A new training facility has launched in downtown Toronto to offer students and existing industry practitioners a range of educational options in the digital media area.

Included on the curriculum are digital graphics, special effects creation, broadcast video editing and compositing, 3D character animation, multimedia and Web development, Internet applications, and network implementation.

The First Interactive Centre for Digital Media and Internetworking is an undertaking of Richmond Hill, Ont.-based computer-training company First Interactive together with a number of hardware, software and integration partners.

To date, partner companies include Silicon Graphics Canada, Netscape Communications, Watco Web Waves, Kinetix, Jaleo, Chyron and Xtreme Graphics, with support from the Business Development Bank of Canada and Essex Capital Management.

The center is located in a 24,000-square-foot facility and features about 60 sgi machines, including about 40 02 workstations, as well as Octane machines and Origin servers and about 70 high-end pc workstations.

Training will be offered on the gamut of leading software programs including Alias|Wavefront’s Maya and Kinetix 3D Studio Max for animation, Liberty for broadcast graphics, and Jaleo for editing and compositing.

But the emphasis, says gm and chief technology officer Brian Sergio, is on providing a comprehensive, hands-on training environment and method to produce grads who are tuned to the real industry world.

Beginning in September, the center will offer about 70 courses in total, ranging from product training programs spanning one to five days to full-time six- to eight-month certification programs.

Courses fall into two areas, the digital media or content creation side and the content management, it side.

Sergio says industry professionals will offer instruction from the ground up, beginning with network architecture and design, through server implementation, application training and ‘enterprise management.’

The center has developed a commercial work-flow model for its programs tailored to particular markets, project types and media, with its certification beginning with the basics of learning Mac, nt, Irix and Unix operating systems, as well as network and theory training before any software training begins.

Sergio says the work-flow models can be customized to meet the needs of industry employers like Disney to provide grads with the appropriate combinations of skills.