Fort Bragg City Council July 22nd 2013
Mendocino TV livestreamed the Fort Bragg City Council meeting for the first time on Monday July 22nd
Lindy Peters introduced the agenda for Mendocino TV and gave a closing synopsis of the meeting. Audio problems plagued the broadcast throughout. Audio was cutting out from the mixers so we had to deploy an on board microphone on our camera. The audio was hollow and booming sounding but the information came through.
We owe a debt of gratitude to our viewers who helped us out diagnosing the situation via our chat box. The meeting will be posted online by the end of the day Tuesday with improved audio.
We apologize for this snafu and will be debugging this problem so the next City Council meeting goes off without a hitch.
Accolades to Joe Seta, who helped decipher the confusion of cables and wiring left to us to work with. This volunteer work is expensive in both time and money so we appreciate every bit of help we can get. Lindy Peters and Mendocino TV aren’t getting paid for our efforts
It seems a bit disengenuous of you to imply that your audio difficulties came about because of what was “left too you” by MCTV. Perhaps if you had taken the time to sort things out BEFORE the broadcast you would have been able to present a better program.
As a staff member at MCTV I was present when you visited the station after making your bogus “offer” to help MCTV. It was clear then that you have no experience with or knowledge of the technical aspects of broadcast TV, and also that your “offer” was a transparent attempt to capitalize on MCTV’s legal problems.
I would like to point out that our crews managed to present the City Council and other city and county meetings for years without ever having such problems. Perhaps you should stop trying to blame others for your own incompetence.
I suspect, of course, that this comment will never see the light of day – which will only confirm for me the suspicions I hold regarding your motives and priorities.
“Your comment is awaiting moderation.” …right.
Huh? If you would like to hash this out in a public forum please direct me to where this comment you are referring to about MCTV is located. I don’t recollect bringing up MCTV when discussing the audio issues I encountered. I know exactly where the problem was and I fixed it. As far as I’m concerned I had the highest regard for the technical support staff and volunteers at MCTV. You should read the John Ruprecht letter in the newspaper. It verifies the facts uncovered in our investigation of the finances of both organizations.
It is located at the top of this page when you talk about having to “decipher the confusion of cables and wiring left to us to work with.” – who are you suggesting left that “confusion” – and why didn’t you spend some time prior to the event making sure you understood where everything went? If you knew what you were doing, you would have spent an hour or so with it at some point prior to the event and rewired it if that is what needed doing.
Actually Earl, the confusion of cables and wiring was caused when the city maintenance worker tore all of the equipment and wiring from Town Hall and rolled it behind a locked door to protect City of Fort Bragg property from being pilfered or damaged in the ensuing chaos created by the MCTV dissolution. Some of the equipment belonged to the City and some to MCTV. MCTV supporters have been so churlish since the judgement against them the employee feared vandalism or theft may occur.
I have no right to work on or touch MCTV equipment so I don’t. I supply my own microphones and cameras while this legal mess gets figured out. All of which I’m pretty competent with. In fact people pay me real money to use them. If you want to improve the quality there is a lot of room for an audio engineer in the room. Want to volunteer?
The comment about the mess of wires was intended to give Joe Seta a shout out for the kick-ass work he did stepping up and volunteering to help out. Joe is a stand up guy who has volunteered for many things no one knows about because he doesn’t blow his own horn.
The technical problem that killed the audio was an error on my part when I muted the audio during some heavy feedback when the meeting first started and I didn’t un-mute it for 30 minutes. We will have a monitor up for the next meeting to monitor the outgoing feed.