Over the years I’ve heard rumours about a collection of audio- and video-production gear that’s been accumulated, under various projects and grantings, in the basement of the Robertson Library at the University of PEI. Today, after a meeting upstairs in the Library, I got a cook’s tour of the secret multimedia bunker, and I was floored: there’s enough gear down there to let you film and edit a Hollywood movie.

There’s a full-fledged sound-dampened audio booth with mixing board, digital recording setup, complement of microphones and speakers and next door there’s a ProTools audio editing setup. In other words, you can record everything from a podcast to an album and not have to leave the basement.

And around the corner there are digital video cameras, an AVID non-linear editing suite, and, it would seem, enough mobile gear to let you set up a decent location shoot.

There’s also enough unused computing power to let you run a small anti-ballistic missile program.

It would appear that, for most intents and purposes, the equipment is sitting there left fallow. Although it might require navigating a bureaucratic thicket to figure out how to secure permission to put the gear to use for your own webcast / podcast / documentary / television show / solo acoustic album, I can’t imagine it would be all that difficult.

Often when People Of Ideas get a new one — “I’d really like to make a documentary about…” or “someone should really made a live weekly podcast about…” — they run up against a problems with resources, funding, and/or infrastructure. And if they try to solve those problems they can find all their energy sucked away by the task.

The gear at UPEI — just sitting there ready to be used — dispenses entirely with almost all of these problems. What are you waiting for?