Frequently Asked Questions

We do not accept same day reservations. The cut-off time for making a reservation for pick-up the next day is 11:59PM.

We do not deliver equipment. You must come to the production office if you are missing anything. We will do our best to make sure you are not missing anything, but human errors happen. You are also 100% responsible for making sure you have everything you need. Production crews in real life will often dedicate an entire day before their shoot for checking that their equipment is in order.

1. You can renew your reservation before your current reservation expires (once it expires in the system, it is late and cannot be changed). To renew, you can email camsprodn@carleton.edu, call our office or stop by in person before your due date.

You are more than welcome to drop off your gear early before your conflict. You can also change your drop off time while you’re making your reservation to a time that works for you. The only issue is being late for your original drop off time as our system automatically marks things late and you will be fined. Please be sure to plan ahead accordingly.

The morning after the drop-add deadline each term, I provide ITS the final list of all students enrolled in CAMS production courses, who are then each assigned a Creative Cloud license. If this is you, please follow installation instructions and email helpdesk@carleton.edu for assistance with Creative Cloud licensing and installation.

Install on your computer the same version of Premiere as is in the computer labs. If you install a version of Premiere on your own machine newer than what’s on lab computers, and your computer breaks, you won’t be able to resume editing on lab machines.

Visit the Carleton CAMS Vimeo channel to watch videos that have been produced by students in CAMS production classes since Fall 2011.

Why can’t I…

• take an SD card out of a camera or computer while it’s on?
• unplug an external hard drive from a computer?
• change lenses while a camera is on?
• plug or unplug a mic while phantom power is on?

There’s a theme here. Each of these things risks making your data unreadable, damaging the equipment, or both.

Computers have a command called Eject or Unmount that lets computer and SD card or external hard drive finish talking with one another graciously before you physically disconnect them. This way of saying goodbye protects your data and card or drive. Modern lenses have microprocessing built in. They can be damaged.

Phantom power is a tiny amount of current that flows from a camera, recorder, or audio interface to a mic. When that current is still flowing and the mic is unplugged, it can damage the mic.

The Carleton Sound Effects Library might be what you’re looking for. The sound effects in this collection are licensed for student use and available for any projects made as part of the CAMS curriculum. The license is “portable” with the project which means that as long as the sound effects are used in a creative project it’s fine for you to upload a project to Vimeo. (If someone just edited the sound effects into one big sound effects “master mix,” where someone else could disassemble them and reuse them, that wouldn’t be okay.) It’s okay for students to continue to circulate the piece after they leave Carleton, however, the sound effects may not be used for projects after graduation or outside of Carleton.

The BBC has made its classic archive of over 16,000 sound effects available to the public for non-commercial use in creative projects under the RemArc license (link on the BBC page). All are 44.1kHz, 16-bit WAV files so this is much nicer than the compressed MP3s available on FreeSound.org. Please e-mail questions to Jay Beck.

Carleton maintains an unlimited license to LinkedIn Learning (formerly known as lynda.com), free for current students, staff, and faculty. Tutorials are available for Adobe Premiere Pro, Audition, After Effects, Photoshop, and more. Sign in with your Carleton user name and password and start learning right away!

Start by reading Kevin Chapman’s article, “Purchasing a Personal Computer.” If you’re wondering whether a computer will run Adobe Premiere (used extensively in CAMS production classes) consider the current Premiere Pro system requirements. Email helpdesk@carleton.edu for assistance buying a computer.

See this Adobe article.

This happens easily. Drives work best with 30% or more free space. And if you’re starting a term with a production class, you’ll want more room than that. Video footage will take up around 10-15 GB of space per hour you shoot. As you review your computer’s contents, think carefully about what needs to be on your computer’s hard drive, what can be thrown away, and what deserves to be backed up.

Perhaps it’s helpful to think about final products —videos you’ve made or papers you’ve written, for instance. Do they deserve to live locally and in the cloud, each one as a backup to the other? Speak with your instructor about how long they recommend you keep raw footage.

Look critically at all the software installed —are there any applications you don’t need any longer? Use your operating system’s search tool. Look for files larger than one GB or even ten GB — dealing with the largest files first will make room quickly. Look for files such as .zip or .dmg. If you’ve got what you need from them, you might not need them any longer.

See Rebecca Barkmeier’s article, All About Adobe Acrobat and Creative Cloud (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc).

Yes, beginning January 18, 2021, within building hours (7:00 a.m. to midnight), provided they wear masks, respect each others’ six-foot social distancing, abide by the posted occupancy limit of nineteen, use hand sanitizer, disinfect the mouse and keyboard they use, leave the furniture where it is, and don’t intrude on any scheduled class sessions in progress. There are eighteen student workstations in Media Lab and one computer at the teaching station for instructors.

Yes, beginning January 18, 2021, within building hours (7:00 a.m. to midnight), provided they wear masks, respect each others’ six-foot social distancing, abide by the posted occupancy limit of four people in the room at one time, use hand sanitizer, disinfect the mouse and keyboard, and leave the furniture where it is. The Wenger sound enclosure inside Advanced Edit has an occupancy limit of one person at a time. When there’s someone in the Wenger, three additional people can be in Advanced Edit outside the Wenger.

Campus buildings will remain locked to people without OneCard access (i.e. remote students, community members). The college is planning for academic buildings to be accessible by OneCard to all students, faculty, and staff on campus from 7:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m. (midnight) on a daily basis. 

• Students will not be allowed to remain in the buildings after 12:00 a.m. (midnight). 
• Security will ask students to leave, if they encounter them in academic buildings after midnight.
• Faculty and staff who are housed in a particular building will have 24/7 access to that building.
• Students will have access to classrooms after classes are over for the day.

Check this display of the current time in Northfield. Carleton is on Central Time.

Central Daylight Time (CDT) happens March through November and it’s five hours behind Universal Coordinated Time, or “Greenwich Mean Time.” That’s abbreviated as UTC-5.

Central Standard Time (CST) happens November through March and it’s six hours behind UTC, abbreviated UTC-6.

See timeanddate.com‘s clickable map of the world’s time zones for more information.

Visit imagencloud.carleton.edu/site/login, look for the Organization sign in, and click the yellow “Log in with Carleton Single Sign On” button.

Watch the video Getting started in Imagen for more information.

(For faculty) How do I get my class set up to use Imagen?
1. Log into The Hub, look under “Faculty Course Resources,” and request a Google Group for each term’s section of each class for which you’d like to use Imagen. The Hub request triggers something different from making a Google Group of your own.
2. Let me or Dann know so one of us can take a few more back-end steps in Imagen.
When both of these things have happened for a given term and section of a course, students currently registered for it will automatically be added to a group in Imagen or removed from it, if they drop the course. If you want students in the course to see a piece of media on Imagen, use the Edit Record –> Privacy function to give the group permission to view that media record. The group will be named by the convention COURSE_CAMS 000.00 (Carleton Single Sign-On).