Hofstra University Invests in Studio Upgrades to Experiment with 4K Capabilities

This past summer, Hofstra University “ripped out its router.”

The university recently transitioned its production studios inside The Lawrence Herbert School of Communication to HD equipment, and invested in eight new broadcast cameras.

The goals of Hofstra’s rebuilt video infrastructure and freshly installed cameras were to bring the facilities up to speed, and experiment with 4K capabilities.

Joe Valerio, chief video engineer at Hofstra’s Herbert School, says the new Hitachi SK-UHD4000 4K broadcast cameras are replacing Ikegami HK388W wide ban triax cameras. He says the old cameras functioned off of the studios’ former analog backbone, and needed to be upgraded.

Hitachi SK-UHD4000 broadcast camera.

“We decided to go with HD cameras because we have to go HD first of all, but we’ve also picked Hitachi for a variety of reasons,” Valerio says. “They have a lot of flexibility in their inputs and outputs as far as providing power for teleprompters, they have a lot of return video paths, they get support prompters and newsfeeds at the camera head…Technically, they fulfill everything we need to do.”

The decision to move to an HD network took Hofstra three years – this included visits to tradeshows, asking for support from administrators and pulling the trigger when the price was right.

“It’s almost like an arms’ race with technology,” says Tim Fehmel, facilities manager/director of operations at the Herbert School. “You have to live with it for a while, then another technology comes out. Then another university builds something else and another university builds something else and by the time you get around to catching up, something else is out there. We really wanted to build an HD facility that would put us on par with any university across the nation.”

Hofstra University completed the studios and camera upgrade in-house.

This summer, Valerio and his team removed 30 years’ worth of wire out of the production studios to make room for the new equipment.

“We had to rip out about 30 years of accumulated wire, and we had to replace triax camera controls with fiber,” Valerio says. “But this is a good thing because fiber is as future proof as we know right now.”