I make the videos of Pine Plains public meetings as a service to the community as part of Pine Plains Views. The videos are unofficial and not recognized let alone authorized by the Town Board. I, like any citizen, may record municipal public meetings as authorized by the NY State Open Meetings Law section 103:
“1. Any meeting of a public body that is open to the public shall be open to being photographed, broadcast, webcast, or otherwise recorded and/or transmitted by audio or video means. As used herein the term “broadcast” shall also include the transmission of signals by cable.”
I try, as best I can under these informal circumstances, to show the meeting from the perspective of a citizen in the room at the time, allowing the camera to zoom and pan to follow the action. In order to maintain objectivity, I do not edit the video: the beginning and end of the meeting is the start and stop of the tape. Nothing is cut out.
In the current case, however, there was a problem.
The Durst Organization came to the Town Board to make a presentation about the NND project and brought equipment to project a PowerPoint presentation. You will see the entire setup process and then, once the projector has been turned on, you will notice horizontal bars of color moving up and down the screen, a problem with DLP projectors. If you are ever in a situation where you are projecting something that will be recorded on video, use an LCD projector and you will look good!
I tried to remedy this on the fly, but was not able to. I had to turn the camera off in order to change some settings and that did not work. My only choice was to shoot, awkwardly and unsteadily, over the shoulder of the person operating a laptop computer holding the content of the presentation.
Here is where I stopped the camera to try to fix the problem. It is not a content edit.
A PDF document of the Durst PowerPoint presentation — without sound but picture perfect — has been made available to the town and can be viewed here.
The following segment is the open meeting after the board returned from executive session.
