This week I coudn't resist the temptation to get myself a Flip Mino from Amazon - I have always been fascinated by video but the size of the camcorders and the degree of complication has seen me buy lots of kit and use none!
The simplicity of the Flip Mino was therefore very attractive as well as the compact size and apparent ease of use in terms of 'producing' the output. So my Amazon package arrived in Wednesday and I have had a couple of days now to play around with it and find out whether the hype meets reality at some point.
The device is small and compact and comes with a material sleeve and wrist loop - all the software that you need for either PC or Mac is stored on the device and in the box the only thing you get other than the Mino itself is a cable to allow you to hook it up to a TV - and of course the obligatory one page instruction leaflet. I am not going to post sample videos as there are loads in Youtube if you search for Flip Mino and you can see the quality for yourself.
True to the hype the unit is very simple to use with a large red button on the back below the screen which is the record on - record off control. Around it are zoom controls as well as play and delete buttons but for day-to-day use the red button is all that you need.
The unit is charged from the USB port which pops out of the top of the unit - a really cool feature but I am concerned about the strength of the pivot - particularly when plugging it in to the Macbook Air there is a degree of strain on the joint and I have taken to using a USB extension cord to tak ethe pressure off.
This brings me to the issue of production of the video. The software that comes with the unit, Flip for Mac, is basic video editing software that produces an mp4 file.
It allows some basic editing and offers cut and paste functionality and export to email and youtube as well as capturing stills from the videos. Unfortunately IMovie08 does not import the files from the Flip to more advanced editing is not possible straight from the unit.
I spent a couple of hours yesterday evening playing with various bits of software on the Mac to allow video conversion from the Flip to to other standards - particularly WMV as I wanted to send a video to a work colleague who is on a locked down corporate PC and will only read WMV files via Media Player. I settled ion using Visual Hub which is a small application with big functionality, The software takes the Flip output and encodes it into WMV, Flash, AVI, MPEG, DV and other formats as well as allowing varying compression rates and image sizes etc. The software has a drag and drop interface and is very simple to use and produced an acceptable quality WMV file of around 3.3mb for a 2 minutes Flip video (The mp4 file was around 5.5mb and an AVI file was over 11mb!).
I will update the posting as I get to play with the unit over the next few weeks. But as I was saying to a colleague this morning the great thing about the unit is that it is simple and pocketable - it is something that you can slip in your pocket when you go out which is a great advantage over the bulkier - potentially higher quality - camcorders that are out there.
Initial views are that this is an excellent, well thought out product and I recommend it highly at the moment. If you are using a Mac then try out the Visual Hub software to do whatever conversion you need - incidentally once converted the file can be edited in iMovie08.
