Early in 2000, the Muskego City Hall began a remodelling project, causing offices to move elsewhere, and city meetings to be held in the Muskego Public Library, cablecast from there. On February 12, 2001, the first city meeting in the newly remodelled City Hall was cablecast from the Alderman's Room (the upper floor meeting room). The next day, the Common Council held its first meeting in the remodelled Muskego Room. The physical arrangements are much improved, but for our cable viewing audience, there are a lot of changes as well. In both meeting rooms, new cameras and sound systems were installed. Both meeting rooms use permanently mounted cameras. With three cameras to cover the Muskego Room, under remote control by one operator, we can provide better coverage than a single camera could do.
The tape playback and production studio end of things also has been substantially changed. First, we have eight tape decks for tape playback, under automated control. All can run on either channel 14 or 25, but as 14 is the public access channel, most taped shows will be on that. Second, we now have a production studio area with cameras, mikes, and lights, ready for use with no need to set up equipment for TV production. Those familiar with the "rat's nest" equipment arrangement in our past will be surprised by the neat, clean rearrangement of our existing equipment, and a new digital desk holding all of the computer, audio and video mixing gear for doing tape editing and show production. The neatness is more than merely esthetic. We get more working space, and our equipment is set up to easily allow either live production from the studio or taped editing.
Four additional playback VCRs were added to our facility, expanding the programming we can offer to twelve tapes at once. One JVC SVHS deck was added to our production suite, replacing one which was doing double duty for on air play and editing (the Panasonic editing VCR pair was always dedicated to production).
We are joining the digital video revolution! We've acquired a Pinnacle ProOne RTDV digital editing system, PC based, allowing us to use fast, efficient, and powerful digital non-linear editing to produce programming. A Sony DVCAM camcorder and VCR are part of this upgrade, giving us the ability to work in pristine digital quality throughout production.
In addition to that, we've added two new SVHS playback VCRs for cablecast, but as one of those replaces an existing VCR, it brings our current total to 13.
We've added DVD playback and creation to our facility. We can now play DVDs on cable.
The production studio has additional equipment and materials, making it easier to create shows.