• Since this video was produced, Pure Digital Technologies has introduced the Flip Ultra-HD camcorder.  The single meaningful difference between the Ultra-HD and the Mino-HD is that the former doubled its memory to 2 gigabytes, which permits about 2 hours of video.  The software, controls, and operation are the same, so if you have an Ultra-HD, you'll still get the same value from this series.
• The large lens and wide field of view, which are an advantage over many HD camcorders of this type, also have one disadvantage:  Camera jitter is magnified.  We'll be discussing how to get control over this in future chapters.
• Some people pronounce "Mino" like the small fish, and others make it rhyme with 'wino.'  I prefer the former, because I think the connotation is more appropriate.
• "Make your battery last a long time by not overcharging it."  How much charging is overcharging?  Pure Digital Technologies says that, for the Flip Mino-HD, it should take about 3 hours to fully charge, assuming you're charging it by plugging it into your computer.  It could take longer, if you're running FlipShare on your computer, so it's best to exit FlipShare for charging the battery.
• The USB extension cords shown are short ones that come from Pure Digital.  It's better, and could be cheaper, to get a slightly longer one from another source.

Darrell, You're so good at opening the Flip boxes, but there's something else you need to demo. I can't figure out how to attach the wrist strap to the Flip. I know where it goes, but there must be a fairly simple way of attaching it.

I did figure this out once, but I didn't find the wrist strap terribly useful, took it off, and forgot about it.

Here's the answer from Flip Support:

This answer was less than clear to me.  The last sentence gives the clue: There are two metal parts that unscrew from one another.  I made a little video to illustrate...

Some of your video demonstrations have pause interruptions. After a few seconds it starts up again. What causes that to happen? Particularly the one about the Supper Party.

Video is very demanding of both network and computer resources. I need some level of quality to do any justice at all to High Definition video, and I have chosen what most regard as the optimal compromise -- the Flash video format from Adobe -- which is the same format that YouTube and other online video services use.

If the video runs more smoothly at some times than at others, most likely it's a network limitation -- e.g., a relatively slow connection, or lots of traffic in your network location. That's called a 'bandwidth' limitation.

If you don't have a lot of free space on your disk, or if your disk is badly fragmented, that can also contribute to the problem.

When you're watching the YouTube version of the Supper Club, it's very chunky, because I'm capturing it from YouTube, where it's already been compressed, and compressing it again. Hopefully, it's good enough that you can get the idea.

If there's any demand, I can make the videos downloadable in higher quality formats that you can watch from your computer. If it's a network problem, that should help. The DVD version of these lessons is another solution, to the extent that they play more smoothly, but ironically they are produced in lower resolution (720x480) that is required for standard definition DVD players. I'm thinking about releasing a Blu-Ray version of the disk, but I don't have a good sense, yet, of how many Blu-Ray players are out there.

Darrell -- If you shoot 1080 video with the Flip, can you go back and capture frames as snapshots? If so, what resolution are they?

Thanks,

Dave

First, I should say that Flip shoots 720p rather than 1080, but yes, you can capture stills.  I actually think this is a pretty good way to take photos, in fact, for some things, e.g. family pictures, or maybe your dog. 

After you take a video, the FlipShare user interface lets you go into snapshot mode when you're looking at.  It shows you 6 frames before and six frames after the current location you are seeing in the viewer.  As you hover over each of these pre/post frames, it takes the place of the frame in the viewer.  When you have found just the right frame -- e.g., the frame in a family video where everyone has a good smile and no one is blinking or doing feather fingers behind someone's head, you click the 'Snapsot' button, and it creates a .jpg for you.

The .jpg shows up in FlipShare, and you can incorporate it into a movie, if you like, which is handy for adding titles in the middle.  The resulting .jpg is 1280x720, which is almost always as large as I want to send to someone else, and often as large as I want to keep.  If I wanted to do art photography, I would probably use a camera with a higher resolution.  (I have found the photo mode of my 1080i Canon HF10 camcorder is about as good as I need to get.)