The Television Production BA Honours course at Westminster is well equipped with professional standard equipment and facilities.
The course is well stocked across the whole production process:
Pre-production
We have access to a wide range of production planning rooms and classroom space throughout the Harrow Campus and access to rooms on other University sites in Central London. The majority are equipped with computers and viewing facilities.
The University also contains a 60-seater preview theatre on the Harrow Campus and the Cinema where the Lumiere brothers projected their first public screening.
Production
Students will have access to a wide range of camera equipment. Standard issue throughout the course are Canon XF305 or Sony Z5E cameras which record in HDV formats. A wide selection of sound recording equipment, tripods, mounts and other materials are also available for hire from our video stores.
Our site in Harrow has two 2000ft double height studios one of which is a Broadcast standard multi-camera television studio. A substantial investment was recently made to upgrade the studio and control room hardware and software, allowing for connectivity over fiber, IP and MADI systems. The studio itself comes equipped with four Hitachi Z-HD5500 High Dynamic Range Broadcast cameras with CueScript prompters mounted on Vinten pedestals. Our Production Gallery is outfitted with cutting-edge hardware from Ross Video allowing for integrated recording, graphics, communications and playback facilities utilising the industry’s most advanced AVC Intra 100 video encoding technology. The industry-standard Ross Carbonite vision mixing desk can seamlessly handle cameras, real-time ‘XPression’ motion graphics and pre-recorded media with ease as all studio components are networked together and designed to be fully interoperable. This means that any single or multi-frame video source or any single or multichannel audio source (including crew communication utilising RTS talkback panels) can be routed to any destination, depending on the specific requirements of any given production. The studio is also fitted with an array of Arri lighting fixtures controlled by user-programmable DMX software.
Down the hallway, our 'Multi-Media Newsroom' features an infinity cove green-screen studio with a dedicated multi-camera control room. Together these enable us to use real-time virtual-set technology to broadcast live directly to the Internet or into the main TV studio mix as required.
Post-production
As standard the University uses the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of editing tools, with the option to also utilize Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer when required. The Television department has access to 13 edit suites in M Block including a fully High Definition capable suite. There are also approximately 80 Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express facilities available around the campus also with access to the Adobe Creative Cloud.
Our staff offer certified workshops throughout the year for all levels of students with some higher end workshops available in the more advanced applications.