Dan Finn, CUNY-TV, Fall 2013
The internship at CUNY-TV is an excellent experience. Dave Rice is renowned for his knowledge and general video and digital wizardry, and he lived up to the renown. As often as he could he sat down with me and talked with me about topics of my choosing. They understand why you are there and are very accommodating to your interests. The actual work involved in my experience was transfer heavy. I captured from quarter inch audio tape, and Betacam SX, DV, Digital Betacam, and U-Matic video tape formats. Through this work I understood better not only various characteristics of the tape formats themselves, but why certain characteristics for the target file are used for some formats and not others (for example 10-bit or 8-bit bit-depth). I also got to see several command line scripts for various processes Dave wrote, and so the internship also provided a glimmer of shell scripting, but only a glimmer because I wasn't at a point to do much work on those. I did get to run the scripts he had made and with his help understand the basic structure and logic of how they worked. There is a plentiful amount of material in the CUNY-TV archive, so I felt I was able to gain a lot of experience with several different types of materials and workflows. Altogether I found the experience excellent and feel lucky to have had the opportunity.
Dan Finn
