Today is the shortest day in the northern hemisphere. The winter solstice takes place at 5.11 pm today.
Please have your gongs, whistles and drums at the ready for the moment.
Photo credit – Andreas Krappweis
DCampbell writes:
Wow, Kennedy – I hadn’t realised there was so much or so many people to it, but surely it is not beyond us to have some kind of webcast of the more important sections of the proceedings
Webcasting from Palmerston Place presents a number of challenges:
resourcing the camera crew, vision mixer and director (kit and people) and integration with the projection system to carry any slides and visuals
looking at the lighting to allow good pictures but without interfering with the projection system (which suffers from light spill from the windows already)
Network and machine infrastructure in the building to capture and code the video.
Dedicated bandwidth (with Quality of Service) to transfer the video and audio stream out to a distribution server. (We currently piggyback on Palmerston Place’s own internet connection).
An alternative would be an audio stream with a general shot webcam updating every 30 – 60 secs but again would probably need a dedicated connection to the net to ensure that there was no breakup.
This is not a litany of reasons for not doing things – it’s just a realistic assessment of the resource requirements.
Kennedy
Or another thought-
We start having Synod on the Th/Fr/Sa after the Assembly on the Mound and share the costs of the setup.
No, I suppose a general ‘piskie tag would work just as well, but I’m with Kimberly and would prefer #piskie
My only problem with piskie is that in some parts of the UK a “piskie” is one of the little people, and not necessarily a nice one.
See for example:
http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/cornwall/folklore/the-piskies-of-cornwall.html
“Some people saw them as the souls of pagans who could not transcend to heaven, and they were also seen as the remnants of pagan gods, banished with the coming of Christianity. In tradition they are doomed to shrink in size until they disappear. “
Maybe it’s just me, but I have always found the potential confusion between pisky and piskie immensely pleasing (by ‘always’ I mean, since I discovered the term – not too many years ago!). It’s one of the (many) reasons I’m pleased to be on the pisky/ie side of the pond.
Thanks Kelvin – all this stuff is quite amazing really – especially Kennedy’s informative and knowledgeable material about what is actually needed. I agree about the Primus’s charge being essential, but if live streaming (if that is what it is called) is too intensive an operation in all kinds of ways for an admittedly small audience, why not do a twice daily edited digest of each day’s business like the one the Revd Dougkas Aitken does for the CofS?
Rob Warren already does do digests in audio format – video may well be the next step, though it is quite a big step to take.
The video update that Douglas Aitken does is a copy of his audio update with appropriate video material behind it ie you don’t get any actuality from the chamber.
We would still need editing and coding time before the video could be uploaded to an external server.
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