For the 19th episode of Reclaim Today Tim and I sat down with old colleague and good friend Andy Rush, who in what seems like another lifetime was part of the UMW DTLT “dream team.” Fortunately we’ve been able to keep in touch on and off these last five years, where he has been keeping himself busy at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida working as a Course Media Developer doing what he does best: all things video. As you may have noticed, Tim and I have been playing quite a bit with streaming video for things like KaraOERoke, ds106.tv, and the like. We are interested in doing even more, and given we have a ton of office space given the construction work for Reclaim Arcade was scaled back significantly. So, what do you do? Take the empty conference room and build a ReclaimTV station. And who do you call? Your friendly neighborhood New Media Speicalist: Andy “feel the” Rush!
So, this discussion is basically broken up into two parts:
1) us reviewing the limits and possibilities of the high-end TV studio Andy helped design at UMW for the Convergence Center. It is without a doubt an impressive space, but one of the things the discussion comes around to is that video game streaming has highlighted the array of open source tools for streaming and fairly cheap hardware that allows you to build a quite impressive “TV” studio on the cheap.
2) at around the 30 minute mark Andy discusses how he created a flexible, cheaper studio with a few basic features like a good mic, lighting, and the Black Magic ATEM Mini switcher (or Mini Pro or Mini ISO) to name a few you would be well on your way to a pretty impressive setup. Hopefully Andy will blog a more detailed list of all the things he was playing with in this video, but if you go to around 45 minutes Andy begins his tour and takes you through and names each piece of equipment.
You pricing and mileage may vary, but if you already have a decent camera and a fairly robust laptop, you can probably build a solid studio for $1000-$1500, which would be a big jump for someone doing it on their own, but for an edtech group or wanna-bes like ReclaimTV, that is a very manageable range. So, I am sure Tim is already ordering equipment for our nascent studio, and we promised Andy we would have another chat when we were further along and he can update us on the next phase of his work this semester: building a kit that faculty and students can easily use that is not necessarily just one big button 
