The tale of the dodgy S-Video cable...

A tale fresh from the floor of the day...

So this morning I was picked up by the lovely Lucy at 7.15 to go help the lovely LCET team with their Sex Presentation at Lea Manor High School. My job in the team is to make sure all the technical stuff gets set up ok and then to run the technical side during the presentation, which includes Sound, Lap top, projector and sometimes lighting. I was a bit worried cos we only had half an hour to set up when we usually have 45 mins to an hour!

Anyway, suprisingly everything went relatively smoothly, even got all 3 radio mics working properly.

Everything was ready and with minutes to go i was just checking the laptop and video feed to the projector. It had been working fine, when suddenly the picture started to flicker! I wiggled the lead a bit and it stopped but then started again. My heart started to beat faster, the year 9's were starting to come in the hall. I decided to un plug everything from the vision mixer and plug it all in again but it still flickered and then we lost the signal altogether.

In a last desperate attempt I plugged the long s-video cable that ran down the length of the hall straight into my laptop thinking it was a fault with vision mixer, but alas nothing, and thus concluding it was in fact a dodgy S-video cable. So running through the program in my head, I realised that without the laptop and projector working that was a few big chunks of the presentation gone. But, to my dismay the teacher was just introducing the presentation and I was out of time to do anything.

The presentation started with the drama, and then went on with Gill doin a lot of improvisation. Then I suddenly had the brainwave that if I whisked the laptop down to the projector at the front I could plug it straight into the projector with the shorter s-video cable that hopefully still worked. This meant atleast we could use the stuff that didn't have audio on it as the laptop was now miles away from the mixer and me audio cable was no where near long enough.

However, a but further into the presentation I then realised I could plug the laptop audio cable straight into the amp for the speakers which was at the front near the laptop, which would allow us to use the audio stuff as well. So sneaking behind Gill and Lucy during their interview(which I think was completely unplanned cos they were tryying to cover for the lack of other stuff) me and Tom sneaked on and wired it up and it worked.

So we managed to get to the end of the presentation having most stuff in their as we would usually have, maybe not in quite the same order and format but most of it was there.

A big well done needs to go to Tom, Lucy and especially Gill for keeping going and improvising as stuff went wrong and then started working again. You guys are awesome:)

But just remember this story and beware of dodgy s-video cables. And if you fear that one may be dodgy then always carry a spare. I have warned you...