Full Sail University, located just outside Orlando, FL, has been an innovative educational leader for those pursuing careers in the entertainment industry since 1979. With over 32,000 alumni, graduate credits include work on OSCAR®, Emmy® and GRAMMY®-winning projects, best-selling video games, and the #1 grossing U.S. concert tours. Full Sail’s 190-acre campus and online education platform serves over 7,000 students from all 50 states and 65 countries.

Faculty from Full Sail University contacte Mobile Studios in January 2009 with an idea for training their students in multi-cam live production. Together, the two companies devised a solution that would allow three students to work with professional-level video switchers, honing the directorial skills learned in class and recording a “live” broadcast with multiple camera feeds. This system would give students the most effective hands-on training possible and even record a DVD of their work for review. To avoid devoting an entire classroom or lab to stationary equipment, Mobile Studios integrated the entire training studio into its innovative PortaCast® Live Production Systems, allowing this realistic learning experience to be completely mobile. This mock studio on wheels could be shared across the entire campus, so faculty could easily move the system to any classroom, being unpacked and set up for use in mere minutes.

Working closely with the Full Sail faculty, Mobile Studios designed a system consisting of three PortaCast® Live Production Systems and a PortaCast® Mobile Server System. This interactive training tool sends multiple video feeds from the Grass Valley Turbo HD servers in the PortaCast® Mobile Server System to each of the three Grass Valley Indigo switchers. The three students training on the units then independently switch the feeds to create their own program or are given switching commands by a student “director.” The video output from the switchers was then sent to a DVD burner, and the resulting disc was submitted for review and grading.