flip movie camera

When Florence came to Taiwan, she brought her "flip" movie camera.

it has about 8GB of memory and maybe 2 hours of movies available. It's good at recording action like dances and performances but most of the time a still pictures is OK with me. Florence used this flip camera to record the dances in Bali, they were great. When she left Taiwan, she left the flip camera with me. We'll see if I can do anyhting good with it, my Nikon Coolmix camera also has a movie capability but I haven't used it. On new technology, I'm kind of a "stick in the mud", especially if it's hard to use. I'll try do do better in the future.

One of the problems with making movies part of a blog entry is size. I usually shoot pictures at PC screen mode that might be 200KB per picture, this is opposed to high quality picture mode that might be 4000KB. Big images on the internet connection just slow down to load so I use the smaller size image as the setting on my camera. I also think that my camera operates faster producing smaller resolution images.

With movies, the size issue becomes even more critical. Quickly file sizes become much bigger than the internet can handle. So short files and short movies become synonimus. (As an experiment take the same picture at incrementally increasing file sizes and see if you can notice a difference(I doubt it)).

I use the "blogger" software provided by Google to make my blog entries. In the year since I did the first blog(tainanchineseclass) and the current blog(mike's trip) the software has gotten much better. But, for me, there are a few problems to work around. One problem is that uploading movies often fails if the movie is more than 60 MB long. I got this 60 MB length my trial and error. The error message when the file is too long is(after a 30 minutes of uploading):


"Please check your internet connection and try again"

being a fool, I tried uploading the same file(200MB) 4 times at different times of the day before I figured out the error message was useless, the file was just too big!

It doesn't seem to be a problem with the number of uploads to a particular blog entry, only that a single upload is more than 60MB. The error message is particularly unhelpful. I expected something better from Google. Welcome to the new digital age!

I had the same disapointing experience with the software provided by the flip movie camera, call Flipshare. With Flipshare you can upload a movie to some "storage in the cloud" and then provide a link so that others can access the uploaded movie. This time the upload fails with the message:

"We are sorry, but there was an error while uploading your video"

Using the Flibshare software to edit the file to be smaller isn't possible as their software can only combine files not cut them. Using the free on linux software(Avidemux) to cut the movies results in the message that they can't be uploaded because they are now "corrupted", although they can play on both Lunix and windows! Welcome to the new digital age! I expected more from Cisco that produced\s the flipshare softeare.

Anyway the combination of using the linux tools(Avidemux) and using blogger to upload shortened movies seems to work for now.

Maybe if you visit us in Seattle we can bore you with the full length movies.