8 November (Part 3) - Recording council meetings
The
mayor’s generous decision to allow ‘filming’ at last Wednesday’s council meeting
before the revised Constitution was formally approved was, as far as I know, totally
ignored, in the literal sense at least. I am not aware of any video recording being
made but I did have a bash at making a sound recording.
With only a few hours notice I dug a couple of old microphones out of the loft
and knocked together a makeshift stand for them; I doubt anyone would appreciate
the real thing stuck in the doorway which is where I had to agree to operate from.
I decided to record on four channels simultaneously in the hope that at least one would
produce the goods. In the event, microphones pointing at councillors’ backsides
were perfectly adequate, the voices are clear if not always as loud as they might be, but
the dynamic range created by bangs on my desk had to be accommodated and there is such a
thing as a playback volume control. I made one silly mistake and overlooked the obvious
fact that four channels would fill the memory card twice as fast as stereo so I had to nick
the reserve card out of my camera half way through the meeting. Silly when I had a larger
card going spare at home and I should have known that a two and a half hour recording
would get close to flattening two fresh Duracells. Things will be better next time.
One advantage of the notebook and pencil method is that the highlights are written
down and anything I cannot remember is lost for ever. Now I have a surfeit of information
and transcribing it takes ages. I suspect we are about to see more council meetings
reported one Agenda item at a time.
The photography was useless due to the council imposed position having no view of the
proceedings. It’s going to take a bit of practice to choose the best of many
auto-focusing options or maybe I’ll go for an extreme wide
angle lens for its extensive depth of field and rely on an excess of megapixels to
blow up the main subject. I hope Teresa O’Neill doesn’t report me for that comment,
it’s probably worse than pitchforks! Maybe a simple ‘point and shoot’ with its huge
depth of field is the better option, but there again the poor lighting may defeat it.
I suspect I will rarely bother, who wants to see their mugs anyway?