TravelWright

Flip Mino Review

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.

Braketing and the Canon G9

Being used to using a DSLR it was great to find that there is an option on the Canon G9 to bracket photos if you use the Program or any of the Priority modes on the camera. Bracketing is where you take three of more photos in sequence and change the aperture or the speed of the photo to either ensure that you get one photo that works - i.e. get the exposure right, or in my case to experiment with composite photos - i.e. combining the three photos which results in an overall better shot. Below is an example of the bracketed shots that uses +2EV, 0EV and -2EV (note these have also got their GPS data attached shown by the G in the bottom left hand corner)

The downside of this approach of course is that you end up with three times the number of photos that you want - on the trip to Bryce and Zion I ended up with 16gb of photos overall to sort through or around 1500 shots!

I used a piece of software on the Mac called Bracketeer which takes the three JPG or RAW images and combines them into a single enhanced image. You can do a similar thing with Adobe Photoshop which results in a HDR photo, although this is a higher quality image the processing time is significantly longer and the cost of Photoshop has to be taken into account. Bracketeer is a shareware program which costs $29.95 from the Pangea Software site and this includes a Panorama viewer plug in for Photoshop.

The software takes up to 10 bracketed images and 'enfuses' them into a single TIFF loss less file of about 45Mb in size. Note: To save download time and storage on the server I have converted the file to JPEG.

There is also an option to batch process files - the software seems to use sequence numbers generated by the camera for file names and the couple of times I have tried it the software has chosen the wrong pictures and I have ended up with some interesting collages of images! So I have gone back to editing individual groups of images - time consuming when you have over 300 bracketed shots but worth it in the end.

Geotagging and Panoramas with the Canon G9

We have recently been hiking in Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park in Utah and I decided to see if I could get Geotagging working on the Mac. Being an avid photographer I always have at least two cameras with me and this vacation was no exception and although I would have loved to have taken my DSLR space and weight wouldn't allow it so my trusty Canon G9 was my weapon of choice.

For my GPS I have a Garmin Vista Etrex which I have had for some time and I purchased the US National Park Topo 24K CD to provide detailed mapping of the area. The Etrex is a great little unit and has large buttons so can be used with gloved hands although the display can be a little small to see some of the detail - it is cheap and the battery life is amazing (if you don't use the backlight).

So I downloaded JetPhoto for the Mac which allows you to Geotag your photos with the GPS location and then map them onto Google Earth of you want to. The process is quite simple and all you have to make sure is that the clock on your camera and the GPS are syncronised (Use the GPS clock as the master as this is taken from the sattelite signal) - also make sure that the time zones are the same although this can be compensated for in JetPhoto when you do the Geotagging.

When you are out taking photos just keep the GPS switched on - there is no need to waymark where you take the photo as the software uses the clock to synchronize the photos with the location. Once you are ready to donwload the photos load them into JetPhoto (not into Iphoto or Aperture at this stage) and save them into a new folder. When you have the photos then plug in your GPS via a USB cable and from the MAP menu choose 'GPS Logs', 'Automatic loading' and 'Match all photos with GPS Tracks'. This goes through your photos and where it can tags them with the GPS location - a small G appears in the lower right hand corner of those photos that have been tagged. You can then view them on Google Earth by choosing that option or create a web album etc.

The above image shows the tagging page of JetPhoto - you can see which photos have been Geotagged as well as the location on the bottom left - a cool feature is that the software also finds the location in Wikipedia and this can be stored along with the Geotagging data with the photo file.

Once the photos have been tagged you need to write the GPS data to the EXIF data of the photo - this is a menu option in JetPhoto Studio. At this point you can then import the photos into iPhoto or Aperture or experiment with the JetPhoto options which include turning them into a Flash Movie (See Below), Sideshow or web gallery.

The other piece of software I played around with was DoubleTake which allows you to create panoramas. Canon provide their own software called PhotoStitch with the Canon G9 but I hadn't loaded it on my Macbook Air so I downloaded the DoubleTake software. This software is pretty easy to use and when you have taken your photos, using the panorama option on the camera, you drag and drop the images into the DoubleTake window and then roughly align them and then choose the auto-align option to get the software to fine tune the panorama. This takes a few minutes and the results seem to be reasonably good. There are options to change the geometry if you have taken the photos by hand and have changed the perspective slightly and options to change the color, saturation, contrast etc. of each of the images to get them more matched.

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