I am feeling a little too far in front of the curve these days with my FlipMino HD. I had such high hopes for using this camera as part of my regular production flow. But the process just doesn’t really work yet, and it is really aggravating. Perhaps someone out there will have a better work flow. Trust me, I am all ears.
As you probably know, Pure Digital’s Flip MinoHD shoots 720p HD footage. I have rather fallen in love with the little camera. I take it with me all the time. Don’t get me wrong, no one will ever confuse the camera’s footage with Red, nor is it a Mark5dII or even an EX3. It is a fixed focus $220 camera. I expected significant limitations. And with those limitations the footage is awesome. But once you shoot the HD footage what do you do with it?
The previous versions of the camera our family has used are standard definition. It has been super easy to cobble together great movies in MovieMaker and iMovie. My 13-year-old daughter started using these cameras nearly three years ago. But the Filp’s 720HD format is completely unsupported by editing manufacturers. I have had to jump through so many hoops to get clips I can edit with that I feel like I work for Wham-O. Here are the problems.
PC
The FlipShare application is great for moving your files from the camera’s flip flash memory to your computer. So far so good. But then what? I can export the files to a local directory, but they are still in the 3ivx .mp4 wrapper. 
That means I need an application that will handle the files natively for editing.
With the 3ivx codec installed on my computer the Windows Media player displays the video clips flawlessly. It is great for viewing vibrant, full screen previews of the clips. But that does not solve my editing conundrum.
The Windows Media Encoder totally fails when it tries to read these files. It gets lost and quits.
Microsoft’s Movie Maker on the PC creates exclusively standard definition Windows 
Media files. The application recognizes that the source files are 1280×720 mp4 files. You can see that in the clip property page. But there is no way to publish a HD movie. The output that you create is 640×480 standard definition. It recognizes that the flip files are oversized sources and scales them in real time down to SD.
Impressive, but not what I am after. The Beta version of Movie Maker displays similar behavior.
Adobe’s Premier can’t even recognize the file format.
Mac
On the Mac side it does not get any better. Using the legacy version of iMovie (The iLife 06 version, you know, the one that actually works as an editor) I can import the files. But the 
process is really laborious because it has to transcode all of the files to the project’s selected video format. In this case 720 HDV. At least it is in HD. That is an improvement.
Unfortunately it can take hours for 30 minutes of source footage to be converted in the QuickTime engine. There is no way to 
define a custom project format, like .mp4 or 3ivx, in iMovie. You have to choose from the preset flavors provided by the application.
Trying to get the footage into iMovie08 was hopeless, but it really does not work as an editing application so I would have used it as a transcoder. It was a total waste of time and I moved on.
At least once you get it into the iMovie06 application you can string the footage together and publish a QuickTime file using the QT “Expert Settings” function. Just don’t expect speed. Last week it took over 22 hours to export a 32 minute string of clips. Not only is this unduly time consuming, but converting the file to a third format when exporting is not a very good idea. I was converting the files from 3ivx to hdv when I imported them into iMovie, and then to animation mov files when I exported. All that jumping from one format to another is very likely to introduce significant errors to the files. If I could have just batch flipped the files to uncompressed QuickTimes in the FlipShare tool that would have been more efficient.
One other problem I have had with exporting longer video strings out of iMovie is the audio and video drift out of sync. The videos of my kids skiing look more like a poorly dubbed Mothra movie than the family out on the hill.
Final Cut Pro is of no help as there are similar limitations to project formats and converting footage when it get dropped into the timeline. I can not create an 3ivx or mp4 project, so again I am stuck with HDV or DVCProHD or some other generic file flavor from the 1990s.
So what’s the solution? I don’t really know. For now I am having to convert the files in QuickTime Pro. It eats up oodles of hard drive space, too much time and is decidedly inelegant. I want a solution where I can create a project in a decent editing tool that edits these files natively. And I want an easy way to flip the final product into an HD deliverable. It could be a high quality file, it could be HD tape. Just something that is not as insanely broken as what we are faced with now.
So what have you discovered out there? Why do we have such a popular tool that only takes us only half-way through the production process? We can acquire, but we can’t distribute. We have a camera that is so easy to use it only has two buttons, but a file format that is so broken and unsupported you need a PhD in math to use it. Let me know what works for you. And I will be happy to share your discoveries.
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