The Higher Education Channel (HEC-TV) is St. Louis’ leading producer of educational, arts, and cultural television programming. HEC-TV is a non-profit corporation with the mission statement “to strengthen and promote the education, arts, and cultural communities in the St. Louis Metropolitan area.” Many of HEC-TV’s programs have earned regional and event national awards for shows such as State of The Arts, which deals with arts and patterns going on in the St. Louis area that has won over 15 regional Emmy awards.
As the Operations Manager of broadcast and operation at the Higher Education Channel(HEC-TV), I cover logistics of live shoots, management of the infrastructure here, broadcasting, and the editing infrastructure as well. I wear many hats and a lot of what I do encompasses managing people and working with new technology. I love the diversity of tasks that come along. No day is ever the same at HEC-TV. I can be working on a meeting involving upcoming partnerships, meetings about new technology, making a live show happen or working on an upcoming event.
One of my favourite shows we started that has become a flagship show of our station is State of The Arts. State of the Arts is a show that goes on in St. Louis and all around town. It spotlights the arts around town and the show was conceived by the Executive Director, Dennis Riggs. I had the privilege of being able to help conceive graphics and conceptualize how the show was put together. To date, State of the Arts has won well over 15 regional Emmy awards.
The challenges that we face are dealing with logistics. We have over 50 freelance editors, producers and shooters. Trying to co-odinate everything going on at once becomes quite a challenge. We have to co-ordinate over two terabytes of data per month coming into our system as well as those 50 freelance professionals trying to get their work completed in a timely manner.
Before Daylite we didn’t have a central database that could include shoots, names of contacts, and any delegator or tasks that needed to be done. We’re still in the infancy of starting this process with Daylite. I started the research around June of 2013 and we started formally implementing Daylite towards November or December. I use Daylite to set up projects for every shoot that comes in and those projects are linked to producers. The project also becomes the aggregation for the shoots and edits incorporated in that project. I can click on a project and see that I have two shoots associated with the project and an edit session. When people ask me what’s going on next Wednesday, I can look in Daylite and have a pretty comprehensive listing of everything going on with my day.
I really like the connections Daylite creates. From any project there is a direct connection to people, shoots, and virtually anything you want. Daylite has a really slick and easy way to cohesively give me an overall picture of what is happening with a particular project. I also like using keywords building Smart Lists. You don’t want to keep bouncing between all different apps like Evernote. You want to be able to look at a project and see all the notes connected to it all in one app.
Our workflow is pretty unique. I’ve spent quite a while trying to figure out how to develop a good workflow with Daylite. During this time the customer service and response time has been great. I love that in Daylite if I have a problem I can just send an e-mail. I prefer this way vs having to go to a portal on the web where you have to sign-in and enter in all your info that way. If I’m having a problem I can just click to get help. Shout out to James who’s been really helpful!
