Audio/Video Recording on Windows

Hello Geeks. I have a friend who is looking at doing audio/video recording on Windows. What software is the best for doing such a thing? I know on the Mac the most simply way to get A/V out to someone is the podcasting creator inside of Garage Band. Very simple, anyone can do it. On the Mac of course you have the professional tools you can use but those require a little bit more skill.

Bottom line…. does anyone know of a personal or professional level piece of software to record, edit and publish A/V content?

Thanks geeks.

Lease an Apple?

Hi, Geeks.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m running a start up Spanish language immersion summer camp out in Vermont this year. It’s sponsored by Middlebury College, which you may know of.

We’re looking to lease some machines for the 6 week summer program to avoid having to buy. I’m looking for tips on any Apple angles for leasing machines. Anyone have experience with this?

We have 3 sites serving 150 – 250 secondary students at each site, so quantities would be reasonable.

Flip Frickin’ Video

I handed around a new toy I purchased before my trip to FL at the Geek Gather last night. It is a little video camera from Flip Video called the Flip Video Ultra. If you are a person that is tired of dragging out the big video camera to take short videos, or tired of finally pulling the camera out and the battery is dead or just tired of all the features they pack onto video cameras these days then the Flip Video recorder is for you. It records an hours worth of video directly onto internal storage. It has a “flip” out USB connector on the side to offload at anytime the videos it records in AVI format to you machine. Instead of requiring a lithium battery that needs to be charged, it takes two AA batteries. I took 3-4 hours of video on my trip and I went through only 4 batteries. There is three buttons on the back and a directional pad. Play, Record, Delete are the buttons. The directional pad allows you to cycle through your recorded video and allows a 2x zoom.

I have one video that only took me an hour or so to put together on my site at:
Macy Swimming

This was my first attempt at using the video off the camera. I realized that iMovie didn’t like AVI files so I had to compress the files to QT files. I originally compressed them to mpeg4 which lost some of the quality of the video which is why some of the water scenes appear a little pixelated around Macy as she swims. This is my fault and not the cameras. Rookie!

Bottom line, do yourself a favor and fall in love with taking video again. Pick this little bad boy up for $139 for the 30 minute model or $179 for the 1 hour model. Don’t be a pussy… buy the 1 hour model. Now I tried to search 5 different Best Buys and 4 Targets before I left for vacation trying to find a black or Orange Flip Video. Let me save you the trouble by sharing something I learned… you can’t get the DAMN colored ones in the stores! They only carry the white one in the retail stores. It’s the same cost online so if you want a colored one just buy it online.

That’s it… happy videoing!!

A plug for Airfoil

At the last GG it turned out that some don’t know about Airfoil. Rogue Amoeba’s little software tool allows one to stream any audio playing on a Mac or Win computer to an Airport Express base station. We use this quite a bit in our office to listen to Pandora through our networked speakers. The features I like are “link to system volume” and the ability to playback the same signal through both on the host computer and the Express base station at the same time. Check it out at: http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

Supercharged Internet

I thought this was worth reposting for those of you who feel they need more bandwidth. http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/03/and-were-off-twin-cities-get-first-docsis-3-0-deployment/

It’s nice that even the entry-level contracts will see a little speed bump. If anybody should upgrade to DOCSIS, please let me know. I’d surely like to try it ;)