Re: Flip Video
Woo! I just won a free Flip Video camera through some promotion through Facebook. It arrived today. The hardest part about getting started was getting the thing out of the darned plastic coffin it came in. (Those things are a class action suit waiting to happen.) I took it to my family temple's bon dance tonight.
The good news? It's dead simple to use. Almost confusingly simple. I wasted several minutes looking for a menu. Any menu. Where are the settings? How do I turn off the cheesy beeps? Nothing. You've got the various buttons on the thing, and that's it.
It feels reasonably sturdy in the hand, and without moving parts, I knew I could be a little rough with it. The kids ran around taking dizzying video clips of their feet for a while.
I was quite honestly surprised at how well it worked in the dark... or at least, outside at night. I know my "regular" digital camera would've balked without blurry long exposures or red-tinted images, but the Flip adjusted its frame rate and white balance and got to work. Here's a three minute taiko drum performance. I uploaded the original AVI.
I got home, and plugged it in. The USB plug is built into the camera, popping out like a little arm. Convenient and cute, I suppose... but if your computer has oddly placed USB ports, it's going to be a problem. I had to lift one end of my Macbook up to fit it in.
The bad news? It's not very Mac compatible. Oh, sure, it mounts right up as a USB drive, and in the DCIM folder, there's all the videos. But they're MPEG-4 AVIs, which Macs don't read natively. It came with a 3ivx decoder that's supposed to slot right into Quicktime, but it didn't work for me. The only solution offered is, "Force Quicktime to run in Rosetta mode," i.e. PowerPC, non-Intel, slow and yucky mode.
The barebones movie editing software that lets you connect clips together and add a music track doesn't work on Macs, either.
At the moment I'm making a movie by running the Flip Video software under XP on Parallels. It's a heck of a workaround, but I'm not sure what else I can do. Obviously if I just upload the AVIs off the camera straight to YouTube or other video hosting sites, they'll work just fine.
So, as a quickie, easy video camera? Fantastic. As a tool to post the random clip to YouTube? Perfect. As a way to make some simple movies on a Windows PC? Great. It's just not a Mac-friendly option if you want to work in iMovie or Final Cut or Quicktime Pro on a current Intel-based machine.
Woo! I just won a free Flip Video camera through some promotion through Facebook. It arrived today. The hardest part about getting started was getting the thing out of the darned plastic coffin it came in. (Those things are a class action suit waiting to happen.) I took it to my family temple's bon dance tonight.
The good news? It's dead simple to use. Almost confusingly simple. I wasted several minutes looking for a menu. Any menu. Where are the settings? How do I turn off the cheesy beeps? Nothing. You've got the various buttons on the thing, and that's it.
It feels reasonably sturdy in the hand, and without moving parts, I knew I could be a little rough with it. The kids ran around taking dizzying video clips of their feet for a while.
I was quite honestly surprised at how well it worked in the dark... or at least, outside at night. I know my "regular" digital camera would've balked without blurry long exposures or red-tinted images, but the Flip adjusted its frame rate and white balance and got to work. Here's a three minute taiko drum performance. I uploaded the original AVI.
I got home, and plugged it in. The USB plug is built into the camera, popping out like a little arm. Convenient and cute, I suppose... but if your computer has oddly placed USB ports, it's going to be a problem. I had to lift one end of my Macbook up to fit it in.
The bad news? It's not very Mac compatible. Oh, sure, it mounts right up as a USB drive, and in the DCIM folder, there's all the videos. But they're MPEG-4 AVIs, which Macs don't read natively. It came with a 3ivx decoder that's supposed to slot right into Quicktime, but it didn't work for me. The only solution offered is, "Force Quicktime to run in Rosetta mode," i.e. PowerPC, non-Intel, slow and yucky mode.
The barebones movie editing software that lets you connect clips together and add a music track doesn't work on Macs, either.
At the moment I'm making a movie by running the Flip Video software under XP on Parallels. It's a heck of a workaround, but I'm not sure what else I can do. Obviously if I just upload the AVIs off the camera straight to YouTube or other video hosting sites, they'll work just fine.
So, as a quickie, easy video camera? Fantastic. As a tool to post the random clip to YouTube? Perfect. As a way to make some simple movies on a Windows PC? Great. It's just not a Mac-friendly option if you want to work in iMovie or Final Cut or Quicktime Pro on a current Intel-based machine.
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