A Quick Look at the Flip Ultra HD

I was pretty excited a week or so ago when my wife told me that she won me a Flip Ultra HD video camera for Christmas. I'd heard friends talking about them, and they certainly seemed to be the bees knees as far as home movie making goes. I do a lot of videos for this blog, which I upload to my Youtube channel, so it seemed like it would be a huge boon to me. It arrived by courier a few days ago, and I've been playing with it ever since. Sadly, my impressions so far are not so great. While I'm sure this will be a great camera for a lot of people, in the way I am using it, it is pretty cumbersome.

Aesthetics

Let's first talk about some out-of-the-box aesthetics with this camera. The very first thing I did when I took it out of the box was look for the little wrist strap so that I could install it. My son once dropped my Canon A590 into the cat water because he was not using the strap, and I don't even trust myself using a camera without it. Well, it is a petty little thing, but the Flip Ultra HD does not include one! WTF? I worked for a dozen years for one of Cisco's major competitors, so I know all about cost-reducing products to beef up profit margins, but this is just ridiculous saving a few cents for a wrist strap. Fail. Fortunately we had a couple of old digital cameras around so I just took a strap off one of those and installed it. I honestly did not feel safe using it without one - it is like the feeling I get in a car without a seat belt.

Then next thing I did not like about the camera was the USB connector that flips out of the side. Guess what Cisco - there is a good reason why nobody else does this - my first thought was "I wonder how long it will be before that breaks off". And then once it does, the camera is useless because there is no removable memory card here that can be taken out and plugged into a card reader. Honest to goodness I'd far rather have a micro-USB port on the camera like other digital cameras have. The Flip Ultra HD is really awkward to plug into your computer, and once plugged in the weight of the whole camera is pushing down on that connection, which looks and feels to me to be a recipe for disaster. This is just a really bad idea that seems to be driven solely by a desire to do something different - and in the end what they've achieved is completely counter-productive. Though I think if I pick up a USB extension cable I can use it to overcome this problem for the most part. But even with that, I'll have to flick open that stick, which still makes it susceptible to being broken off. Fail.

One final note on aesthetics is the vertical mode of operation of this camera, versus most others which are operated in the horizontal position. Initially I did not like this at all as it just did not feel right in my hand, but after just over a day I'd say I'm already used to it, and my opinion on it is neutral - no better, no worse than horizontal. Just different. I think probably most people are used to this from their smart phones - but I do not have a cell phone so it is new to me.

Function

It looks like the folks at Flip/Cisco (not sure if Flip was always a Cisco brand, or if Cisco may have bought them at some point) wanted to put out a product that was completely idiot proof, and as far as that goes I guess they've managed to hit the mark. But the problem is that if you are not a complete idiot, it may not be for you. One of the ways they've managed to hit that goal is by eliminating all possible settings from the on-board camera software. OK, I admit that it took me a while to figure out some of the features of my Canon A590 point-and-shoot, and there have been times when I've accidentally shot a video in the wrong mode which caused me to end up with a really low-res video that was all pixelated on Youtube. Not the end of the world by any means, but it was pretty frustrating the twice I managed to let this happen. But in both cases I just went with it anyway, and posted the videos as-is. With the Flip Ultra HD, there are no options for video resolution, so what I get is 1280x720 (720p), which is a pretty impressive high resolution HDTV format! One which I would guess very few people need or want. The first video I shot with the Flip Ultra HD, I cut together several clips to make a single video of my son's birthday party, which I then uploaded to my personal Youtube channel for family to see. A 5 minute video was a whopping 390 megabytes, which took almost 2 hours to upload. Ouch! And I can't even play it in that resolution on this 4 year old PC with a 2.8Ghz single core processor and 2GB of RAM. Too slow. It is extremely choppy playing natively in a player on the PC itself. When playing from Youtube and switching to a popped-out 720p mode it is not as choppy, but still choppy. In short - this camera would be infinitely more useful if it allowed me to select a lower recording resolution.

And speaking of playing the videos natively - they are in a standard MP4 format, so forget about playing them with Microsoft Media Player. And if you are already used to using Microsoft Movie Maker to edit your movies, forget about that too. When I first realised that 720p was a massive file that would take forever to upload, I tried to use Microsoft Movie Maker to render it down into a more manageable resolution, but nada. This is of course Microsoft's fault and not Cisco's, because Microsoft (curse them) does not support a lot of standard formats like MP4. But still, the result is the same - it will not work for you. My Linux box is under repair at the moment so I have not yet had a chance to try it out there, but I'm fairly confident it should work fine since Linux does deal with standard formats. I ended up buying a copy of the AVS software suite, which for 60 bucks for over a dozen really great video, audio and anti-virus programs, is a pretty sweet deal I have to say! Their video editing software is really nice (if really slow on this old PC - forget about surfing the web while a video is rendering).

By way of comparison, a 5 minute video shot on my Canon A590 is about 200Mb for the raw AVI file, but once you put it through the Microsoft Movie Maker software it comes down to an extremely reasonable 32Mb, which only takes a few minutes to upload to Youtube. Of course that is because it has a resolution of 640x480 instead of the whopping 1280x720 of the Flip Ultra HD. I did load my 5 minute birthday video from the Flip into the AVS Video Editor to see what I could do with it to reduce it down. So far I got it to spit out a 720x480 version of the video in AVI format, which reduced it from 390Mb to 200Mb. But I think if I can try again with WMV format I might be able to get it down into the 50Mb range, which would be completely reasonable for uploading to Youtube or other sites.

Technobabble

Now we are going to dig into some of the technical details of what I find extremely discouraging about the Flip Ultra HD - the fact that it implements its own filesystem over top of the Windows Filesystem. In case you are not a propellor-head like I am, what that means is that if you are inside the FlipShare software and put together a video with a name of "Junior's 7th Birthday", what you end up with for a file within Windows has a cryptic name more like "VID00014.mp4". On the surface it may seem as though this will not matter to you in the least if you only want to use the FlipShare software. Who cares what it looks like from Windows, right? Well, what if you want to make backups of your pictures, and store them on another PC? Or on DVDs that you store off-site? You then want to go looking through your backed up files for the video of Junior's 7th Birthday. Good luck with that! Honestly, this is an extremely unforgivable and very major FAIL on the part of Flip/Cisco. Many others have done this in the past, and it is always the wrong thing to do. Not only do they obfuscate your file names for you, but they also give you the impression from within the FlipShare software that you can create folders with different things in them. But back in windows there are no folders created - all your files are in one folder, and they all have those cryptic names no matter what you called your videos from within FlipShare.

To me this means that I absolutely will not use the Flipshare software, period.

OK, in fairness, they do give you a way to "import" and "export" videos to and from FlipShare, but all this does is create a duplicate copy which wastes more space on your disk, and makes life more confusing for you to manage. Was my last edit done within FlipShare? Or was it done on the exported copy? Which one is most recent? Good luck with that - this problem would not exist if they did not do such stupidity. And if you read this and say to yourself "OK, then I just won't use FlipShare", remember that you are still stuck if you have a native Windows box, because of Microsoft's failure to support industry standards like MP4. If you want to edit your videos in any way, you're going to need software to do it so you'll likely have to go out and buy something like the aforementioned AVS (which honestly, is pretty spectacular software for the price).

Summary

If you want an idiot-proof video camera, this may or may not be for you.

If you are doing any amount of uploading to Youtube, Facebook, or the likes so that far-away family and friends can see your videos, you are going to end up being frustrated because of the massive file sizes and the enormous upload times that will result from them. The people viewing them on Youtube on the other end probably do not have the means to watch them in 720p anyway, so what's the point?

If on the other hand you want to make your own DVDs to send via snail mail to family and friends (honestly, do people really do that with Youtube at their fingertips?), then maybe this is the right camera for you. I have not yet tried these features since this is simply something I would never even consider doing, but I'm told by friends with this camera that it is easy to do. The FlipShare software certainly seems easy to use (which in turn means it has very few features)

I'll keep using my Flip Ultra HD for sure. I have been wanting to do videos in a slightly higher resolution than my Canon allows me to make, and with some post-processing I'll definitely be able to do that. And when the time of year comes around for my son's big end-of-year dance recital, I'm sure I'll appreciate having the 720p resolution so that we can replay those memories on our HDTV. And I think once I get my beefy Linux box up and running again and can get off this ancient Windows albatross I'll be a much happier man. Speaking of which - Flip/Cisco do not have Linux software. But again I'm guessing that Linux will work fine natively with the MP4 files produced, and I'll just use PiTiVi to edit down my movies.

I'll update this review after a few months use, to see what my impression is then. I think my initial disappointment is due to the fact that I've heard so much good from others about this camera, that it made me think I'd be walking on water after using it. That and the fact that my use-case does not seem to be what this camera is intended for, which means that I'm using a hammer when I should be using a saw.

Still, there are a couple of very serious issues with the Flip Ultra HD that I think need to be resolved even if you are part of the target audience : that stupid flip-out USB jack, and the FlipShare software implementing its own filesystem.