Flip camcorders.

What do you think of the Flip camcorders?

• I have a 5 month old son and I just bought a nikond3000 for regular pictures and now i need something to take little videos here and there with. Im wondering what the takes on the Flip camcorders are? Can you burn what you record onto dvds or is it easy to use and upload videos....I have a regular camcorder but its kind of old school but it works and its fine so im wondering if i should just carry around the camcorder i have now which records on mini tapes or buy the flip cam..is it good quality video? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

• Answer:

  I think any equipment is generally fine - if it is used within its capabilities. With a small lens and small imaging chip, low light will be a chellange - so turn on some lights when you use the camcorder. Outdoors, in daylight, when the camcorder is close to the subject, it will be fine. With no manual audio control and no method to connect an external mic, audio extremes (very loud or very soft and far away from the mic) will be a challenge for the audio. When you fill the memory in the Flip, how do you fit more video? Copy the video in the camcorder to a computer, then delete the camcorder's video so you have room for more video. When you fill the computer's hard drive, what happens? Assuming the video editor in the computer can deal with the video from the Flip and the computer has a DVD burner, you can go down that path - if the video from the Flip cannot be used by your video editor, convert it to a format that allows the video editor to deal with it. Since you did not tell us what computer or what video editor, we have no way to know what, if any, compatibility issues there might be. If you want to burn the video to a DVD so it can be played back in any DVD player, that is easy enough to do - with a DVD authoring application. It will render the edited (or non edited) video to VOB format and burn the DVD in a manner that regular DVD players can understand. When you are in the video editor, just "Save As" or export as a format the sharing sites can deal with. Most common are MOV, AVI, WMV and MP4. What are planning to do with the edited video - or if you want that video in 10+ years? Assuming your "mini tape" is actually miniDV (digital) or Digital8 tape, I would be using it instead. The digital tape is a good archive media technology. Just don't re-use the tapes. And it is likely the "mini tape" camcorder has larger lenses and imaging chip(s) which allow it to provide much better low light performance. Just be cause it is tape - assuming it is digital tape - does not mean it is somehow inferiror because it is "old shool". If that were the case, the professionals would have been the first to jump to the "better" new technology. The fact is that DV format video is a lot less compressed than any consumer grade MOD, MPG or whatever format video save to flash memory or hard disc drive camcorders - and a LOT less compressed that any consumer grade standard definition video DVD based camcorder. The zeros and ones written to the digtal tape are the same as the zeros and ones written to flash memory, hard disc drive and DVD based camcorders. The difference is that the video data is compressed a lot less when it is in DV format. Since video data compression = discarded video data, that means video quality is best available in the DV format. But since you did not tell us which "regular, old school, mini tape" camcorder you have, we have no way to know if it uses digital tape (miniDV, Digital 8) or analog (VHS-C, Hi8). And last, if you are using a digital tape based camcorder, you need to connect the camcorder's DV port (not USB) to the computer's firewire port (not USB) with a firewire cable (not USB). With the camcorder in Play" mode, launch the video editor in the computer and import or capture the video from the camcorder's tape. USB will not work. USB-to-firewire cable/converter/adapter things will not work. If your computer has no firewire port, hopefully it has an available expansion slot so you can add one. But we don't know what computer you are using.