Grant Writing Workshop
One of the nice things about my job is that I often get to participate in events that are not always held in our main office. Technology doesn’t always stay bottled up in the Methodist Building. One of these remote events is a Grant Writing Workshop. Dr. Annette Greer is hosting a workshop for people in our local churches who are interested in learning about best practices and methodologies for successful grant writing. This event is being hosted at Westminster UMC in Kinston, NC over three successive Mondays (this being the second day).
We are responsible for providing audio/video/web streaming support for the workshop. Derek Leek (Conference Webmaster), Steve Taylor (Missions Director), Bill Norton (Communications Director), Dennis Peay (clergy volunteer) and I are running all of the different equipment necessary for pulling off an event of this size. We have approximately 20-25 people here on-site and another 10-15 watching remotely via the web stream.
The technology behind this event is fairly straightforward. Steve and Derek are running our two cameras. Bill is running the sound board and video switcher. Dennis is running the Powerpoint laptop and I am watching over the video stream and handling incoming e-mail questions/comments. The video switching equipment can display video from the two cameras, the presenter’s laptop and the Powerpoint laptop. The audio board is handling input from four wireless microphones and a lavalier microphone (worn by the presenter).
640 x 480 Video!
We have also made significant changes to our web video stream. We have been streaming our major events on-line for several years now we have always had to work around a nagging Mac/Linux incompatibility. We were also streaming out a high bandwidth and a low bandwidth stream simultaneously.
Since our dial-up usage has fallen to almost zero, we decided to do away with the low bandwidth stream altogether. We changed our outgoing video stream from 320 x 240 to 640 x 480. We also changed the streaming coded from Windows Media version eight to version nine. Mac/Linux users should be able to use this newer codec without any of the issues that they encountered when we were using the older one. We upgraded the audio output to 192 kbps (cd audio quality). All of these changes were squeezed into an extra 100 kbps or so of upload stream bandwidth. Today is the first day that we have tried streaming live with these changes, so we’ll see how it goes. I’m looking forward to great results!
