just in the nick of time for Festival the new portable production studio equipment has arrived.  The system uses the NewTek Tricaster, with graphics, slow-mo replay, recording and distribution of the production.  The cameras are JVC GY-HD250's with the studio package.  We are very excited to premier the system at Festival.

GRTV may look a little different lately.  A new server based playback system was installed just before the new year.  All the shows you see on GRTV are playing back from a file on a computer now instead of a DVD or tape.  The Tightrope SX4 has 4 terabytes of memory and is much more reliable than the previous system.  Many of you remember the racks of tape decks that filled the master control room and staff cueing shows at all times of the day.   Now we upload programs to the server and can do it days or weeks in advance.  Another benefit the server brings to the channels is the interactivity between the graphics computers and the playback information.  Program schedules are accurate and up to date at all times.  In the future we'll be able to take shows right from your flash drive and save you the cost of a DVD or DV tape.

New board member and GVSU Professor, Kim Roberts, has prepared a list of items every video producer should have on hand.  

"These items are good to have on hand in your media production “ditty” bag.  We don’t recommend going out and buying all of these items at once.  Just keep adding to your collection.  You can “Google” video ditty bags and many styles/options will come up.  Buy one you can afford now or make one out of a bag you own.  Slowly your collection will outgrow your bag and you’ll be ready to invest in a professional bag that suits your needs."

The "Diddy Bag" list is available for download.

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At the annual membership meeting on August 15th Byron Strickland was named GRTV's voluteer of the year.  This was Byron's second time winning, he and Charles Bennet shared the honor last year.  All of us at GRTV want to thank Byron for all his hard work and dedication.  Volunteers are the core of a public access tv station and we couldn't do it without them.

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