Star Studio Shines for Children in Hospital

Challenge:

Star Studio in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, broadcasts 12 shows and shoots about 10 hours of original programming every week. This studio is highly specialized for a particular purpose. The target audience is hospitalized children, and each program is geared to making their stay at Children’s Minnesota a bit easier. 

In one form or another, Star Studio has been a part of Children’s Minnesota since 1978. The current studio set-up opened in 2010 with HD equipment. Between the Minneapolis and St. Paul hospitals’ campuses, they’ve recorded over 3,000 shows since 2008. Recently, they upgraded their camera equipment for a better-quality broadcast on a limited budget.

Solution:

To broadcast the shows as well as stream them on the internet for patients who want to keep watching the shows from home, Star Studio has two studios, equipped with Vaddio® equipment: three RoboSHOT® 30 cameras, a RoboSHOT 20 UHD Camera with a OneLINK HDMI extension, OneLink Bridge, Quick-Connect™ CCUs, and a PPC Premier camera controller.

The RoboSHOT 20 UHD ptz camera provides the show’s main shot and provides broadcast-quality 4K images. One RoboSHOT 30 camera captures the audience from the front of the studio. Another is directly above the set for overhead shots. The third provides secondary coverage of the set. 

The Quick-Connect CCUs enable adjustment of AWB, red and blue gain, brightness, OPWB, gamma, chroma, detail, iris and gain. This aids in more accurate representation of the image and provides the abiliTy to color match and shade multiple cameras.

The CCUs also deliver high-quality HD video, power and control over Cat-5 cables. The outputs allow for flexibility in system design so they can broadcast and stream simultaneously.

The PPC Premier allows Ben Diger, Star Studio Broadcast Engineer, to pan, tilt and zoom each of the cameras during the show. Diger says the overall control of cameras has been very good, thanks to the PCC Premier’s precision joystick controller and ability to store and immediately recall camera settings with the simple touch of a button. 

Results:

Diger says their new RoboSHOT 20 UHD camera provides crisp 4K video footage, and realizes that how good the show looks is a vital consideration in today’s media environment.

“We want our content to be more compelling than mainstream programming, so having a good image is important,” he said.

Perhaps the best result is what happens with the children who are in the studio audience or watching from their rooms. Diger says the programming and interactivity of the call-in shows is often welcomed by parents.

“It’s something that is always surprising to parents. They say when the show is on and their child calls in, it may be the first time the child has smiled in weeks,” Diger said.