I recently purchased a Flip UltraHD from Amazon for use as a POS
camcorder...but I was surprised to find that it's better than any of the
DV Camcorders I've owned both in terms of quality and ease of use.
Shooting to flash memory and having instant review or delete is
wonderful. No need to rewind, view, rewind back to previous
scene..overwrite some tail to not lose timecode continuity, etc.. all a
thing of the past.
Ok, so I admit I'm not on the forefront of the latest video technology.
D9 was the most sophisticated format I had and that was still SD but I'm
still shooting with my TRV-950.
1280x720P is gorgeous. Let's start with the bad, so it's got a CMOS
sensor instead of CCD which in my experience usually is slower and less
accurate and it's auto focus, and no external mic input, everything is
automatic, and no anti shake circuitry. Depending on what you shoot, in
practice, none of that really overshadows the good...in good to decent
lighting the picture quality is gorgeous with saturated colors.
When I'm done shooting, I flip out the USB jack and plug it into my
laptop and the clips are ready to trim. The built in software is decent
for stringing together a few clips and adding a sound track but it has
some quirks.
You trim all the clips and then start assembling them in sequence. If
you are stringing them and decide you need to further trim a clip, you
have to go back and lose all of the editing you've done, there is no way
to save the progress. Another drawback is that if you want to edit 100
clips, you need to drag each one individually. While you can drag them
all at once, they appear in reverse order instead of sequential
order..so the last thing you shot appears first. So you would need to
manually reorder each one by dragging.
Obviously from a production stand point, this software isn't very
flexible but it works. It automatically dissolves from scene to scene
and you can add a beginning and ending title and add a sound track to be
louder, quieter, or replace the existing audio.
I decided to see how my Sony Vegas Movie Studio Plantinum ver 9b would
work with the Flip. I imported a couple of clips that I saved to my
hard drive and it worked fine. So I decided to import all 110 clips
from my 1 hour project. All but 3 were imported. After many freezeups
I did some Googling and found lots of issues with the H.264 video
compression, AAC audio compression, MP4 file format in Vegas. Maybe I
imported too many files, maybe my 3GB of RAM is too little, maybe my
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz cpu is too slow. I don't really know, but I'm
going to find a solution.
The Flip Ultra HD has changed the way I create my videos. I can shoot
widescreen HD from a locked down camcorder and do as many retakes as
necessary to get the perfection shot. It's perfect for the One Man
production company.
Just wanted to pass on my experiences thus far.
Richard
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