SMAD Facilities Overview

Check Out the Interactive Tour of Our Facilities

Students in the James Madison University School of Media Arts & Design work in an industry-standard facility utilizing the latest technology and sofware tools. The School provides students with real world experiences supported by knowledgeable faculty and generous access to labs and equipment.

SMAD houses a new digital high-definition video production facility for both field and studio production. The Television Studio features three 1,080 line Ikegami cameras, a Grass Valley Kayak switcher, a 24 channel Wheatstone audio board and a Chyron Duet character generator. The studio is used for narrative/cinematic productions as well as informational and news related programming.

A 16-station Post-Production Lab is utilized for editing and compositing and is available for students in classes and after hours. Every student learns at a dual-monitor HD station using applications such as Final Cut Pro and Motion.

The studio and post-production lab are connected via fiber to a Shared Storage Video Server with 27 terabytes of storage. Students ingest video to the server, do their editing and compositing, then access or play out the video in multiple locations within the building. Students shoot, encode, edit and output entirely in widescreen (16 X 9) HD.

The SMAD Resource Room provides meeting space and workspace for students outside of class. Students in every concentration have access to video editing, photo manipulation software and printers, cross-platform web development stations and video projection for group project planning and development.

Our Interactive Media Lab provides instructional and work space for both beginning and advanced web production. Each station is loaded with the Adobe Creative Suite of applications for creating graphics, webpage layouts, Flash animations and video.