A few weeks ago, I picked up a Flip Video MinoHD Camcorder thinking it would be great to carry around and shoot video of the kids. Not really thinking that the quality would be so good. The quality is really good, it looks amazing on my 56” LCD HD screen, it’s probably not professional quality but my kids love watching their trips to the park on the big screen.
Due to it’s small size it is a bit tough to hold the camera still to take video that doesn’t shake, but once you get used to it, by bracing your arm. The software that comes with the camera is actually really good, it allows you to easily post your videos to YouTube, or email your video clips. It does a decent job piecing video clips together also. That said, I don’t use it, I am currently using iMovie 09 part of the iLife package from apple. I plug the Flip Mino HD in and up pops iMovie, I think select save the contents of the camera to an Archive, which is located on an external drive. Once the contents of the camera on the the drive I can easily import the clips I want into iMovie and add music and transitions, there are even some pretty cool templates that add the titles and transitions. One of the main reasons I use iMovie for my editing is because iMovie has a pretty cool feature that removes some of the shake out of your videos and it works pretty well, but that’s for another post.
This video was shot yesterday with the Flip Mino HD and edited with iLife ‘09
on a Macbook Pro
What I love is that I may shoot 15 minutes of video and then come home and quickly pick the clips I like and save the movie to iTunes, and Smugmug and now I don’t have to worry about where the tape is. With hard drive based cameras, the clips transfer as fast as your connection will allow, with tape based systems it usually has to be transferred in real time. Don’t wait get your Flip Video MinoHD Camcorder now.