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Hot tools for cookery training

The South-East Essex College wanted its cookery teaching to be cutting-edge and offer the most flexibility possible for its students. To achieve this, the College consulted AV and digital media specialist Impact. Impact recommended using a combination of cameras, customised control panels and a central server to record the lessons at the Ora Kitchen and the Students Skills Kitchen.

The advanced recording system, powered by Xenturix, is operated via a wall-mounted Crestron control panel and a wireless water and heatproof Crestron lanyard system. The Crestron touch panel unit is in an Ingress Protection (IP66) rated cabinet to also guarantee heat and water-resistance. The system needed to be robust enough to cope with the rigours of a kitchen environment.

Using the new tools, chefs are able to pause and review a current recording during a live lesson while continuing to record centrally. Students can then access these recordings on demand.

Impact based the solution to the client's brief around the Xentaurix client and content management server solution. The core of the recording system is a client PC encoder for each kitchen and a centralised application and content storage server.

Both kitchens have waterproof LCD screens that allow lecture-chefs to see the current camera view and to review the last recorded content via a hard disk recorder. Two ceiling mounted cameras in each kitchen captures the live action with pre-set camera positions covering the major working areas with pan, tilt and zoom capabilities to allow for fine-tuning.

The whole system can be controlled from anywhere within the kitchen, either through the wall-mounted control or the wireless lanyard.

The recording system has a centralised content management server that allows the recorded content to be reviewed by the chefs before releasing to the students.

Details such as the chefs’ name, course code and key metadata can be added at this stage.

Students can access the content via a standard web browser. They can search content by date, chef, course code or any keyword. In addition, the student can then create their own bookmarks and clips to personalise their own recordings without altering the original. There is no other solution in the market to enable this flexibility.

Live session can be accessed online by any authorised student from a networked PC within the College's network.

South East Essex College offers adults a vast range of educational programmes and courses besides its Higher Education qualifications. Courses range from three weeks to three years in length and cover a wide range of subjects. Most of our adult courses are part of the National Qualification Framework and have an element of external assessment. Past South East Essex College catering students have gone on to work for the likes of Gordon Ramsay and the Houses of Parliament.

Film of the project: http://www.youtube.com/user/ICTHorizons