For a number of years I have been connecting UM's Detroit Center with the MLK Day keynote speech from Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor. I also sometimes do other streams in the afternoon from the Union Ballroom.
I make this connection using the Detroit Center's two Lifesize High Definition video conferencing systems, one of which I keep in Ann Arbor for just such event connections. It creates an HD 1280 x 720 link between the two locations.
In order to make the experience seem more like "you are there" I put the camera in a seat in the Hill audience. Here is a photo taken a few years ago that shows what it looks like.
You can see that it looks quite good, which is what you would expect from a high definition camera. This year, though, we had a problem.
When I made a test connection on Jan. 10 in preparation for the Jan. 21 event I discovered that the camera in Detroit was not behaving. Here is what it looked like.
It was all green and noisy, and instead of being 1280 x 720 it was something like 632 x 420. Here is a screen shot of the Detroit camera and the local camera side by side, taken from the web portal that lets you control these units remotely.
Even though the image on the right isn't great, you can see the difference.
I contacted Lifesize support and the guy I spoke with had connected to it he said he'd never seen anything like it. He talked to another tech who said they had seen it a few times and in a couple of instances upgrading to the latest software patch fixed it. I did that, but no luck.
Lifesize is overnighting a replacement camera. Stand by for updates, and a bit more info about the setup at Hill.
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