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HomeMy WebLinkAboutMN-CABLE-2017-12-05 1 City of Ithaca Cable Access Oversight Committee Meeting Minutes Tuesday, December 5, 2017 at 5 PM (as approved February 6, 2018) Meeting Room, PEGASYS Access Center, 519 West Green Street, Ithaca, NY Present: Chair Rich DePaolo, vice-chair Wies van Leuken, member Sue Perlgut, Common Council liaison Ducson Nguyen, Access Studio Coordinator Lauren Stefanelli, member of the public Barbara Smith. Excused: member Wayles Browne. 01. Call to Order at 5:16 by DePaolo. 02. Agenda Additions and/or Deletions: none. 03. Public Comments: Barbara Smith presented comments on I-Net connections, the planned open house and the studio renovation (for the latter two, see attached Coordinator’s report). 04. Approval of Minutes of the November 7, 2017 Meeting. The minutes minus attachments were approved with a small change. Regarding the attachments: DePaolo requested that a more complete copy of his Email exchange with Chris Mueller be attached, rather than an excerpt. A second draft of the minutes will be reviewed at the next meeting. 05. Access Studio Coordinator Report a. Substitute Staffing and Transmission Services: no reports. b. Studio Upgrade – update. Stefanelli reported that her training for the new studio equipment still has to take place. (See attached Coordinator’s report) 06. Member Reports a. Usage Fees: a draft resolution was discussed on additional uses for the collected usage fees. A final draft will be reviewed at the next meeting. b. Quality of PEG cablecasts: Chris Mueller reported that his engineers found no issues of signal strength on the PEG channels. The AOC asked that the poor quality of Ithaca’s PEG channels be further investigated. c. Business Hours – Annual Review: The current Business Hours will remain unchanged. They generally seem to work out well for producers. d. Staffing Levels – Annual Review: Staffing levels cannot be determined as long as Spectrum TV does not release payroll information. e. PEGASYS' Access Rules – Annual Review. Spectrum is reviewing its guidelines for all its PEG stations and the AOC will wait until these are published. Stefanelli said that one change being considered is for producers to upload their programs to the Nexus 2 from their home computers, rather than drop off their media at the Studio. For those unable to do so a computer would be made available in the Studio. (see Coordinator’s report below) f. Term Expiration of Board Members DePaolo will follow up with the Town Board regarding his term’s renewal. 07. Old Business a. Franchise Agreement: the consortium of municipalities is awaiting a reply from Spectrum. 08. New Business: none 09. Next meeting: Tuesday, February 6, 2018 at 5 PM. 10. Adjournment: 6:35 PM. Contact information for AOC members: City of Ithaca: Wayles Browne, secretary <ewb2@cornell.edu>. City of Ithaca: Ducson Nguyen, Common Council liaison 2016-17 <dnguyen@cityofithaca.org>. City of Ithaca: member Sue Perlgut <sperlgut@gmail.com>. Town of Ithaca: Rich DePaolo, chair <rd@richdepaolo.com>, <RDePaolo@town.ithaca.ny.us>. Village of Cayuga Heights: Wies van Leuken, vice chair <pmv4@cornell.edu>. Web site for the PEGASYS studio, with program schedules: http://pegasys.webstarts.com/index.html studio location: 612 West Green Street, Ithaca, New York mailing address: 519 West State Street, Ithaca, NY 14850 phone (607) 272-7272 fax (607) 277-5404 PEGASYS staff: studio manager Lauren Stefanelli <Lauren.Stefanelli@charter.com> 3 Access Studio Coordinator Report - December 2017  Studio Upgrade Rich DePaolo solved a second audio delay problem I identified last month. The audio delay we had installed previously delayed mics to match the video that Broadcast Pix delayed during its processing. However, this created a new problem: video clips, which had been synched before, now had a delay! Rich cleverly repatched our audio mixer so that the mics would be delayed but the clip audio would not, and solved the problem. Com Tech’s Dick Linn was back on November 13. He got the wireless internet connection working so that the Broadcast Pix trainer can do our training. We are still waiting for that training to be scheduled.  PEGASYS Open House We discussed holding an open house to introduce people to our modernized studio. I think we need a participatory activity, rather than just handing out leaflets, to make this successful. Perhaps a live television event with visitors invited to be in a studio audience, even participate. I will hope to brainstorm further with you at the meeting.  PEGASYS Equipment Maintenance and Repair No broken items to report.  Cablecasting Policies I have begun working with our technical staff to update our playback system. The new configuration, which I hope will be completed within the next several months, will eliminate tape playback. I have been warning producers for about 3 years that PEGASYS would soon no longer be supporting tape formats. I am going into detail to explain the reason for this because AOC member Wies van Leuken expressed concern about my planned changes. We introduced SVHS in 1992 with the purchase of our SVHS camcorders. Most of our playback SVHS decks were purchased at about that time. Our DV camcorders were purchased in 2002, and our DV tape playback decks stem from that time. We now use tapeless HD camcorders for production, and accept mostly mpg files, and some DVDs, as finished program formats. For about 10 years, no producers have submitted new programming on tape. Manufacturers no longer make or service the decks. Our SVHS and DV VCRs were gradually failing, and were gradually removed from service. The VCRs for capturing to our old edit systems were removed when we bought new edit computers; new computers cannot interface with VCRs. The VCRs in our studio were eliminated when we upgraded our studio this year – no one had used them for many years. Most of the VCRs in our playback system were removed for recycling because they no longer worked and could not be repaired. As we did once upon a time with U-Matic tape, those long-time producers with boxes of old programs on SVHS and DV tape that they want to keep and resubmit to us must transfer them to current formats. We have resources for them to do that here at PEGASYS. There is an SVHS to DVD dub chain in the office. 2 dual DV/SVHS tape decks with Firewire can be used to capture to any of the 3 PEGASYS laptop computers, which can still capture from tape via Firewire.