You two have done a good job listing the equipment you use and given some good basic steps for getting started, but I wanted to ask about the video formats and sizes that you use for the show. Can you post something about what sizes you render the show in and how that works? I primarily have a Windows audience, and WMV seems to be the most popular, but I’m wondering if there’s a better way to render the video. So far I’ve used iLife and VisualHub to convert to MOV and then WMV, but the quality isn’t great.

We release GeekBrief.TV in five different formats. Every show starts out with the basics and expands based on their audience’s needs. I suggest beginning with three formats: a small .mp4, a large .mp4, and a .wmv. Talk to your audience, listen to what they need, and adjust accordingly.

Here’s what we do for GeekBrief.TV:

Once the show is edited and ready to go, we drag it into Visual Hub. This application is $23.32 and is worth more than that. It makes compression fairly painless once you decide on your settings. The two things that are missing is batch compression and the ability to tag for iTunes during the compression process.

Extra Large: Under “Optimize For” choose “Apple TV”, click “H.264″, and move the slider to “Go Nuts”. The file size is 960×540. It’s .mp4.

Medium: Under “Optimize For” choose “iPhone”, make sure “H.264″ is still checked, and move the slider down to “High”. The file size is 720×400. It’s .mp4.

Small: Under “Optimize For” choose “Nano”, we still have “H.264″ checked, and move the slider down to “Standard”. The file size is 320×176. It’s .mp4.

For WMV, we drag the Extra Large version into Visual Hub. In the “WMV” tab, move the slider back up to “Go Nuts”. In the Advanced Settings, we change the size to 640×360. It’s formatted for the xBox since that’s how the majority of our WMV viewers use it.

Audio: We actually use Sorensen Squeeze, since we already have it for our TiVo format. We used to use MP3 Converter (part of Call Recorder), but when we upgraded to Leopard, it broke. If you don’t have Squeeze, you could export the file to a .wav format from Quicktime, import it into iTunes and convert to MP3.

Be careful not to overextend yourself. There are so many possible formats, and so many devices that use different formats. You’re not going to be able to provide every single possible file for each viewer. You can estimate about thirty minutes per format for post production (depending on processing power), so keep that in mind when you’re deciding what to do.