With standard definition (SD) taking its final breaths on the video market, hi-definition (HD) video is lighting up college classrooms across the country.
During an interview David Kirk, Vice President of Epiphan Video, it was apparent that HD video is taking higher education institutions by storm and growing in demand.
To explain the increasing demand of HD video to the higher education vertical, we cover its significance through three “R’s”:
Richer images
At first glance, HD video brings beautiful images to students and instructors.
HD video allows viewers to get up close and personal with intricate image details, and enables instructors to show pictures on a larger screen that they would normally be unable to show, such as microscope slides.
“It gives you a crisper image than SD,” Kirk says. “More than that, there’s lots of detail, especially depending on the subject matter. A lot of the stuff that gets presented is basic text on a PowerPoint, and that’s fairly easy with almost any technology, but really, if you want to give [students] a richer experience, you want to be able to bring things in, like microscopes, and highly detailed, rich imagery and video content.”
Resolution improvements
In addition to image richness, HD video comes with a cleaner-looking resolution.
The improved resolution quality enables instructors to include lots of text and pictures without having to worry about their content being compressed and distorted by the time it reaches students.
“When you’re dealing with SD video, by the time that detail gets compressed, and then sent out to the student and decompressed, it just doesn’t have the level of detail you’d need to convey any real visual content, as well as fine text,” Kirk says. “With SD resolution, if professors use fine text, it gets so blurred and muted to the point where, when the student is trying to ingest that stuff, it’s not clear… With HD resolution, and the modern codecs that goes with it really makes that classroom experience richer and real.”
Reaching remote students
One of the biggest plusses to HD video is being able to present good quality content for distance learners.
In the SD days, instructors were often stuck watering down the content used for in-class students to reach distance learning students. That meant distance learning students missed out on a high-resolution graph, or received blurry text, leading to confusion and frustration.
HD video means instructors “don’t have to prepare their content thinking, “how is this going to be compressed,” and, “is a remote student going to be able to see this?” Kirk says. “They can put the content as they would for the existing screen in their lecture hall that they know is high resolution and good quality, and… they don’t want to have to dumb that down for live students to give content that will compress nicely for the distance learners. HD resolution enables professors to take advantage of the HD resolution in the classroom and not worry about the remote students not being able to see that level of detail or clarity.”
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