New point-and-shoot digital makes online videos easy
Move over iPod touch and Nintendo Wii. There’s a new gadget in
town this holiday season that is sure to top the wish list of teens
and 20-somethings nationwide.
New point-and-shoot digital makes online videos easy
Move over iPod touch and Nintendo Wii. There’s a new gadget in town this holiday season that is sure to top the wish list of teens and 20-somethings nationwide.
Pure Digital, a San Francisco-based company, is the maker of Flip Video, a camcorder about the size of a deck of cards. The video recorder made a splash Nov. 6 on Oprah, when everyone in the audience received one as a gift on her show dedicated to the YouTube phenomena.
The camera is geared towards people who are interested in making videos for online sites such as YouTube or MySpace without the expense or knowledge required to use a full-size digital camcorder. The Flip Video comes in two models. One offers 30 minutes of recording time and starts at $119. The other offers 60 minutes of recording time and starts at $149.
We at the Pinnacle tried one out to see if it really works as easily as the makers promise it would. We passed it around the office to see just how easy it was to figure out, how the camera handles, and how the upload process works.
First tip – don’t videotape female coworkers eating breakfast, as they are likely to turn away and stomp off in a huff.
Second – the camera is little and doesn’t have much of a zoom feature, so using it to videotape the little cheerleader your cousin has a crush on doesn’t work so well.
Third – it’s a great chance to stealthily record people who you think are cute without them knowing.
It was all done in the name of research, after all.
When it comes to uploading videos from the camera to the Internet, that’s when it becomes priceless.
The camera has no attachments to connect it to the computer – it just has a USB connection that flips out from the camera body. The camera does not have a place to add memory cards because the goal of the company staff was to make it self-contained. There is no software installed to edit the videos or make them compatible for the Internet. To upload a video of one staff member’s dog, we just plugged it into a port on a laptop and a prompt popped up automatically. It takes a few minutes to load the videos, depending on how much is saved on the camera. Then there are options to edit the videos or upload them straight to the Internet. We skipped the editing part, because how much can you edit a 32-second clip of a dog playing with a ball?
Unlike videos shot on typical digital cameras or on other camcorders, the program on the Flip Video automatically formats and compresses the videos for YouTube or Yahoo Videos. All users have to do is log in to the site and click to make their videos private or public. In less than 10 minutes, people could view a video of a rat terrier mix named Cassidy.
The ease of transferring videos online is what made the Flip Video appeal to some of us, while the ability to plug it in anywhere is what drew in others. One staff member’s teenage daughter borrowed the camera for a weekend trip and opined about how cool it would be to take on travel because it can be plugged into any computer anywhere without having to install software – library, Internet cafe, a friend’s apartment.
After we passed the camera around the office, at least a few of us added it to our Christmas wish list or have relatives who want one, too. Though we couldn’t get the company to call us back to talk about the product, we are sure their customer service response will be a lot better.
