Flip Video Test
Today I received my Flip Video Ultra camcorder and I was anxious to try it out. I opened the box, took the unit out, put in the two AA batteries, turned it on, pressed the record button, and it WORKED! This thing is sweet. It’s extremely simple to use – drop dead simple. The unit I bought has 1 Gb of memory and will hold up to 60 minutes of video. To download your clips to the computer, just plug it into a USB port. You can either drag and drop the files to your hard drive or use their software which is stored on the camcorder (Mac or Win). The native files are 640×480 AVI files compressed with 3ivx MPEG-4. Audio is 44.1 kHz, mono.
You can import the clips directly from the camcorder into iMovie 6 without having to first copy the files to your hard drive. This saves time. You can then edit in iMovie and Export any way you want, even as DVD. The quality is really quite good considering that this is a $140, Flash based camcorder. It does well in low light too. I wish they had a jack for an external mic and maybe a 3X optical zoom, but all in all I love this little thing. Now, what can I shoot?
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