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!!