My wife rocks. I’m a gadget freak, so for Father’s Day she researched the best gadgets on CNET and found a review of the Flip Mino. As of today, August 17, 2008 it sells for $151.48 on Amazon.
Here’s the deal. We bought a camcorder 3 years ago when Lily was born. It was great, fit in my hand and took two hours of tapes. Here’s the problem: it sits in a bag downstairs somewhere, the battery always seems to be dead, the tape always seems to be full and its a bit too much hassle to get the video off of the tape and on to a format we will actually use.
The Flip Mino, on the other had, is a little smaller than a deck of playing cards. I just carry it around in my pocket. The internal memory holds about 60 minutes worth of video and the device has a built in USB connector. I simply plug it into my computer and copy over the videos.
Flip Mino
Here’s a shot with the USB Connector open:
Here’s how I use it:
1. Take as many videos as you want before it fills up (about 60 minutes).
2. Flip up the USB Connector and plug it into your USB port on your Mac [You're not still using Windows are you? If so then go here.]
3. Copy the files from FLIPVIDEO\DCIM\100VIDEO\*.avi to where ever you are going to store your videos. Yes, you read it correctly. Flip stores the files as an AVI file. Luckily you can convert it over (see below). I have a couple Western Digital Passport: 250 Gig USB external drives I use for my media files. Although I bought mine at Costco, you can currently get them for $95.99 at Amazon. On the Passport, I have a subdirectory called “Video_Flip”.
4. Once you confirm the videos were copied over, go ahead and delete them off of the Flip. If the little LCD light is blinking on the Flip’s USB connector, go ahead and leave it connected to charge the battery up. It will stop blinking when complete. NOTE: if you completely drain the battery, you can not simply plug it in and download videos. You have to wait until it charges up to some magic point. The documentation doesn’t mention this and I thought it was broken.
5. If you are like me, you probably have a week or so worth of videos stored up on the Flip. They always are named incrementally starting at 001. So when you delete them off the Flip, the counter starts over. If you are always copying the files into the same subdirectory on your computer, you will have file collisions from files with the same name. Instead, every time I copy something over, I rename the files with the date I took the video (ie. 20080817-001). That way I also know when I took the video.
6. Fire up iMovie and import a clip. Create a new project and name it. I use the following naming convention: YYYYMMDD_description (ie. 20080621_sacramentors). That way I know when the video was shot and I have a fighting chance of knowing what it was about.
7. Drag the clip into the project, or edit the clip to your hearts content. I put a title clip at the front with both a name and date.
8. Under the Share pull down menu, select Export. I save it to the same subdirectory as my .avi files on my Passport. You can select the file size and attributes. I save it as a Medium (640×330) size so I can play it on my Apple TV.
9. Add the file into iTunes and you’re set.
Here is what a quick video looks like: