DMC Teaching Resources
The Digital Media Center, located in the basement of Fondren Library, is a resource available for free to the entire Rice community to assist with media projects of all sorts. For faculty members who have not had the chance to visit us or explore our services, it can be difficult to understand how we might aid their courses. To that end, we’ve set this up as a guide to explain what services we offer and how other faculty members have utilized them for their own classes.
Equipment Checkout
Our most popular service offered is an equipment checkout program for all manner of digital media equipment. We have nearly 200 pieces of equipment available for checkout by any Rice faculty, students, or staff free of charge. Most notably, we have a variety of still and video cameras, tripods, microphones, and audio recorders. At this time, equipment checkouts are for intervals of 7 days, and can be reserved up to 1 month ahead of time.
Studio and Workstation Reservation
In addition to the equipment checkout program, the DMC also hosts an audio studio with 4 high quality microphones set up for simultaneous recording, a photo/video studio complete with green screen, black, and white backdrops, and a number of media editing workstations which are all loaded with Garageband, Finalcut Pro X, iMovie, and the entire Adobe CC Suite. A number of workstations also include useful peripherals such as large flatbed or high resolution film scanners, VHS digitization equipment, CD and Blu-Ray players, and multipage document scanners.
(Please note that due to COVID-19, we have amended lab and studio policies limiting the number of concurrent patrons. See the policies posted here for more details)
In-Class Workshops
The DMC offers in-class workshops to teach students how to use a wide variety of media editing software or digital media equipment in the pursuit of their course’s projects. These workshops can be specifically tailored to cover the techniques or applications needed for the course, or provide a more general overview. At this time, in-class workshops are provided via Zoom only.
DMC Short Courses
Similar to the in-class workshops, DMC short courses are typically around 1 hour in length and focus on one media editing program. DMC short courses are offered every semester, with a slightly variable catalog. They are free of charge and can be attended by any member of the Rice community.
If you are unable to attend a short course or are looking for a refresher after attending one, we also have a wiki page where we provide written guides on all of our supported software.