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With only five minutes until Northwestern High School's morning broadcast Friday morning, coaches sent last-minute announcements, students put final touches on the day's weather report and video engineers color-corrected the anchors who sit in an all-green set.
"Who's doing the countdown?" teacher Andre Lee asked his morning-announcement crew.
A minute later, the cameras and teleprompters were rolling and the anchors read everything from senior class news to inspirational quotes to lunch reminders.
The Hyattsville school's television production class is the only one in the county using NewTek TriCaster virtual sets for live broadcasts, according to NewTek spokeswoman Jennifer Thurlow. Networks like Fox Sports and MTV use the sets for live production.
Prince George's County Schools spokeswoman Lynn McCawley couldn't confirm whether Northwestern is the only school in the county using any type of virtual set, but said it's the only one she is aware of using the system.
The virtual set is all-green but it appears on television like a professional news station, with oak desks and graphics. Students use the computer hardware to include graphics and color-correct people on the set so the images broadcast clearly.
Lee teaches television production to about 150 students in six classes. Students produce films and shoot and edit the video yearbook and other school events.
About 12 students are on the morning announcement team, and they spend every morning typing announcements into teleprompters, doing dry-runs and color-correcting the virtual green set backgrounds.
Junior Leon Scales, 17, one of the morning announcement anchors, transferred this year from Silver Spring's Montgomery Blair High School, where he also took television production classes.
Scales said being able to work with the latest versions of software, the video-editing program Final Cut Pro, and anchoring morning announcements have inspired him to pursue broadcast television in college.
"We're really privileged here," Scales said.
Other students, like senior Matthew Campbell of Hyattsville, also said the class has inspired them to pursue television careers. The 17-year-old is a video engineer on the morning announcement team and said his dream is work for a production team for ESPN's sports news.
Campbell said the morning announcements appealed to him because of their hectic nature.
"It's all about timing," he said. "It takes a lot of cooperation to get things done."
Some of Lee's students have gone on to win prizes in the Burke High School Film Festival, a contest for high school students in the Washington, D.C.-metropolitan area.
Lee said exposure to new technology in production makes students more marketable in the job and college world.
"A lot of these kids, it's their first time they're coming into contact with television or film production. A lot of them haven't used a camcorder before," Lee said. "You want them, when they leave here, to be successful in the next level."
E-mail Elahe Izadi at eizadi@gazette.net.
