Here’s the video from the Spartanburg City Council’s Nov. 17 meeting. Please forgive the low quality video, as we were still figuring out the limits of the equipment, and shot this at the lowest possible video setting. To view the entire playlist, click here.
Again, please bear with us as we figure out our equipment and find the best available means of filming City Council meetings.
Steve Shanafelt
Video quality is fine, but it would be super nice to hook into that audio feed.
Also wanted to add I think it’s incredibly awesome y’all are doing this. A huge service to the community, so thank you.
Thanks, Kirk. It’s really hard to be an empowered, informed citizen if there’s not even a basic, easily accessible record of what happened at these meetings. If pointing a camcorder at City Council and uploading it to YouTube helps make more people aware of what’s happening in local government, we all win.
Honestly, I’m a little surprised that the City hasn’t already taken on the idea of filming their meetings. I know there are budget issues at the moment, but this is something that many other cities of this size were doing a decade ago. If a blogger with a digital camera can do this for around $100 investment, there’s no reason whatsoever that the City can’t. Maybe this little initiative will give them a push in that direction.
As far as the audio goes, we’re stuck with limited options at the moment. Our camera is a Kodac zi6 — one of the best in its price range for audio — but it lacks a mic jack. Our options are limited to using another digital recorder (perhaps tapping into the audio feed from the microphones in the chamber) and syncing it up, doing what we can in the editing program to bring out the existing audio from the camera, or just coping with it until we can get a new camera with an input for a mic.
Assuming the Spark project keeps growing — something we can’t do without donations (ahem … hint) — we’ll probably invest in a better camera some time next year.
Also, if anyone has an older digital camera with a mic input they’d like to see put to a good use, please let me know.
Hey I found out you did this from reading the Spartanburg County Democrat’s website tonight….just so you know these things don’t go un-noticed! Rock on Spark.
http://www.democraticspartanburg.com/thelatestheadlines.html