Designed as a small, high quality digital arts facility, the Center offers students a full range of multimedia field and editing equipment.

The Center was funded primarily by grants. To keep the lab affordable, students and faculty installed all equipment. The lab design and all equipment in the lab was chosen by student and faculty committees, allowing both department students and faculty to have a direct voice in their own facility. 24/7 lab access, and advanced lab management techniques assure that the lab is not just a show piece but a working creative arts center, and the hub of student creative activity on campus.

Some of the impressive features of the Center cannot be seen by visitors today, but they are inside the walls, and are the direct result of student and faculty planning for a Center that was more than just a nice stop on a campus tour. The first aspect of the lab is that students had a great deal of input into its construction. Student workers took faculty mandated requirements and held community meetings to determine what functional layout would best meet their needs. Only two student suggestions (or a ping pong table and a private lavatory facility) where not in the end included in the Center's design. Students then spent the period of construction watching their design go into place.

The main features of the Center hidden in the walls are the advanced sound proofing, the specialy designed air handling, very wide doorways, and the "no hallway" design adopted by students. All walls in the Center are double width, while exterior walls to other sections of the building are triple thick. Instead of standard insulation, sound deadening insulation is installed, and metal wall beams are sound isolated to reduce transmission of low end "thump." Students could literally have a brass band playing in the Center and the Honor's Lounge next door would never know it. Extra wide, slow speed air handling is added to the rooms to reduce air handling noise without giving up cooling capacity. Doorways are wider than the required minimum to allow equipment to be moved easily into and out of them, and also to make the rooms accessable to wider wheel chairs. Finally, the students adopted a "no hallway" design to maximize usable space. The hallway present in the Center represents less than 5% of the final design space and is less than 14 feet long.

A primary feature of the lab, designed to increase work productivity, is the use of incadescent lighting throught out the Center. Florescent lamps can lamps pose a health problem to students who work underneath them for long periods of time if their work entails looking at television monitors or design screens. In particular, they can cause ADD symptoms to increase in severity, can trigger epileptic siezures, cause eye strain, and can cause an increase in hypertension, none conductive to long term creative work. To reduce these conditions, and to give a sense of warmth and friendliness to the Center, all lighting is with low wattage incandescent lamps. To save money, the ceiling units are equipped with low cost edison bulbs.

The Center is equipped with 3 high definition capable editing suits. These digital media suites include quad processor Power Macintosh computers, 4 TB disk arrays, tape drives, dual gigabit connections to the Internet, a 2 hour battery backup, and 3x 23 inch monitors. All private bays are handicap accessable, and use incandescent lighting . Student chosen artwork, including reproductions of famous paintings, photographs, and movie posters, adorn the walls, and each larger bay has a couch for visitors to view students workers (typically used by clients working with students on productions.

The Center is equipped with state of the art digital recording assets, all available for student use. In addition to a selection of standard definition video cameras such as this Sony DVW-500 camera with an 18x zoom lens, the department also maintains high definition video cameras with complete digital cinema production capability. Camera kits have access to matte boxes, follow focus, and can be mounted on the department Jib, doorway dolly, steadicam, or a wide arrange of heavy and light weight professional tripods. At the Center for Creative Media, still photography is not seperated from videography. The lab has 8 digital SLR cameras with a wide range of lenses, tripods, monopods, and lense filters. Students can choose if they desire to work in 16mm film with rental or borrowed cameras.

The support equipment available to the Center is just as important as the digital SLR cameras and digital video cameras. The Center has a full range of lighting and grip equipment, equivilant to a professional production truck. In addition to mundane items like c-stands and combo stands, the lab owns a 20' butterfly with a selection of 12' and 20' rags, a 1.2kw HMI daylight fresnel, several 1k fresnels, a full selection of flags, fingers, and dots, and over 60 other lighting instruments. It also has access to the Swan Auditorium for learning studio and theatrical lighting.

While the lab has nearly 30 TB of online local storage and nearly 50 portable hard drives (which are issued to students each semester to hold their creative work), it still maintains a state of the art networking presence. To give access to the campus servers and to the local work group servers in the Center, every room is equipped with dual Gigabit Ethernet (with plans for future upgrades to 10G). All machines currently installed in the Center have either dual or single Gigabit Ethernet. The Center is also equipped with a high speed wireless networking hub.of PDAs and other Blue Tooth enabled technology.