I am dearly love my Flip Mino HD. It is convenient, easy to use, and well designed. So much so, that most all of the videos on my newest project – SpanTube – have been recorded on the Flip Mino HD. Typically, I just import them directly into iMovie on my Mac and edit with no problems.
Recently, however, I decided I might like to try a little green screen fun. I do have a copy of Final Cut Express which I suspect does chroma keying, but I was already familiar with how to do it in Pinnacle Studio 10, which I have installed on my Windows XP machine at work. I also have Adobe Premiere 1.5 that I could use for the same purpose.
The trouble came when I tried to import the .mp4 files directly into either program, as the programs did not support the file format, or so they said.
Now bear in mind that yes, I did install the 3ivx codec on this machine. I even reinstalled it, to no avail. After a series of tweets looking for help, most folks responded thinking I had the regular Flip camera, which saves videos as .AVI files. The high definition Flip Mino does not, it saves files as .mp4.
Well, finally, I have figured out a system to convert these files to a format friendly to the two programs I have on this machine (Pinnacle Studio 10 and Adobe Premiere 1.5). And it’s using freeware software, which is even better.
Some time ago, I had downloaded the Quick Media Converter program that Lifehacker mentioned. I didn’t realize it was as good as it is.
First, go download it and install it. I am using version 3.6.5.
Then, export a clip using the FlipShare software.
Then, drag and drop your exported clip onto the Quick Media Converter screen.
Then, choose AVI DivX Custom Resize from the top menu.
Change the dimensions of the file to 1280×720, which are the same dimensions the Flip Mino HD records in.
Press the convert button.
After conversion, the file appears on your desktop with an appended file name.
I hope this helps. I haven’t seen this answered to this degree anywhere else, so I am hoping this serves the larger community well.
When I exported the video from Pinnacle Studio 10, I used the following settings.
Size: 1280×720
30 FPS
I figured out that the native settings when recording with the Flip Mino HD records audio as 64kbps AAC/AAC+. I didn’t know that. It does sample at 44100, though.
Good luck, and enjoy your HD video editing on a Windows machine!
A few days ago I got my new Flip Mino HD in the mail. I charged it overnight and then began to play. Last night, I shot a quick bit of footage in low light situations. First I recorded my Christmas tree and then my Christmas lights outside. I uploaded it to YouTube using the included FlipShare software.
@thekyleguy mentioned via Twitter that YouTube does not do well with HD footage, despite being newly HD and widescreen capable. He recommended blip.tv as a viable alternative.
I decided to compare them head to head, well, to head. I added Vimeo to the mix, as it is my sharing service of choice when publishing work for public display. My little less than one minute video was roughly 70 megs when copied right from the Flip.
Here are the three videos. Keep in mind I uploaded this without any changes at all. This is raw footage, compressed using the Flip’s internal H.264 compression and then the sites do with it what they please to display it. I also did not change the default embed code in any way, despite Vimeo’s delicious method to change the size, color, etc of embedded videos. I had to change all the embed code to the same size. Since YouTube’s embed code used the size I liked the best (560×345) I stuck with that all around. This post looked awful with three videos of all different sizes. In hindsight this should have been three posts.
The first thing to notice is that the blip.tv player borks my theme because of the width. It plays HD video in the native resolution of 1280×750. I could change that in the code relatively easily, but in keeping with a direct head to head to head comparison, to heck with my theme.
YouTube
Vimeo
So the Vimeo embed wasn’t HD. You have to go to the Vimeo site to watch it in HD. Odd.
I feel silly. I’m not sure how I missed it but it turns out Wikispaces did respond to my initial post. I guess I didn’t recognize the name and didn’t see the signature as I was reading the comments. I’m sorry about that..
Here is what they said:
Hi Chris,
We’re sorry to hear we contributed to what sounds like a very rough day. Here are a few things we’ve got in store at Wikispaces we think will help a lot:
1. Allowing guest page creations. This makes good sense. We’ll add it as an option in the manage space section, defaulting to “off”. The reason we haven’t had this in the past is that it’s something spammers pounce on — but with active space organizers and our spam protection systems, we think it will be useful for many wikis.
2. Account creation for schools. Every week, we create thousands of accounts on behalf of teachers for students who don’t have email addresses. Right now, we do this based on requests sent to us, but we’ve got plans to streamline this process for organizers. We want you to be able to create 20 accounts for your wiki in a heartbeat — ideally, in the time it takes to go from Plan A to Plan B while your students are in the room.
3. Our editor. We’ve got some frequently-requested formatting features we’re testing right now. We think you’ll love them, and find they fill some gaps without making the editor overly complicated (or slow!).
As always, we’re here to help and listen to any suggestions you might have: help@wikispaces.com. We’ve gotten to where we are thanks to thousands of passionate people like you — a huge percentage of them teachers — who tell us where we’ve gone wrong and what we can do better.
On the official Get Satisfaction page, the founder and CEO of PbWiki responded to my inquiry.
Hi! This is a tough issue. We’ve had a lot of teachers emailing us asking for us to make sure an address gets entered before proceeding so they know which students are making which changes, so several months ago we started asking that *some* address be provided. It sounds like you’ve just discovered that that solution doesn’t work well for you. Can you help us think of a setup that would work better?
What do you think? I can understand the need for some teachers to record at least a name, but I think requiring an email address is too much.
My suggestion to him will be, require a first name (and I think it’s important to note first name only needed) and make the email address not required. I think if kids are not doing this appropriately then it’s more of a classroom management issue and one not necessarily designed to be handled by software.
Or, make it where the user can decide? In some setting somewhere, make it where I can say, “I do not want my contributors to have to share their email address”, etc.
I had an amazing day planned for my kids, with two days of the computer lab blocked off for our use. I was planning for us to spend our time exploring Ancient Rome in Google Earth and making placemarks, adding descriptions, reading the included Wikipedia articles. Notice I said I was planning…
I got to the computer lab to find out that Google Earth was not available to students. My workaround to that had been “fixed” so now I had no workaround.
And 20 students with nothing to do.
I scrambled and put together a project where they research in Wikipedia (rebellious, eh?) and then put their information into a PowerPoint presentation.
Not much else they can access.
I made sure to talk about the basics of good PowerPoint design, I ruled out clip art use and cheesy backgrounds, and ended up teaching a good design lesson.
It’s still not Google Earth.
I then switched gears after lunch and decided to pilot a wiki-based research project and created a new pbwiki. It used to be that as long as I gave the kids the wiki password they could edit until their hearts were content.
No more.
The recent changes in PbWiki’s login procedures have made it where they have to have a wiki invite key and then enter a name and email address.
Sigh.
Even when I told them the wiki invite key and told them to make up a name and email address I was frought with problems with the software not allowing kids through. A lot of the kids simply didn’t know the basic syntax of an email address. Of course, you can’t not include a name and email address.
I asked for help in pbwiki’s Get Satisfaction page, but as of yet there’s been no answer.
So I switched to Wikispaces. I threw together a new wiki that didn’t have ads and had them go to work. I created new pages for each group and had them edit their own pages. Naturally, there’s a chance someone could edit someone else’s, but hey, it’s a reasonable risk.
Except that I wanted them to create a new page for each of the places I asked them to research.
They can’t create pages. Drat!
So back to the drawing board, they can’t create pages and I don’t have the brain power amidst answering a slew of questions to create five pages for each group (and there are roughly ten groups per block). That would be counterproductive.
They progressed nicely once we got up and running, although I had loads of trouble with them typing in the wiki address.
How hard is that? Most of them typed exploring ancient rome wiki spaces into the address bar.
This tells me more and more than they know how to play but basic operations are beyond them, at times.
So, I implore you, pbwiki, let my kids edit with only an invite key. Let that happen on the free version.
As for you, wikispaces, please let my kids create new pages. Or let that be something I decide in the manage space section.
And for goodness sake, Wikispaces, it’s time for a more robust WYSIWYG editor. One of the reasons I love pbwiki is due to their integration of FCKEditor. My kids prefer it, too, since it lets you control your text so much more nicely and more fine-grained.
I got this idea from some tweets last night, specifically from watching budtheteacher backchannel a workshop. It got interesting, especially when D’Arcy Norman backed away due to the high volume of tweets.
What if we had a space to always use as a central back channel? What would this space look like?
What if we collectively create it on a space at www.edublogosphere.com?
I would say it needs a…
1. Chat room that archives chats and makes them searchable
2. Twitter feed so that folks can announce that they’re planning a backchannel.
That’s all I’ve got. Does this seem worthwhile? What else should be added?
Flashmeeting seems to be all the rage lately among some of the folks in my learning network. I agree, it’s a great service that I’ve had the pleasure to see in practice. It works well, and provides a free solution that works nicely.
I seem to recall having had a “booker” account that doesn’t work any more. I emailed Kevin and in his response was this paragraph. I am posting it because the information is also found on their website if you dig a bit, so I’m not violating any personal ethics.
Flashmeeting accounts on our server at the Open University are used for research purposes. Within this context all the accounts we host on our server have to fit within our research agenda with regard to use etc. and all activity (i.e. including video and audio) on the server is recorded for potential use in research publications etc.
Which makes me wonder what I’ve said will turn up in a research journal. Grant you, I may not make my display name my actual name, but there is still a clear record of it being me that said whatever was said.
Not sure I am actually concerned, but I did feel this was an interesting point to bring up, for those of us concerned with privacy.
If you caught the link from yesterday and liked the stats plugin I mentioned, you need to read this…
Anyone hosting their own blog and running the WordPress.com Stats plugin should update the plugin to version 1.1.1 immediately or apply the patch below. A critical SQL injection vulnerability was found and fixed. The bug could allow an attacker to steal administrative credentials. (WordPress.com bloggers are not affected.)
Most users will want to download the latest version and simply copy the new files directly over the old ones. Subversion users may do `svn up`. Advanced users may apply the patch manually.
Thanks to Alex Concha who found and reported the bug to me. He also provided the fix.
I do enjoy twitter, and often find myself perusing the past posts at twitku, my twitter/jaiku posting tool of choice. Recently there was a bunch of activity regarding twitterfox, formerly called twitter notifier. It allows you to embed a twitter notifying popup in your firefox browser so you are immediately notified when someone updates (of course you can select how often, and you can decide to turn off the popup).
Personally, I keep a twitku tab open and check in when I want to. Which means, I am not interrupted. This works well for my productivity when I am sitting in foreign countries with slow internet connections. Sheesh.
Anyhoo, I am worried about your cognitive health. You see, each time the twitterfox notifier pops up alerting you that a new tweet has occurred you are distracted, not just inconveniently but also cognitively.
This type of interruption violates the split attention theory, which branches from the cognitive load theory. If I were involved in learning something (which is hopefully the vast majority of time I am sitting here), then I would have my cognitive train derailed more often than is necessary, negatively affecting my learning.
For me, that’s not ok. I need twitku to be on demand, hence the tab scenario.
Take this screenshot (did I tell you how much I love skitch?)…click for full size version.
If I am involved in reading this article, my working memory is going to be heavily processing information that will hopefully make it into long term memory. This process is halted by the interruption of twitterfox.
Twitter and Jaiku are useful tools for me, but I cannot afford to be interrupted, not because I am terribly important or busy, but rather because my working memory suffers and that derails learning. Twitter and Jaiku are useful tools at times, and at times pointless fun, but they have to be leveraged properly.
NB: I am not a cognitive scientist, and this is subject to my understanding of cognitive load theory. Please understand this is my take and is based on how I learn, I am not ragging on you at all. If you disagree, that’s fine. Just be nice about it!
This is a fantastic new feature for Slideshare, the ability to add audio files and synchronize slides to the audio.
They’re calling it slidecasting.
Jonathan Boutelle from Slideshare contacted me and asked what I thought, I told him I loved it. Here’s a brief intro, if you want to find out straight from them, hit up the slidecasting faq page.
It begins with a small little box on the bottom right, tempting you.
That leads you to this little nugget of info, good only if you’re uploading a new file.
If you already have a presentation loaded to slideshare and you want to add audio to it, you go to the presentation and hit the tiny edit button on the far right.
And then you’re off! At the top of that page, hit the create slidecast button and add your audio file.
It uploads it and preps it for synching. More on that part of the process later.
Congrats, Slideshare, for another great new feature!
May 1, 2009
Tagged with: flip camera • flip mino hd • pinnacle • video editing
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