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The Flip Video Camera – Thoughts and Some Sample Videos

May 17, 2008 //
28

Shortly before I went to Las Vegas, I decided I’d like to buy the Flip Video Ultra camcorder while I was down there. If you don’t know what it is, here’s a short description:

It’s a handheld, solid state, 2GB capacity video capture device. It captures 640x480 video at 30fps. There is a 1.8” LCD screen on the back and it runs on 2 AA size batteries. It has a neat flip-out USB connector that allows you to plug it straight into a standard USB port. It also has an output plug and cable for direct TV output. On the bottom there is also a standard sized threaded tripod connector. There is no memory card slot, and the device holds 60 min of video. It retails for about $100.00-150.00. That’s about it.

When you plug the device into a Windows or Mac machine the first time, it will install some nifty software to preview the videos, transfer the videos and allow for some basic editing as well. It also shows up as a generic USB mass storage device. On Linux, this appears to be the only option. It might be possible to run the windows version of the software under Wine, but I haven’t tried it. But being able to easily pull the avi files off onto my drive is the all important functionality I was looking for.

One of the problems I found during my pre-purchase research, was that I couldn’t seem to find any full size avi samples to download and view in order to judge the quality of the video. I purchased it pretty much on blind faith, just hoping the video quality would be good. Since trying it out and viewing the video on my pc, I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised.

So in order to possibly help out others looking at this camera, I’ve decided to post a 23 second clip from the camera for people to download and view. But first a word about video formats…

The camera saves video in a format called 3ivx. It seems to be a specific type of mp4 format. The audio portion of the codec seems to be the main stumbling block for some of the video players I’ve tried.

On my Windows box at work, once I installed the proprietary software that came with the camera, the videos could be played by the proprietary player as well as Windows Media Player (I think the software installs the proper codecs for WMP to use).

On my Linux box (Ubuntu Hardy Heron), I was able to play the video with no problem using Totem, but VLC and Mplayer would only play the video and not the audio. Hmm. This is weird since Totem is usually the weakest of the three.

So for the sake of comparison, I decided to modify a couple of the scripts we use for our screencasts and converted the original 3ivx file to an mpeg4 (h264/mp3) file and also to a flash version to allow people to avoid video codec hell entirely.

So you can download the original file to see the quality the camera provides and also download the h264 version and if you have any trouble playing either, you can also view the flash version. From my relatively untrained eye, the three versions are fairly close in quality. All three are the full 640x480 resolution so you should get a much better idea of the quality than you would from YouTube or similar sites.

Note also the relative filesizes. The original avi and flash versions are 11.5MB and 18.5MB respectively, but the h264 version is a whole lot smaller. You’d expect to see a huge degradation in quality, but it actually looks very similar to me (again with my untrained eyes of course). So you be the judge:

Original AVI from the Flip Video Camera:

(640x480, 23sec, 11.5MB) VID00026.AVI

h264/mp3 file converted using mencoder:

(640x480, 23sec, 3.2MB) VID00026_h264mp3.avi

Flash version:

(640x480, 23sec, 18.5MB) Click Here to View

Have a look and give me your comments. I’d be interested in also hearing from any Mac users (ahem.. Earl Moore?)out there to see how the original and h264 versions play on your shiny Macs as well.

All in all I’m very pleased with the Flip camera. It’s simple, seems fairly rugged and is just about exactly what I was looking for.

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Categories family, linux, photography, technology, Uncategorized

Plugging back in, and winding down.

March 22, 2008 //
3

I recently arrived back from an almost two-week vacation down to Myrtle Beach and Disney World. While not completely “off the grid”, aside from a daily email check and a couple of blog comments, I pretty much unplugged. I gave the camera a decent workout with a few hundred snapshots just downloaded onto the pc tonight. Highlights? Space Mountain, my daughter having fun fun fun, and a visit to Kennedy Space Center.

This is really just a check in post while I unwind (yes, I know a vacation is supposed to unwind me, but it never seems to work out that way) and slip back into ‘normal’ mode once again, a little more refreshed and recharged. There will be a few more photos likely posted, but here are two for now:

I’ve tried moon shots before and have never been satisfied. But one night this past week, looking out onto the Atlantic, the full moon seemed somewhat dimmer than your typical bright shiny full moon, so I thought I’d give it a try. Handholding my 300mm lens fully extended, ISO 100, and F5.6 at 1/125, I braced the lens against the balcony railing and fired off 3 or 4 shots. Suprisingly, a couple of them seemed fairly sharp when I reviewed them. Here’s the full shot and a 1:1 crop of the moon to show you some actual detail instead of the washed out mess that my previous attempts have always produced:

goodmoon_500w.jpg

Here’s the 1:1 crop of the moon itself:

goodmoon_1to1.jpg

And of course, another shot I liked getting was this restaurant’s sign along Hwy 17 which made me laugh. It may not appeal to those of you without a grade school sense of humour like myself ;) - but for me it made for at least 10 minutes of quality bathroom humour.

sbb.jpg

Categories family, humour, life, photography

RawStudio 0.7 is out!!

January 25, 2008 //
2

Woohoo! Congratulations to the RawStudio guys for getting 0.7 out today!

RawStudio is the application I use to convert my RAW photos (.CR2 files from my Canon Rebel XT) into jpegs. I love this application because of the way it streamlines the raw conversion workflow for me. It’s interface is logical and well thought out and perhaps most surprisingly, different from anything else I’ve tried. I love it.

The single hitch with using RawStudio up until this point was the fact that when it converted one of my CR2 raw files, it generated a smaller than full size jpg. Plenty big for most print uses and definitely plenty large for web use, but not full size. It came down to a process referred to as demosaic’ing. Something so far above my head that I resigned myself to using UFRaw in those rare instances I wanted a single full size jpg conversion (UFRaw is good for single conversions but painful when you’ve got directories full of raw files).

But all that ends with version 0.7. They’ve got the demosaic thing sorted out. They’ve streamlined the interface even further with a quick exposure mask toggle and better zooming control. The exposure mask dynamically shows you which areas are over or underexposed as you make adjustments to your photo. What I noticed first is that it really highlights the lack of dynamic range in today’s digital cameras. I’m not going to get into a film vs digital comparison, but rest assured you will be amazed at how little dynamic range you can actually capture in a photo. Clearly using multiple raw conversions or multiple exposures to compose high dynamic range (HDR) images is something that could be used a lot more than it is.

So if you’re interested in a free-software RAW conversion utility to help your image workflow on Linux you should really give it a try. A lot of the major distros likely have Rawstudio in their repositories, but if you want version 0.7 right now, you’ll likely have to download the source files and compile it yourself. I’ve built it here on Gutsy so if you need help, let me know, it’s not that hard at all (heck, if I can do it, then surely you can!). Hubert Figuiere on the mailing list also posted a link to a pre-built 1 click installer for Rawstudio 0.7 for use on OpenSuse 10.3 which is:
 http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/home:hfiguiere/openSUSE_10.3/rawstudio.ymp

Good job guys!!

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Categories linux, photography

F-Spot – new version aggravation

November 29, 2007 //
4

Typically I’ve always used F-Spot to transfer the photos from my DSLR to my hard drive. I like the way it arranges my photos: /home/user/photos/yyyy/mm/dd.

However, I don’t use F-Spot for managing my photos. There are various reasons for that and I’m pursuing the use of IPTC data for tagging the photos directly (and not using a separate database) — but that’s for another post.

So up until this last upgrade (to Gutsy), F-Spot has always imported my photos and had a checkbox that let me import them WITHOUT adding them to it’s managed photo library. However since upgrading I think the new version of F-Spot has done away with this checkbox, and so I am unable to stop it from moving any imported files directly into it’s library. Thats NO GOOD. I checked the options menu but couldn’t spot any way to turn off this feature.

Please someone tell me I’m wrong. How can I copy photos from my camera using F-Spot without importing them into an F-Spot library?

I’m open to suggestions for other apps. I have used gThumb, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to auto-create the subdirectories in the same way and format as F-Spot did.

Let’s hear some suggestions!

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Categories linux, photography

A SD card with wi-fi built into it? Now that’s cool!

November 20, 2007 //
0

On a recent TechGuy podcast I heard about this Eye-Fi Wireless SD card that comes with built-in wi-fi capability. Yes wi-fi right inside the SD-card!

So the gist of it is that you can transfer pictures to your pc or mac without even taking the card out of the camera. And this would be camera independent.. so you don’t need a camera with wi-fi built into the hardware. This is right up there in the good idea hall of fame with the Sandisk Ultra II SD Plus card that folds open to reveal a USB plug right on the card.

It also does auto uploads from the camera to online photo management services like Flickr. And I’m assuming this would work anywhere you can get wi-fi connectivity (not necessarily your own PC). Personally I don’t like just mass uploading pics to Flickr. I like to cull my photos and toss out the horrible and mediocre ones whenever possible.

I’m not sure how well it would work with Linux and haven’t read about all the other potential issues like security etc. But the one stumbling block I have is not Linux related at all. It is the fact that my Canon Rebel XT uses Compact Flash and not SD.

Oh well, it’s still very very neat. :)

ps - With the extra room in the significantly larger CompactFlash card, they should be able to give me a 0.5”x0.5” OLED preview of the photos right on the card too! :)

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Categories photography, technology

Postr – Gnome-based Upload tool for Linux

November 6, 2007 //
0

Lifehacker seems to have it’s fair share of Linux related info lately which is nice. Something interesting spotted today was this article about Postr, which is a Gnome based application for uploading photos to Flickr. I’ve been using jUploadr for a while and it does work fairly well. But it would be nice to have a non-Java based alternative that would be a little better integrated into my Gnome/Openbox environment at home. I think I’ll give it a shot this week and see how it works.

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Categories linux, photography

Liquid Rescaling – Very Cool.

October 30, 2007 //
0

Saw this excellent and interesting demo of something dubbed ‘Liquid Rescaling’. In essence it allows you to stretch or compress an image but keeps some semblance of proportion for the objects within the image. It’s hard to describe but imagine you had a 4x6 image, but there was an ugly garbage can on the right hand side. With this tool, you could crop off the right 2 inches (leaving you with a 4x4 image) but then stretch it back to 4x6 *without* fattening up the people in the picture.

It uses algorithms to detect areas in the photo where it can stretch while minimizing distortion. It’s really quite neat. Even neater is the fact that there is a plugin for the GIMP which uses the tool. If you watch the demo you will be amazed at what you can achieve.

I also believe that there is no equivalent tool in the beloved Photoshop that does this. ;)

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Categories linux, photography

Photographic Inspiration

October 26, 2007 //
0

I haven’t done a lot of photography related posts lately. Unsurprisingly, that’s because I haven’t done a lot of photography lately. ;)

Not that I have lost interest mind you, but anybody who reads this blog regularly will know my interests shift around all the time. Sometimes it takes a little creative inspiration and awe to get me moving again on certain fronts. This gallery by Nick Brandt is just one of those things.

While his photographic subjects might be dramatic to start with (how often do you get to photograph lions, elephants and zebras in the wild?), his use of tone and somewhat dramatic burning and dodging techniques add a huge amount of drama to each and every image.

I’ve always been a fan of post-processing when it’s well done; and in Nick Brandt’s case, it sure is. And given the tools you get in the GIMP and Photoshop, applying these techniques to improve your own images is not so hard. I’ve always found John Arnold’s Photowalkthrough tutorials to be incredibly useful in teaching techniques that can really enhance your post processing work.

Expect to see more photography related posts here in the future.

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Categories graphics, photography

Photographic Observation

October 26, 2007 //
2

Over the past few months I have noticed something different in my neck of the woods. I do a lot of driving (commuting etc.) and a great deal of it is on back country roads north of Toronto (the area where I live). It is not uncommon to see the odd car pulled over on the shoulder with a dead battery, flat tire, child peeing in the bushes.. y’know, the usual. But lately, when I spot one of these cars, I look over further and see people with their digital SLR cameras across the ditch photographing some grazing horses, a majestic sunset or just a nice picturesque farmhouse scene. Sometimes they’ve even got tripods set up!

You can clearly see that almost all of them are not professionals (no big camera bags, or huge elaborate glass), but amateurs satisfying their passion and hobby on the way to and from work. Sometimes I’m almost tempted to pull over from the rat race and just chat them up about photography, but alas, my social skills are not that well developed I guess.

I’m not sure if it’s just my own perception, but it seems like digital photography of the more serious kind is really on an upswing. Very nice to see.

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Categories photography

Photo Printing in Linux

August 15, 2007 //
0

A recent article in LXer points out that printing photos in Linux is a nightmare. And while I can’t comment on most of the apps that she’s tried, I can say that I’ve been quite satisfied printing in the Gimp.

I recently bought a new Epson R380 printer. So new in fact that Feisty didn’t have support for it. It turns out that the Gutenprint project added support for this printer as of version 5.0.1. Installing these drivers was a bit of a quagmire, but I got it done. And luckily, the next release of Ubuntu (Gutsy) will support this printer out of the box.

So contrary to the LXer author’s findings, I can print photos quite happily in the Gimp. Yes, even high quality borderless ones (I’ve printed borderless 8x10’s and 4x6’s so far). Colour profiling and correction for the printer is not easy, but I have to say that with a little tweaking to lower the greens and increase the magenta levels, I’ve managed to get very nice colour prints. And besides, my dad has an older model Epson R300 that he uses with XP (and the Epson drivers) and his prints always end up magenta-heavy, so colour profiling is not something that’s really easy on any platform - it’s a feature that requires simplification everywhere - and no, getting your printed output to match your screen in Photoshop is not that easy either - definitely not easy enough.

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Categories linux, photography
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