Kerstin Baker-Ash

Hometown Toronto Pride

Toronto. Rap. Video.

Fantastic. I'm neither too old or too proper to like a bit of hometown T-Dot pride. Loving the Anthem video from Kardinal Offishall, even if the person who uploaded it can't spell his name properly...

 

New Flip Mino HD

After umming and ahhhing about it for some time, we finally took the plunge and bought a Flip Mino HD. The delay in making a final decision stemmed from whether or not we could really get that much out of it, and how handy it could be in situations where it might be neat to take a quick video. We have an HD camcorder which we use for more lengthy shots (birthdays, weddings, etc) but wanted something I could carry around in my purse and whip out at a moment's notice. The Flip fit the bill nicely.

It's not too jerky (we also bought a Joby Gorillapod for stability while bike riding or in the car) and does great with contrasting colors. I gave it a try with some flowers in our backyard for closeups, but there isn't a macro function and it seemed blurry and unable to focus. That's fine for us - we're really not looking for that in a grab-n-go camera - but you'll be disappointed if you wanted to take shots of bugs roaming around leaves.

The functionality is intuitive; you can't really miss that big, red, push me button which starts and stops filming. The sound extracted from a rather tiny microphone is impressive. When we went for a walk in the woods to test the sound, the playback on birds chirping was amazing. On the flip side, be aware that if it's windy or an airplane is flying overhead, the mic will pick that up as well. 

Keeping in mind that YouTube significantly degraded the quality of the film (next stop, Vimeo), here's our first little test (complete with the required "quick, get the camera out" deer moment):

The original looks great in iMovie. The next job will be to upload a new video to Vimeo to see how the Flip handles itself there. While we might bring along our camcorder to our friend Michael's wedding next weekend, the Flip will definitely come in handy during the hora.