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GSE Video Lab

GSE is proud to offer advanced video and multimedia services and equipment to students, faculty, and staff. The video lab is open Monday through Friday 9:30-5 and hosts an array of video and computer equipment to help you enhance your work and study at GSE. Our video staff personnel is sometimes out on location doing project work, so please contact us in advance for access to a workstation to do video work or for help with the technology.

GSE students may reserve cameras and tripods for shooting their classrooms, transfer their video between formats like Hi8 and VHS, easily create DVDs, or get help converting video for the web or a PowerPoint presentation.

Faculty and staff can request that the Video Lab shoot an important event, convert videos from tapes to DVDs, or even have the Video Lab create multimedia presentations or edit video for classroom or case study use. We will accommodate requests to the extent our staffing and resources allow.

For further questions, see the Video Lab FAQ.

The following is a list of equipment available upon request:

Cameras & Mobile Video Equipment:

EQUIPMENT LOAN

Video cameras may be on loan to students for 1 week increments and must be returned by 5pm at the end of that week. (Students provide their own tapes)

  • 1x – (Hi-Def Hard Drive Recorder) JVC GZ-HD5u
  • 1x – (Hard Drive Recorder) JVC GZ-MG555u
  • 5x – (Mini-DV) Sony DCR-HC52
  • 5x – (Dual Flash Memory) Canon HF M32 Camcorder
  • 2x – (Mini-DV) Sony DGR-HC42
  • 4x – (Digital8) Sony TRV340
  • 4x – Sony Digital Audio Recorders

Tripods and batteries are available for use with each camera upon request.

Students, faculty, and staff may reserve one of the above cameras for a week at a time. Please bring Penn ID with you in order to complete the sign-out form.

  • One (1) VX2000 Sony MiniDV camcorder with 3 chip color processing.
  • One (1) 5 piece Lowel professional light kit - various lights for all shooting situations

Charles Washington is available during video lab hours to assist with any projects or studies that could benefit from video or multimedia enhancement, to help convert camcorder video tape into more useful formats like VHS, CD-R, or DVD-R, or for guidance on how to use any of the above software applications. Please contact  charles@gse.upenn.edu.

More information about the specific applications the video lab offers can be found online at each vendor's website.

MEDIA DUPLICATION & TRANSFER SERVICES

Students can duplicate their own videos (DVD to DVD) in the computer classroom (Rm. 124)  or bring them to the video lab to be done by staff. The video lab can also duplicate VHS to VHS. We cannot make copies of any copyrighted material unless it is currently known and proven to be now public domain.

The video lab can transfer the following formats to DVD:

HDV, HI8, Digital8, DVCam, MiniDV, Compact-VHS and VHS.

Media brought to the video lab for duplication or transfer immediately are placed in the video lab’s work queue with all other projects currently in progress in the order they are received.

Students are to provide their own media (DVDs and/or tapes) for these services.

(Tapes and DVDs can be acquired locally at Radio Shack on 40th Street or CVS at 34th Street for about $5-10 each )

VIDEO EDITING

The video lab currently has 2 editing machines (1 PC and 1 Mac). The PC uses Sony Vegas Video (v.9e) and the Mac has Final Cut Studio 7 . If you are unable to get time in the video lab to do your editing, you can visit the Van Pelt Library which has video editing facilities. visit http://wic.library.upenn.edu/wicfacilities/lending.html

We encourage students to purchase a removable hard drive (40GB minimum) if they anticipate editing their own videos, as the lab doesn’t have the extra storage capacity needed to accommodate student video projects while they are editing them.

NOTE: Any media brought into the video lab needs to be well labeled and contact information must be provided with it. Unlabeled DVDs and tapes are often lost, recycled, or even trashed if left for an unreasonable amount of time.