Dalarna University College is located in Falun and Borlänge, in Dalarna County, Sweden. The institution uses VirtualKaty 6 in their courses and teach students to use it in their projects.
Mikael Jorhult, a lecturer at Dalarna University, is an active VK user and he told us a little about the university and how they use one VirtualKaty 6 Network license for their lectures, and in computer labs and classrooms.
1. Hello Mikael, please tell us about yourself.
My name is Mikael and I’m a technician and a lecturer at the School of Media Studies at Dalarna University. I do support for our student as well as some teaching, mainly sound and music production using Pro Tools.
2. What programmes do you offer at Dalarna University?
We have 72 programmes covering multiple different fields covering everything from Business and Tourism Studies to Engineering and Media Production.
Our School of Media Studies offers six three-year bachelor degree programmes on campus in Audiovisual Production, Film & TV Production, Production of Commercials & Information Films, Scriptwriting for Film & TV and Sound & Music Production. Beyond those we also run a two-year college degree programme for Design of Music & Sound online. The media production programmes have around 350+ students in total.
3. Are there any apps or tools you can’t live without?
With the relatively large number of students we have working in our facilities and the fast pace tempo of media production today we need to make our rooms flexible to accommodate for as many different tasks as possible.
Using the Avid NEXIS storage platform to have your project instantly available in any room in the house is key. Also running as many apps as possible using floating seat licenses, such as the Virtual Katy 6 Network license, helps us move applications around where they’re needed at each moment.
4. What’s the classroom environment like?
The University’s Media House, where The School of Media Studies is located, is equipped with a Music Recording Studio, a TV Studio, an Audio-Visual Lab, a Recording Room for Foley, a Cinema, a room for Critical Listening, 30+ Editing Suites and multiple 20 seat computer labs for teaching software as well as a couple of regular lecture halls and classrooms.
Most of the students’ work is done in the editing suites and pre-production rooms that all have our basic set software including several different DAWs and Video Editing Software. These rooms, as well as all other facilities, are available to the students 24/7 and booked through an online booking system.
5. What type of software do students use in their projects?
The suite of software used is a bit different for each of our programmes so our students have access to several different applications for audio/video editing and a number of additional ones for certain tasks. We aim to provide as close to the same technology and software as possible to what’s used in the industry.
On the video post production side of things, we mainly use Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere for video editing while Avid Pro Tools is used to edit and record the audio. Our standard workflow also involves using Adobe After Effects for visual effects, Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve for color grading and VirtualKaty to conform the edits from Media Composer in Pro Tools.
6. You currently use VirtualKaty 6 in your classrooms. How is it used for teaching?
We teach VirtualKaty as part of our video post production workflow and introduce it during the course High End Film Production in the second year of studies. As with most software we teach it is introduced during a lecture in the course where the students are going to have to use it as part of their production workflow.
During the lectures the functionality VirtualKaty is presented and shown after which the students get to try it out for themselves with a given project.
To pass the course the students produce a short film using industry standard techniques and tools editing which include reconforming their Pro Tools sessions to the latest edits from Media Composer multiple times during the production.
7. Do you use it for multiple courses?
After being introduced to VK the students use it in their workflow for most production projects during their second and third year including their final ten-week display project which is their last and largest project before graduating.
8. Has the VirtualKaty 6 Network license improved your workflow? How does it compare with single VirtualKaty licenses?
We’ve been using VirtualKaty for reconforming our Pro Tools sessions to new edits from Media Composer for several years with great results but with the single licenses we had to limit in which rooms VirtualKaty was available.
With the large number of students, we need to make our rooms as flexible as possible so you can pick up your project in whatever room is available for the day. The VirtualKaty 6 Network license solves this by not tying the license to specific single computers or iLoks.
We also get similar benefits in that any computer lab can be used when teaching VirtualKaty to a class without having to move any licenses around. All this while having fewer licenses than we had when using single licenses.
