You know what annoys me? We get these teabagging nutcases to finally debate, and we don't have decent video or audio - making their statements appear less striking. The more "professional" the appearance in video/audio - the more we up the ante for providing reasonable answers. Note the difference for a casual viewer between the CNN O'Donnell/Coons debate and the infamous Widener debate.
I'll say the same thing about the Alaska McAdams/Murkowski debate - coming as it did on the heals of Miller's reTHUGlican meltdown, it was also important - yet the video/audio of it was even worse.
And its not that hard to fix. Really. (in extended)
Go to Radio Shack. At the Shack, they have these things called Mixers.
This one here here is $30.
Coons has a Mic, O'Donnell has a mic, the interviewers/moderators have 2 mics. You plug them into the back of this thing called a mixer, do a level test (sibbalance, sibbalance, sibbalance), plug that puppy into your sound card (it has a Mic In port) on your computer, and, lo and behold, you have direct audio.
A handy how-to is here:
You can also buy some lights. You can go here to see what you need. Really, you don't have to go whole hog. 1 or 2 special lights for the candidates faces make all the diff in the world.
Now note- the Widener debate was broadcast on radio - so no one appearantly thought to run a sound board feed to the camera?
In other words - 1 audio cable,
TEN DOLLARS, gives us better quality sound bytes to use against the Wingnuts in future ads.
Time to enter the 21st Century, because the audio-video quality of some of what I have seen looks more like its from this era: