latakoo … this is important
When Luria and I launched GeekBrief.TV in 2005, we bumped up against a lot of limitations. Bandwidth was only as good as we could get. The first batch of shows was in standard definition, and I wanted us to be HD. Even when we started shooting in HD, the show couldn’t be delivered in anything like real HD.
Here’s the dream for any new media producer. When we’re able to shoot in 4K and get that video to anyone who wants to watch it on a mobile phone or IMAX sized screen within minutes (even better live), then we have a real revolution.
I read about a company today on Techcrunch called latakoo. The story is a group of journalists joined some tech guys to fix a problem. We’ve got gear to shoot amazing footage. Moving that footage from one part of the world to another without lots of quality loss or lots of time to wait makes what we do frustrating. Latakoo says they’re solving that problem.
The best way I can explain how cool this is is to give you a hypothetical case study. With GeekBrief.TV, we never covered CES by going there. It’s expensive to go, and I’m a cheapskate. I was only willing to go if we could get the expense sponsored, but that wasn’t possible because of our deal with Mevio. We covered CES by making several short episodes of GeekBrief.TV based on news coming out of CES.
Here’s the deal, though … there were lots of people attending CES that would have gladly served as GeekBrief.TV corespondents. There was no way to get high quality video from Vegas to Dallas in an amount of time that would have been good enough to make the kind of show I wanted to make.
Latakoo has built a system for moving great quality video from source to production quickly.
I haven’t tried latakoo, but what I read about them sounds like just what wasn’t possible when we were covering events remotely. I hope to have an opportunity to work with this company on a future product because they’re meeting a need in a really important way.
Read MoreHow We’re Doing GeekBrief.TV from Two Locations
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.
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