New A/V System Improves City Hall Broadcasts
Tuesday, March 7th, 2023
Not everyone can make it to City Hall at 6 pm for a Mayor and Council meeting. Thanks to new technology upgrades to City Hall's council chamber unveiled Monday night, it's now easier to bring City Hall to them instead. After a month of installation work, a new audiovisual system debuted during Monday night's council meeting. The new system includes four new robotic cameras, new microphones and speakers, and new video screens.
"A lot of people around 6 pm, they are busy with their family," said Jorge Paez, director of the city's information technology (IT) department. "These meetings are important, because you know, local government is important because it can impact you directly as the resident. But if you don't have time to come in and sit down and listen, if you have time later at night to watch that, what better way, and then you get to see everything."
Caption: Bill Lloyd, a member of the city's IT staff, works at a computer station to direct the livestream broadcast of Monday night's Mayor and Council meeting
The City of Dalton first began broadcasting meetings of the Mayor and Council during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when it was not possible to have residents attend meetings in person. The broadcasts were very much an improvised work in progress, with the first live streams produced using cell phones. As the city's IT department had more time to work on the problem, the broadcasts moved to a laptop computer with a web cam and audio plugged in directly from the council chamber system. The quality of the broadcast was still poor and residents had trouble hearing and seeing people speaking during meetings.
"Just to give you a little bit of perspective – we had the system that was the original system to this building when it was built in 2004," Paez said. "All of the audio equipment was original. What we were using to live stream was the microphones and pretty much that’s it. We had to add the webcam, which at one time was serving as the microphone as well, and a lap top and that was it."
The city's IT department began working more than two years ago to study ways to improve both the audiovisual presentation for those attending meetings in person, and also for the live streams for people watching meetings remotely. The process was made more difficult by the fact that Dalton had to wait in line as most other municipalities as well as businesses, churches, and other organizations were all trying to add similar systems at the same time because of the COVID pandemic. The city eventually partnered with the WH Platts Company to refresh the council chamber system.
"It was a lot of work, specifically working with the A/V (audiovisual) engineers because we have our end goal in mind, but they don’t and they have to fulfill that need to reach that end goal," Paez said. "It definitely took about two weeks, just to go back and forth. First, just sorting out all of the components, and then actually putting them together to make sure they function. And of course, another thing that we had to instill into the engineers was... that security came first. All the A/V systems mostly have security added later on, this system we’re trying to embed the security to begin with."
Caption: New video screens behind the city council dais and also mounted to the sides of the room make it easier for those attending meetings live to monitor the meeting agenda and any media being shown
The council chamber was shut down during the month of February for engineers to install the new equipment, a process that included the construction of a new work station in the back of the room that houses the computer equipment to direct the broadcasts. The new equipment allows IT staff to switch in between cameras and also control the audio. The result is a professional quality broadcast that allows viewers to better experience the meeting. The new system also automatically adds closed captioning of the words spoken during meetings.
"It's much more accessible, and in the day and age that we live where there’s an effort to have a truly open government and a transparent local government it gives the public an opportunity to view the meeting video live or if they’ve unavailable during the meeting time they can go back and watch it," said Andrew Parker, Dalton's city administrator. "Whereas before maybe the audio wasn’t clear or there wasn’t any closed captioning, we have that now. We have multiple camera angles so you’re able to actually see the person speaking at the lectern or on the dais, or the member of the public that’s speaking where before we didn’t have that capability. It’s definitely an improvement for the city and the public to ensure that we have a transparent government that the public can view at any time."
"I was very pleased with it," Paez said. "The transitions are very smooth, and you can actually see the reactions and that’s one thing that I really wanted to emphasize, the expressions of the council members. When they are asked questions or when they’re making statements, I want to see their facial expressions and I wanted to project that to the mass audience."
The IT department is continuing to work to refine the video feed and in coming weeks will be improving the quality of the video seen by online viewers. The City of Dalton's YouTube channel can be found at youtube.com/cityofdaltongeorgia. Previous council meetings can be viewed under the "live" tab. To watch Monday night's meeting, click play in the window below.
Below: A copy of Monday night's meeting on the city YouTube channel
