I love video.
It helps me communicate quickly and effectively with my audience.
But it wasn’t always this way.
For many years, if you wanted to create a video you’d be thinking thousands – if not tens of thousands – to get the right equipment to tell your story. Just five years ago, I bought $10,000 worth of kit so that I could produce professional looking video.
Recently I’ve discovered new ways of doing things, that makes video so accessible to communicators. It’s so compact and simple to use, creating a video is an afterthought and far from a chore.
Flip Mino HD
The main piece in my kit is a mobile-phone sized camera called a Flip Mino HD. This little piece of kit is unobtrusive and often has my subjects saying “so where’s the camera”.
Why is small important?
Small is important because big cameras intimidate people. It takes up their view, they don’t know where to look and it’s just plain scary!
You can place a Flip down on the table with a mini-tripod, have a short conversation with your subject, and within moments they’ve completely forgotten they’re on camera.
Editing with Apple iMovie
I hear you asking about the editing.
The Flip Mino HD comes with editing software built-in, so you can do simple editing on any computer. For corporates it can be awkward getting the software installed, because it will normally need administrator privileges.
Instead of the inbuilt software, I find I’m more productive with my Apple MacBook and the video-editing software that comes as standard – iMovie.
iMovie makes the process of editing, transitioning and titling your productions really easy. Sometimes it’s so easy, it’s counter intuitive for those of us with a bit more of a technology background. That said, the in-program help is a good reference, and there are always free iMovie classes going at your nearest Apple Store.
Connecting the two is simple
I don’t know how many times I’ve had issues with fiddly connections, incompatible formats or difficult software when I’m on a deadline. I haven’t found this with the Flip.
The Flip gets it’s name from a handy flip-up USB port, that connects directly into your Mac, or PC. It shows up like a drive, so you can drag your new movie files onto your hard disk. The movie files are in MP4 format, so they’re in a perfect format for simple editing.
There’s no more software to install. As a bonus, if you have iMovie open, the iMovie software will automatically detect when you have plugged in the Flip Mino HD camera. On detection iMovie opens up the import window to ask which of your new movies you wish to import into iMovie for editing. Choose Manual import mode to select some movies, or Automatic to upload them all.
Send your movie directly to YouTube, DVD or file
iMovie allows you to import directly from your software to YouTube, so you can save your latest creation directly to the web, or you can export to disk, or burn directly to DVD to give you a file you can take with you.
But I work in a Windows environment and need a WMV file
That’s not a problem, but it does need some more software – called 4Media Video Converter Ultimate 6, which you can buy for less than US$30. This price hardly seems like a large amount of money for the simplicity of being able to edit your videos on a Mac.
So there you go, video creation, editing and output using iMovie and a Flip Mino HD camera. If you’ve got questions, I’ll cover them in a future blog post – ask away in the comments!
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