GBTV #0251 | GeekBrief.TV
We like being experimental on The Brief, but we don’t typically take it as far as we are today. This episode won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Neal’s camera work is rough and the audio is difficult in spots, but the experiment we were documenting is something we don’t think has ever been done before. Let me tell you the story.
The producers of the TV show, The Lab with Leo Laporte contacted me last week about attempting a segment via Skype. I’ve been interviewing people like crazy via Skype over the past few weeks for another feed. The one thing I’ve learned is that when bandwidth is good, we get great looking results. When bandwidth is bad, we get digital salad. I didn’t want to give Leo digital salad, so I contacted my friends at xTrain.com. xTrain recently launched an unprecedented online video training service. They have a state-of-the-art studio here in Dallas, and bandwidth that will make you drool. They also had a desire to impress Leo, so they agreed to help me get the segment to Leo in an amazing way.
From what I gathered, the xTrain team hadn’t realized the power of Skype to deliver great looking video over the Web, until I asked for their help. They started playing around and when I got to the studio, they were over-the-moon excited about what they’d figured out. They were able to deliver excellent video to The Lab studio in Vancouver over Skype. Leo Laporte said it looked like a satellite uplink. What’s more, they delivered the video with me on a 3-D virtual set.
This behind-the-scenes look at the experiment is meant for “how stuff works” fanatics like us. As soon as The Lab episode is released, I’ll try to get permission to release the segment on my feed so we can see what the finished product looks like.
Photo Credit: giovanni gallucci | social media consultant. Other photos from the day are here.
14 Comments
Leave a comment
how exciting! can't wait to see that episode of The Lab, must be fun to play with such cool tech the formerly dead, DAK
That studio is absolutely amazing! I can't imagine how much all that equipment costs.
Very cool. I'm really digging this intensedebate comment system. I fully intend on integrating in to my blog. :)
Very cool episode!!!
Cali - This new comment system is really nice, but it seems to be a pretty heavy load on rendering the web page. On both a quad G5 tower and my 2.2 core2duo MBP, most of the page appears, but then produces the beach ball for several seconds while the comments portion renders itself.
Signal is a WOW.
Its all internet black magic to me lol, but this is amazing! How much bandwith was there?
45mb/s
New comments look interesting .. I'm still catching up on the shows as I've been internet deprived for the past while - watched 8 shows last night.
I don't know if Leo was impressed… but I sure the heck was!!!!
I think it's very cool that you're in a position to be experimenting with the technologies available to achieve results that are surprising the professionals better funded than you. Keep pushing the envelope guys. You're redefining the tools available to all podcasters.
Hi, I love the podcast…great work, and very informative. Just a suggestion…You need a .5 second delay at the start of your podcast to allow the video streaming to set up on most clients. Keep up the good work
I'm very glad to hear it!
Comment system works fine on my windows xp media center p4 1.8ghz 1 gig ram while itunes downloads various podcasts.