On my lunch hour Friday, I stopped by the television studios of the Raleigh Television Network, the city’s cable TV community access channels. A very helpful Mr. Ted Savage welcomed me and gave me a tour of the facilities.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the studio is now all-digital, with equipment free to for anyone’s use providing they have taken the appropriate course for using it. These courses were scheduled for September, but as I understand it classes will be opening sooner. A meeting anouncing the upcoming courses will be held on July 16th in the Raleigh City Council chambers.

I drooled over the three-CCD Mini-DV field cameras now available for use. They provide a quantum-leap in quality for a fraction of weight that the clunky SVHS cameras provided. The two Final Cut Pro editing stations (with widescreen flatpanel monitors) were sitting idle. The all-digital studio (with chroma-key), was also waiting for activity.

I never put together a show the last time I was a registered producer as I was busy with one thing or another. This time, however, I fully intend to put this digital system through its paces. I don’t even know what shows or programming I want to produce, but it’ll be something interesting. My three years of blogging has been good training for coming up with ideas.

(And if you’ve got something you’d like to see on community access TV, drop me a comment below.)