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r/videoproduction • … • u/CaptainJAmazing

I run a university school of business's video studio. How do I make myself "indispensable?"

So I manage a smallish video studio at the business school of a major private university. This place was really built (just a few years ago) for recording lectures. Studio has a green screen, a Canon XF405 camera, a tripod, a rudimentary ATEM switcher (both physical and digital) with Extron recorders, an audio board, a touchscreen, and a lightboard. Maybe I don't get quite as many lectures as I used to, but that has been made up for by our recently adding webinars. We've never had quite as much traffic as we'd like. Especially right now, when only summer classes are in session and it's slow. The boss is a little worried that some higher-up will go on a budget-cutting spree one day and eliminate this studio entirely, and my position with it. What services/tasks can I add to the studio to make it and my position more indispensable?

Some more important tidbits of info:

* Studio is for faculty/staff only. Students in here must be on assignment from a faculty member. * It's mostly only for the School of Business, not the University at large. * A big thing I do that everyone seems to like is condensing sports highlights down to about 6 minutes and putting them in the corner of the hallway signs. That's appreciated, but not essential. Plus right now we're in the summer drought between baseball ending and football beginning. Some evergreen stuff will appear there starting in a few days. * Boss is not interested in putting an ad for the studio where the sports highlights normally go, mostly because of how it will only pertain to a small percentage of the people seeing it (facstaff vs. students). Would be nice to find something to put there, though. * Related to that, I do feel like a lot of facstaff are, consciously or not, unaware that this studio exists. * I think we lost a certain amount of traffic due to Covid teaching professors how to do a bare-bones video lecture on Zoom. * Boss wanted me to learn a program like OBS Studio or StreamYard to spice up webinars, but neither work with Zoom, which 100% of our streaming clients have used so far. Boss thinks they might be convinced to stream to another platform, but I'm not so sure. I can't even name a time someone with this school has used anything but Zoom. Also, StreamYard seems to have very little to offer that Zoom doesn't already have. * Boss is not interested in putting faculty highlights from the school website in the empty space. * I've taken the camera out and recorded a few minor school events, like when local businesses put booths in the downstairs commons area, with the intention of putting them in the corner of the hallway signs. Somehow they always just end up getting archived. It doesn't help that there aren't any events coming up that would work for that.

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