BCTV-2 Program Director’s Report, May 31, 2007

Equipment and Facilities:
The City of Belfast has separated the power in the boathouse so that BCTV is now on its own electric meter. We will be needing to pay for our own electrical usage from now on. It will be interesting to learn how much power we do consume. I am certainly finding myself being more diligent in turning off computers and monitors whenever possible,
We did purchase a 500 gig hard drive, to expand the amount of material we can have on our server. The 300 gig drive in our server is nearing capacity and I believe it will be able to store an additional 200 hours of programs with the new hard drive. The new drive cost $113. To give you a sense of the cost of storage dropping, we purchased a 12 gig drive for our first non linear AVID edit system in 1991 and paid $2000 for it.
We are currently playing with our windows and fans to see how we are able to best keep our facility cool. I am hopeful that an air conditioner will not be necessary, but our equipment which was helpful in keeping our space warm in winter is not as useful for climate control in the summer.
We are dealing with a problem with our email address. For the time being our station email is BCTV2@yahoo.com. We hope to get our old email address back shortly.
Personnel:
Nancy Sosman, our part time office manager has done a fine job organizing our DVD library. She has learned how to program our server and to do some editing.
She is also quite helpful as we develop our teaching manuals for future camera and production workshops. She is new to video and has been great at giving me feedback if a point was omitted or is unclear. I believe our manuals will be a valuable resource to community producers.
Hillary Gocze, a senior at Champlain College, is our summer intern. She will be devoting 200 hours this summer to BCTV. She has her own camera and editing computer, but is borrowing one of our tripods. She is working at producing some PSA’s and promos as well as short documentaries that will run between our regularly scheduled programs.
Rachel Reed is a young lady who was my most reliable student production person when I taught some video production classes at Belfast Area High School. She has expressed an interest in volunteering “as much as I can so I can do everything”. Ah isn’t youthful enthusiasm wonderful. I am hoping to teach her to download programs off the internet and also to put programs on our server. I will be working with Nancy to determine what will work out best for us.
Programming:
An author’s talk presented by Belfast Free library featured Stacy Mitchell, an articulate speaker and author of “Big-Box Swindle”. We are airing the talk on the station. A new series of Gardens of Waldo County is in production, and the first program of the season airs next week. The Mid-coast Summer Video Guide is also scheduled to begin airing in mid-June. We have begun to expand our programming on weekends so that there are TV shows on from 2-10PM , as well as 9-noon.
Respectfully submitted by:
Ned Lightner