I’ve said all I’m going to say about the personal part of what’s happening, but I thought it would be kind of cool to share how we’ve been producing the show from two locations.

Writing the show hasn’t changed much except that Luria writes much more than she did when she was here. It’s been interesting to see the different types of stories she chooses than me. I tend to write about gadgets. She tends to write about tech news and Web services like Google Docs. The Brief we will release today is about stuff we both wanted to cover. I wrote some of today’s show yesterday, some this morning and she wrote some to. Because of Google Docs, it’s always been easy to collaborate on a script.

After the script is done, Luria shoots it herself. She has our lights and the camera and the teleprompter. She shoots in front of a green screen in one take with one fixed shot and then she transfers one HUGE file to me, via FTP. The uncompressed footage is typically 4-8GB per episode. Sometimes it takes five hours, and really, that’s the biggest downside of the setup.

I have all the editing gear. As I download the file, I do preproduction graphics that will be used in the episode. When I have the file, I drag it into Final Cut Pro. It usually takes less than an hour to edit. Occasionally, when there are unusual graphics or video features in a particular episode, it takes longer.

I compress the show into three formats using Sorenson Squeeze. It does an excellent job, but it’s slow (and expensive). Then I upload the four formats to Mevio and post to the GeekBrief.TV Web site.

Except for news that needs to be more timely the workflow has worked well. It’s always fun to trouble shoot our way through new challenges.

This video isn’t in HD so it’s more fun to listen than to watch, but it’s our speech at Gnomedex in 2007. We kind of tell our New Media story and encourage anyone with an idea to “just start.”

I have a lazy Web Question. I’ve been working on this most of the day and I can’t find a solution.

My system disk is almost full according to a warning I received earlier today. It’s a 300GB drive and I don’t store many files on it. It’s primarily applications and system files. iTunes has a handful of songs. iPhoto is empty. All the apps that store files are empty. My Final Cut scratch disk is on a Drobo. There is no reason this drive should be even half full, but if I Get Info on the system disk it says I’m using 297.87GB of 300GB.

I ran OmniDiskSweeper and it only found that I was using 146.71GB of disk space. I ran Filelight and it showed me using 140GBs.

What am I missing? Thanks in advance!

When you start a business you love, you may be tempted to put 100% of your time and energy during waking hours into making it a success. Cali and I have done that with GeekBrief.TV. Even when we took time off from the show, we used the time to work on parts of the business you don’t see. We took that quote, “Find something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” to heart.

The problem is, people aren’t designed to only work. We need rest, and we need play.

Yesterday morning I was listening to the audio version of My Life in France by Julia Child and I got a life lesson. She wrote,

In 1963 I was shooting four episodes of The French Chef a week while also writing a weekly food column for the Boston Globe. In the Fall, we were scheduled to take a break from TV work and had planned to visit Simca and John at their rambling farm house in Provence, but as November hove into view, we began to regret it. The quicksand of my cookery work, Paul’s painting and photography projects and all the mini bits of upkeep and improvement that 103 Irving Street required were sucking at our feet.

‘I just don’t know if we have the time for a trip to France right now,’ I sighed.

Paul nodded, but then we looked at each other and repeated a favorite phrase from our diplomatic days,

‘Remember! No one’s more important than people.’

In other words, friendship is the most important thing–not career or housework or one’s fatigue–and it needs to be tended and nurtured. So we packed up our bags and off we went, and thank heaven we did!

Throughout the last five years we’ve produced Geek Brief, we had similar opportunities and intentions to travel, but we always made the other choice. We prudently decided we should use that time to work on the business. Sure it would be great to go to Italy. I want so bad to go to Scotland. Hey, we should go to Japan and see all the crazy gadgets and have real Ramen! Instead, we opted for the more prudent choice. We stayed home and worked on our business.

Rest and play are the other side of the work coin. You can’t just breath in. You also have to breath out. Lot’s of people look at our story and think it is inspirational, but I hope people will learn from what we got right AND from our mistakes.

Take real breaks. Leave the Mac at home or at least in the hotel room. Enjoy life with friends and enjoy the beauty in the world. Otherwise you’ll just wear yourself out and burn yourself up.

I just got off a streaming test with Mike Versteeg the developer of CastBlaster and VidBlaster. He’s very close to having a viable alternative to Tricaster at a price any individual, church, school or community group can afford.

VidBlaster can stream to the Internet now using Windows Media streaming, but we’ve asked him to make it work with Ustream.TV. He made it happen in about two weeks.

Steven Saylor is in town and we’re going to do a live stream with him tonight at 8PM (ish). We’ll probably limit it to one camera so we can have a higher quality video in the archive.

Mike isn’t quite ready to let me try the Ustream-friendly version of VidBlaster, but he said he’ll have a version I can test after this weekend.

I love this stuff!

I’ve been getting some great advice from Jason “Cannonball” Jenkins about lighting. Jason is a professional lighting designer who is currently on tour with the Osmonds on their 50th anniversary tour. After he introduced me to a few hardware and software solutions that would enable us to control our lighting from a single control point, I read a short blog post on AutomatedHome.com about the company iControl receiving funding from the iFund.

I started wondering how cool and how hard it would be to create an iPhone App that would control DMX lighting via WiFi. The lights themselves could be wired to the network, and the iPhone would operate as a wireless controller complete with sliders for dimming individual lights.

I’m still early in my research, but I found a post about using an iPhone or iPod Touch as a visual controller. I found a company that makes an ethernet connectable DMX controller that has a Palm App written for it. I also found this DMX WiFi receiver that would probably be overkill in my setup. I also found a D.I.Y. for using DMX in a home automation setup.

If an iPhone or iPod Touch can be used in home automation, it could also be used to remotely control studio lighting. I’m not sure how hard it will be to pull all the parts together, but it seems like it could be amazing.

This post is meant for googlers. Smurf sex is just when sex happens with so much blue light that the participants look blue. No mystery really. 

Spending money in new media is a tricky thing. Everything we do costs much, much less than antique media, but it isn’t exactly cheap. Lighting for the Big Trip cost just under $6000. That’s a lot, but it’s a choice that will make sense for the next several years.

Usually when we buy something for production, I expect a pretty quick return on our investment. That doesn’t feel quite as true for the streaming stuff we’re experimenting with. Live streaming is where podcasting was three years ago, months before we started GeekBrief.TV. Money wasn’t exactly flowing into podcasting then and it isn’t quite flowing into live streaming now.

So, I’m thinking about buying a Tricaster so we could go live for a portion of each day with two or three cameras. I’m not sure the investment would be returned for at least a year, but I really think being an early mover is extremely important. Leo gets it. Chris Pirillo gets it. I HOPE we get it.

It’s a big expense, but I’m thinking the long-term return is massive.