  Photo-production of excited mesons in the 1-2 GeV mass range decaying via
multi-pion or multi-kaon emission has been investigated at the
TJNAF\thanks{This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and The
U.S. National Science Foundation.} experiment E01-017 (g6c) in the $4.8-5.4$
GeV photon beam energy range. The main objective of the experiment is to
extract resonance parameters of the produced states by way of a Partial Wave
Analysis (PWA) technique. In this paper, we will focus on the general
characteristics of the data distributions in both the neutral and charged
3-pion final states, i.e. $\pi^{+}\pi^{-}\pi^{0}$ and $\pi^{+}\pi^{+}\pi^{-}$.
