Tech Notes - The Flip Video Camcorder
Monday May 19, 2008
I bought a Flip video camcorder late last week, and I've been taking a lot of videos since. My procedure in the past for a camcorder video was:
- Take the video with my Panasonic video camcorder.
- Import the video into Windows Movie Maker.
- Tweak the clips for length.
- Add music from my legal library.
- Make a .wmv movie.
- Upload the .wmv to YouTube.
With the Flip, the procedure is:
- Take the movie with the Flip.
- Plug the camera into the PC and tell it to send it to YouTube, adding music on the way.
Here's my review of the Flip, with tech information, links, comparative pricing and more.
I have a flip video too, I love it. As a realtor it has come in very handy for sending tours on email to clients out of state.
I’ve looked quite a bit at video and putting it on my various blogs. I’ve been using coolplayer plugin and .wmv files.
The wmv files are clear, and much smaller which helps with bandwidth purposes. I too have been very disappointed with the quality of images on YouTube.
I’ve just bought a flip video camera for some experimenting, and again have found the wmv files are much smaller and very easy to embed using the Coolplayer plugin.
The first video I took was a short 12 sec clip posted at How I win at scrabble
The post itself is just an experiment for flip video converted to wmv with windows movie maker.
I use Photo story 3 to build single property video montages saved as wmv files and use the coolplayer plugin to display them on the sites.
Here is an example of one of those. Risky Drive Video Montage
The Flip video I purchased was the 60 min Ultra. The software on the camera has a save image feature when you are in the clip editor for saving individual jpg files.
I don’t want to use it for video tours of home, rather I envision it as a tool for short podcasts of 30 sec to a minute on things like “this is what a termite tube looks like on a foundation” and “This is what the inspector means when he says there is a negative grade to the landscaping”. Using these clips in conjuction with regular blog posts should be informative and fun at the same time.