If you have the lead-time, fly Southwest in the US for domestic flights. They allow a carry-on, a man-purse, and two large checked bags for free.  I’ve also found that all carriers seem to be more lenient on carry-on bag size if you’re using a backpack versus a roll-along. We use either a Cinebag backpack (the big one) for our camcorder or a Burton photo pack for the DSLR stuff. Man-purse is a Timbuk2 courier bag which carries laptop, drives, backup point-shoot. 

If we’re just doing interviews and don’t need butter-smooth panning, we leave the 75mm tripod at home and bring a 4 section photo tripod with a cheapy 701HDV head. If we pull the center column out with the head attached before packing we can even fit it into a small carryon sized roller (that we still check). 

We’re still trying to figure out lighting though! Hah.