Flip over HD

Just when you thought HD cameras couldn’t get any smaller, Pure Digital, maker of the mega-popular Flip camcorders, is rolling out the the MinoHD. This is essentially the Flip Mino shooting 720p HD video.  The Wall Street Journal’s Katie Boehret tested this insanely small profile camera and had generally high praise for this potential game-changer in the consumer HD camera market.  You can see some of her test footage below.

This is not a camera that can be easily dismissed. The New York Times reported that the fastest growing company in Silicon Valley over the past few years was not Facebook, VMWare, or all-mighty Google. According to Deloitte, the professional services firm, it was none other than  Pure Digital Technologies, maker of, you guessed it, the Flip video camera.

The appeal of the Flip has never been incredible optics or a robust feature set… no it is all about simplicity. When my daughter started shooting with flash-based cameras (she was I marveled at the novelty. The rock-bottom price of these cameras put them in the range of an impulse buy at the electronics store. One of the potential challenges that Pure Digital may face is the price for this new camera. It jumps to $230 and puts it out of impulse range and more directly in competition with consumer cameras that have such novel options as an optical zoom, image stabilization and external mic jack.

But this is all about simplicity and you can be certain this camera is simple to operate.

Its internal 4GB of will hold up to an hour of video. I am not personally a big fan of the 720p format. It is a frame size that straddles the line between standard definition (480i) and HD (1080i). Both Sony and Cannon have adopted 1080 as the HD format for their cameras, while JVC and Panasonic have chosen 720. (Can you say VHS v. Betamax?)

 

Most new HD Televisions will handle either format quite nicely. The choice to work in 720 for the Flip Mino is logical. 1080 files are significantly larger and to get smooth recordings would require the ability to write a lot a data very quickly to the memory chip. Not only are you pushing fewer pixels around with the smaller 720 format, you are also pushing fewer 1’s and 0’s. You can record and retrieve files faster. Mixing your Mino footage with content from your Canon or Sony HD camera could be problematic as you will be mixing formats and most current edit packages don’t handle this problem very smoothly.

The new camera also will utilize new FlipShare software. This on-board software platform allows a user to plug the camcorder’s flip-out USB arm into any computer for easy drag-and-drop video organizing, editing and sharing. This has not always been true with past iterations of the software. Particularly when wrestling with a sometimes balky DivX codec.

FlipShare’s use of drag-and-drop video organizing resembles the way that Apple iTunes songs can be dragged into playlists. Users can manage their files, rename and copy through the intuitive interface. They have made following the usual paths of distribution quite easy (save to the computer, play full screen, share via e-mail, upload to YouTube, AOL or MySpace, or create a movie.) On the Mac side, it’s fully compatible with Apple’s video applications, including iMovie and iDVD.

While not quite perfect, and I usually hate to buy the first generation of any technology, I have a feeling I know which camera will be under the tree this Christmas.

 

Technorati Tags: drew keller,HD,home video,flip,flip minohd,mino,Pure Digital Technologies,flipshare

It was shot with a still camera…

The line between still and video cameras continues to blur. True, that’s a painful pun, but there is no denying this trend is most evident in top-of-the-line still cameras. If we could look at the names on the waiting list for the Canon 5D Mark II professional S.L.R. I would wager most of them would belong to filmmakers, not still photographers.

This is because the high definition footage from the Canon is mind blowing. It is full motion, 30 frame-per-second, 1080p footage captured on an image sensor the size of a 35mm negative, instead of the video camera’s fingernail sized CCD. Not only is the capture system vastly superior with the S.L.R., but the glass in the lens means the image in the $2,700 camera rivals that of a $100,000 HD camera used for features. Using Canon’s interchangeable lenses means the filmmaker is no longer limited to a zoom lens full of compromises permanently mounted to the camera. You now have a prime lens system with out Redrock. And you have a digital cinema solution without the hype of Red and their proprietary file format hassles.  You have a filmmakers Nirvana. You also have a very long waiting list.

There have even been a few rumors of late that Red pulled their plans to release Scarlet because the 5DM2 chopped the legs out from under it. Honestly, that would not surprise me.

Sure there are compromises. There is no audio to speak of so you are back to double system sound. But heck, I could figure that out using an iPhone or a DVcam.

The Web was buzzing a couple of weeks ago when photographer Vincent LaForet spent a weekend making a short, wordless movie using an early Canon 5D Mark II. He hired a couple of models, grabbed a crew, rented a helicopter, pulled together $5,000, and made an absolutely astonishing-looking piece of video. It was hard to find the thing online—Vincent didn’t want to host it on his own site because of the massive bandwidth required to serve it. (Here’s his writeup, and here’s the “making of” video.)

Finally, David Pogue of the New York Times writes that, “the original video has finally found a place online, and you should have a look.” I could not agree more, you should have a look. And as Pogue writes,  “Just keep telling yourself: ‘It was shot with a still camera. It was shot with a still camera….’”

LaForet | Visuals (in HD)

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: drew keller,Canon 5D Mark II,video,filmmaking,still camera,HD,1080p,LaForet