FTVM Production Technologies and Studios

NOTE: UM Information Technology Services provides no-cost access to many software titles to all faculty, staff, and students, including Adobe Creative Cloud. For a full list of available software (and other ITS services), please click here. 

The Department of Film, Television, and Media Production courses use Adobe Premiere Pro editing software for both video and audio.  Classes are taught on Mac computers but Premiere is also available for Windows based computers. Final Cut Pro-10X is also available but not used in FTVM production courses.  Avid Pro-Tools is available in the Duderstadt for editing sound and is frequently used by the School of Music Performance Arts Technology students (School of Music's film composers and sound designers) working with the FTVM 421 and 423 classes, upper level production courses.

Not all FTVM Production courses require access to an external hard drive and editing software. If you intend to purchase equipment, we suggest:

Apple MacBook Pro with:

Retina Display
16GB Memory - Minimum

512GB Solid State Storage
3 year extended warranty (suggested for all laptops)

External Hard Drive

LSA editing suites and most classrooms support USB3 and Thunderbolt Drives.  Solid state drives (SSD) or disk drives with minimum capacity of 500GB are acceptable.  Disk drives should have 7200rpm spindle speed.  A Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter is necessary for Drives with Firewire connections only.  Do not get a drive with only a USB2 connection as they are too slow for editing video.

Students in the following production courses are expected to have or have access to an external editing hard drive: FTVM 300, FTVM 301, FTVM 304, FTVM 305, FTVM 306, FTVM 309, FTVM 400, FTVM 401, FTVM 402, FTVM 403, FTVM 404, FTVM 405, FTVM 406, FTVM 421, FTVM 423, FTVM 495 (Honors projects involving production only), and FTVM 499 (independent study projects involving production only).

NOTE: Because students work in groups in FTVM 300, FTVM 301, FTVM 400, FTVM 402, and FTVM 423, each TEAM will be able to work on one or more shared drives; however, each student will likely want to have their own drive as well.