The Flip Mino PocketGuide ChristopherBreen
Ginormous Knowledge, Pocket-Sized.
The Flip Mino Pocket Guide Christopher Breen Peachpit Press 1249 Eighth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 510/524-2178 510/524-2221 (fax)
Find us on the Web at: www.peachpit.com To report errors, please send a note to
[email protected]. Peachpit Press is a division of Pearson Education. Copyright © 2009 by Christopher Breen
Executive editor: Clifford Colby Editor: Kathy Simpson Production editor: Myrna Vladic Compositor: Rick Gordon, Emerald Valley Graphics Indexer: James Minkin Cover design: Peachpit Press Cover photography: Pure Digital Technologies Interior design: Peachpit Press Notice of Rights All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact
[email protected]. Notice of Liability The information in this book is distributed on an “As Is” basis without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of the book, neither the author nor Peachpit shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book or by the computer software and hardware products described in it. Trademarks Flip Video, Flip Mino, Flip MinoHD, Flip Ultra, FlipUltraHD, and FlipShare are trademarks of Pure Digital Technologies, Inc.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and Peachpit was aware of a trademark claim, the designations appear as requested by the owner of the trademark. All other product names and services identified throughout this book are used in editorial fashion only and for the benefit of such companies with no intention of infringement of the trademark. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is intended to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this book. ISBN-13: 978-0-321-63753-6 ISBN-10: 0-321-63753-4 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound in the United States of America
To those who constantly fill my life’s viewfinder: Claire and Addie
About the Author As a Macworld senior editor, Christopher Breen pens the popular “Mac 911” tips and troubleshooting column and blog; contributes frequently to the Playlist blog; hosts the Macworld Podcast; appears every so often in video form in the Macworld Video; and generally makes himself available for reviews, features, and how-to articles. He’s also the proud author of The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide and The iPhone Pocket Guide. When not banging on a computer keyboard, he plays the piano professionally in the San Francisco Bay area.
Acknowledgments How can you not acknowledge the faith and good will of a publisher, editor, and sales team who don’t immediately bust a gut when you propose writing a book about a family of camcorders that require you to do little more than point them in the right direction and push a single red button? Thus, kudos to Peachpit Publisher Nancy Ruenzel, Executive Editor Cliff Colby, and Sales Maven Scott Cowlin. Kathy Simpson edited yet another of my Pocket Guides, and I have to say we make a hell of a team. (She fought for the zombie references, so that tells you something.) Thanks to Myrna Vladic (another Pocket Guide alumna) for making the book so legible and attractive; Rick Gordon for taking the raw text and making it book-ready; and James Minkin for performing a job I hate doing (yet one that’s so necessary): indexing. A big “Bless you” to Jan Wiedrick-Kozlowski at CommStrat, Pure Digital’s PR firm, for providing details early and often. And, of course, thanks to the folks at Pure Digital not only for tasty tidbits, but also for making the Flip camcorders in the first place. At home, wife Claire and daughter Addie carried on in splendid stiffupper-lip fashion when I vanished at night and on weekends to do this. Special credit goes to my daughter for putting up with tiny camcorders being shoved in her face every few minutes.
Contents Getting Started . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Chapter 1: Why Flip? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Old School, Meet New School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 What to Do with Your Flip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Chapter 2: The Flip Cameras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 The Lineup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Using Your Flip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Chapter 3: Customizing Your Camera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Trying out the Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Sharing Your Designs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Chapter 4: FlipShare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Installing FlipShare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Touring FlipShare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Making Stuff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Working with DVDs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Chapter 5: Editing with Windows Movie Maker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Tour the Movie Maker Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Import a Movie with Capture Video . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Enhance a Movie with Edit Movie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Make a Movie from Scratch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Save and Distribute a Movie with Finish Movie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
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Chapter 6: Editing with iMovie ’09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Plugging in Your Camera . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Touring the iMovie ’09 Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Making a Movie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Exporting Your Movies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Chapter 7: Delivery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 FlipShare Sharing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 Streaming Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Chapter 8: Tips and Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Stop Shakin’ All Over . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Light up Your Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Record Sound Audio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Frame Your Shots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Getting Started Much as I appreciate your desire to learn more about your new pocket camcorder by purchasing this book, I also understand that now that you have the camcorder, you want to play with it. Whether you’ve purchased a Flip UltraSD, Flip UltraHD, Flip Mino, or Flip MinoHD, here are the most direct steps for doing just that: 1. Open the box. Inside are a TV cable, wrist strap, soft case, and quick-start guide. Oh, and a cell-phone-size plastic thing too. That’s the camcorder. Small, ain’t it? 2. Strip off the protective plastic. Pure Digital Technologies, the company that makes the Flip, protects the camcorder by wrapping its most vulnerable bits in plastic. Now that the camera’s in your hands, you can remove that plastic, as it gets in the way of the lens and LCD display.
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3. Install the batteries (Flip Ultras only). Unlike the Flip Minos, which carry a non-user-replaceable rechargeable battery, the Flip Ultra camcorders are powered by two AA batteries. (The Flip UltraHD includes a rechargeable AA battery pack; this pack is optional with the Flip UltraSD.) To install those batteries, move the lock switch on the bottom of the camcorder to the unlock position (to the unlocked-padlock icon). Remove the front panel, below the lens, by sliding it down. You’ll see two battery slots. The positive (+) terminal of the left battery points up, whereas the positive terminal of the right battery points down. If you have a Flip UltraHD, insert the bottom of its battery pack first (with the words Flip Video facing up and toward you) and then push the top of the battery pack into place. If you have a Flip UltraSD, find a couple of AA batteries and insert them as indicated by the battery diagram inside the case. Slide the cover back into place, and push the lock switch on the bottom of the camera to the lock position. 4. Turn on the camcorder. Position the camera so that the LCD screen faces you. On the top-right side of a Flip Mino or a Flip Ultra, you’ll see a button with a Power symbol (a circle with a half line through it) stamped in it. Press this button to turn on the camera. If your camera came from the factory not long ago, it should have enough power to make a two-note “ba-lip” sound and light up the LCD display, which shows an image of whatever the lens is pointed at. 5. Press the red button. In my vast experience with devices of a technical nature, I’ve discovered that a big red button means one of two things: 1. Press it, and something really bad happens: Missiles fire from the island-bound lair of a megalomaniacal baddie, nuclear reactors heat up and melt down, or the universe folds in on itself like an origami stork.
Getting Started
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or 2. Press it, and something really good happens: An ill-considered missile launch is aborted; nuclear reactors chill out; or the universe goes on about its business, completely ignoring the on or off state of any red buttons. In the case of the Flip camcorders, go with the more positive option 2, because pressing its red button causes the camera to start recording. 6. Record something—and then don’t. Point the camera at your friends, your family, your pet, yourself, a fire hydrant … who cares? On most Flip camcorders, you have at least an hour’s worth of storage. (The latest Flip UltraSD and UltraHD record up to two hours.) Live it up! If you’d like to get closer to your subject, you can always take a few steps, but you can also use the camera’s zoom controls. On a Flip Mino, press the plus (+) symbol above the red button to zoom in. To zoom out, press the minus (–) symbol below that red button. If you have a Flip Ultra, the + and – buttons are in the same locations relative to the red button. The difference is that on the Ultra, they’re parts of a toggle switch rather than separate touchsensitive buttons.
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When you’ve recorded as much as you want, press the red button again. 7. Watch what you’ve shot. To see what you’ve captured, press the Play/Pause button, located to the northwest of the red button. The last scene you shot will play on the LCD screen. To navigate to other clips, use the left- or right-arrow button to move back or forward, respectively, through the clips stored on the camera. When you find a clip you want to watch, press the Play/Pause button. To adjust the volume coming from the camera’s speaker, use the + and – buttons.
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8. Trash what you don’t want. If, on your Flip Mino, Flip UltraSD, or Flip UltraHD, you come across an embarrassing clip of yourself running around in your train jammies and, to avoid being blackmailed by your little brother, want to delete that clip, just press the Delete button. If the camera is locked so that items can’t be deleted without confirmation (as it is by default), press and hold the Delete button until the camera tells you that Delete is unlocked. Press the Delete button again, and you’ll be presented with Yes, No, and All options—meaning, respectively, “Yes, please delete this clip so my creepy little brother can’t have it,” “No, I actually look pretty fetching in those train jammies,” and “All right, there’s nothing on this camera that I want to keep. Get rid of every clip on it, please.” To move among the options, use the left- or right-arrow button, select the option you want, and press the Play/Pause button to confirm your choice. If you have an original Flip Ultra camcorder, navigate to the clip you want to delete, and press the Delete button. The words Delete video? will flash in red. To delete the video, press the Delete button again. If you’ve changed your mind, press the Play/Pause button, and the clip will remain on the camera. 9. Read on. Now you’ve got the very basics of shooting and viewing video on your Flip camcorder. To learn more about these subjects—as well as to get the lowdown on transferring video from camera to computer; editing your video in the Flip software and with such common video editing applications as Windows’ Movie Maker and the Mac’s iMovie; sending your work to your friends; and offering up your video to the universe via YouTube, Facebook, and a host of other video sharing Web sites (including your own)—flip through this book’s remaining pages, and run your eyes over them.
1 Why Flip? At the risk of appearing to gratuitously promote my other books, The iPod & iTunes Pocket Guide and The iPhone Pocket Guide, I’d like to cite those titles to help explain why a book like this one is necessary. After all, like Apple’s iPod and iPhone, the Flip cameras couldn’t be much easier to operate. The FlipShare software that accompanies these cameras can be used without a lot of background in video editing. And it’s not like Pure Digital has cornered the market on pocket camcorders. (As I write this chapter, some perfectly fine high-definition pocket camcorders are for sale from companies such as Kodak and Creative Technology. And because high definition in your pocket is so popular, it’s likely that we’ll see more of these kinds of cameras before too long.) So, as this chapter’s title asks, why Flip? Because, like the iPod and iPhone, the Flip camcorders are about more than just functionality. Like Apple, Pure Digital understands the notion that personal technology
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can be personal. In the case of a pocket camcorder, it can not only serve perfectly utilitarian purposes such as shooting a birthday party or a night on the town, but also reflect the personality of the owner. Unlike any other company that makes pocket camcorders, Pure Digital pushes this personality angle in a couple of interesting ways: It allows buyers to create custom case designs for the Flip Mino at no extra cost, thus transforming the camcorder into a fashion accessory (see Chapter 3 for details).
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It lets you extend your personality to the world by sharing the contents of your camera via the Internet. (The FlipShare software included with every Flip camcorder makes that easy to do; I show you how in Chapter 7.)
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What else do Flip camcorders have to offer? Let’s take a look.
Old School, Meet New School
If you’ve been shooting video with a full-size camcorder, you may wonder what makes Flip cameras so special. They don’t have image stabilization, so video can be shaky if you’re not careful. Although the MinoHD and UltraHD shoot in high definition, its 720p HD output isn’t the best HD standard available. (I provide more details on HD standards in Chapter 2.) Its digital zoom feature enlarges the image’s pixels, creating some pretty blocky video when you zoom all the way in. It has no white-balance or manual focus controls. The lens wasn’t designed by a leading German optics manufacturer. And on and on. Although these concerns are perfectly legitimate, they demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what pocket camcorders are for and the areas in which they have an advantage over traditional camcorders. Allow me to bring some clarity to these concerns.
Chapter 1: Why Flip?
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A bird in the hand Not long ago, pulling together video gear for a day of shooting was just slightly less arduous than packing for a 2-week trip to the Grand Canyon. You needed a camera slightly larger than the typical elementary-school lunch box, a handful of tapes, a charger, a battery, a spare battery for when the first one pooped out, a remote control, a tripod, and a bag to put everything in. When it was time to shoot, you flipped on the power, removed the lens cap, extended the viewfinder, pressed Record, cursed when you realized that you didn’t have a tape in the camera, shut down the camera, loaded a tape, and started the whole process again. Is it any wonder that after the first month of “Cool, I’ve got a camcorder!” excitement wore off, you got the camera out only on Christmas morning and—oh so briefly—that one time in the hospital delivery room? This is where the Flip has a distinct edge. When you can shoot video only with a bulky camcorder and its entourage of parts, and when that gear is stuffed away in a closet somewhere, you’re likely to miss capturing life’s most spontaneously memorable moments: your roommate stumbling into a telephone pole after quenching a too-powerful thirst at the frat party, that totally cute guy dancing at the club, or your daughter demonstrating her first clumsy cartwheel on the playground. Sure, the Flip camcorders can’t capture the same quality footage as fullsize HD camcorders, but a fat lot of good that does you when something great happens and your big ol’ camcorder is sitting on a shelf somewhere. Because you can take a Flip with you anywhere you go without fuss or bother, you’re likely to capture something—which, last time I studied the matter, is vastly better than nothing.
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True point-and-shoot How many times did you hear your dad say this when he was huddled behind the camcorder? “Wait, wait—don’t move. I’ve got to adjust the framitz and refocus the dippulator. I’ve almost got it!” Right: often enough that whenever he could pull it together to actually shoot some video, he got a lot of sour faces from his family. The beauty of the Flip cameras in this regard is that recording is a two-step process. Turn on the camera. Push the big red button. Done. There just isn’t anything to fiddle with, so in many cases, you’ll shoot more quickly than you would with a full-size camcorder.
The intimidation factor Try this experiment: Grab your cell phone and point its camera at your best friend. No big deal, right? She either ignored you or mugged for the camera. Now find a big camcorder and try the same thing. My guess is that you got a completely different reaction, along the lines of “What are you doing with that!? Put it down!” People (younger people in particular) are increasingly comfortable with having small image-grabbing devices shoved in their faces, and because they are, it’s not a great challenge for them to carry on as though the camera wasn’t there. Big camcorders are intimidating. The Flips, not so much.
Edit anywhere Each and every Flip camcorder has FlipShare editing software planted on its storage medium. When you jack that camcorder into any Windows PC or Macintosh with a USB 2.0 port, you can not only transfer the video from the camera to the computer, but also install FlipShare on that computer. This software allows you to edit and upload video from just about any computer you come into contact with. Try that with a full-size camcorder.
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Easy off So you’ve just spent the past 5 minutes pointing your Flip at a friend who swears he can jump 12 vintage Ford pickup trucks with the aid of his skateboard and a homemade rocket pack. Finally, in an unanticipated moment of clarity, he chickens out and tells you to turn off the camera. Now you’ve got 5 minutes of him hemming and hawing and you calling him a wuss. YouTube viewers are pretty forgiving, but not that forgiving. If you were using a full-size tape-based camcorder, imagine trying to delete that bit of video to free up some room on the tape—completely possible, but also a complete pain in the neck. With a Flip you can just press Play/Pause, locate the clip, and press the Delete button to delete the clip. Then you can go back to calling your friend a wuss as well as a chicken. With luck, he’ll succumb to the peer pressure, and you’ll have something memorable to shoot (and, possibly, something to show to his parents when they ask him, “What happened to your teeth?!”).
Express yourself Unless you’re very careful about how and what you shoot, you’re not going to get results from a Flip camcorder that look stunning on a bigscreen TV or DVD. But that’s not the point. The ideal destination for video shot with the Flip is the Web: YouTube, Vimeo, MySpace, Facebook, and similar video sharing sites where you can document your doings. Also, because you’re shooting for public consumption, you’re going to shoot content that’s different from what people normally shoot with “real” camcorders. Your content can include newsworthy events like political speeches and rallies, your band’s rehearsal, or a cat on a trampoline.
Share and share alike Find someone you know who’s been shooting video with a full-size camcorder for a while. Ask her to tell you, as honestly as possible, how
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many tapes she’s pulled from the camera and tossed into a drawer with the promise that someday, she’ll get around to editing her work. Unless she’s obsessive about her video, she’ll sheepishly admit that she hasn’t touched at least half of it. Shooting hours of video is great, but it does you little good if you don’t do something with that video. Most people charge a Flip camcorder by plugging it into a powered USB 2.0 port. When you do the same, your video editing application launches, be it FlipShare or a different application you’ve chosen. Heck, you’re most of the way there! Just import the camera’s clips and share them via a burned DVD, e-mail, or Web-based video sharing service, and you’re one giant step ahead of the guy who’s “getting around” to editing his video.
Experiment The Flip camcorders invite experimentation. They include no moving parts and are a cinch to use, so you can safely hand one to a 7-year-old to see what she comes up with. (You may be amazed by what comes out of a camcorder when the operator has no preconceived notions of how it should be used.) Also, the Flips are really small, making them perfect for strapping to the handlebars of a bike, a snowboarder’s helmet, or the tail of a kite. And if you want to be more ambitious and create a Webcast with one, that’s easy to do too.
What to Do with Your Flip
You just point at things you want to shoot and press the red button, right? Mostly, yes. But here are a few ideas you may not have thought of: Take notes.
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They say that a picture’s worth a thousand words. What’s a video of your Chem 101 seminar worth, then? Beats me. But if you’re in a class
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where capturing audio and video is as useful as taking notes, haul along your Flip and start shooting when the professor opens his mouth. Catch someone in the act.
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It pains me to suggest that there are people in this world who aren’t as ethical and upstanding as you, dear reader, and me, but it’s the regrettable truth. If someone’s doing wrong by you, and if capturing that wrongdoing (harassment, bullying, blackmail) on video will help stop this behavior, feel free to place your Flip in an inconspicuous location and press the red button. On the original Flip Ultra and all Flip Minos, a red recording light appears on the front of the camera when it’s recording, which could give away the location of an otherwise nicely concealed camera. Feel free to place a little duct tape over that light so that it doesn’t show. The Flip UltraSD and UltraHD include an option that lets you turn off the red light (go right ahead and insert your own reference to The Police’s “Roxanne” here).
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Catch something in the act.
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I have a fair number of feral cats that I’ve adopted, and because they’re feral, I’m forced to feed them outside. They have dinner as the sun goes down, and coincidentally, shortly thereafter is just about the time the local raccoons and skunks like to have breakfast. They, too, enjoy cat food. I enjoy the antics of these critters, but their sometimes-too-easilyoffended nature prevents me from observing them close up. Thanks to my Flip MinoHD, however, I can enjoy their every sniff, chomp, and growl vicariously. I just take the camera with me when I feed the cats, place it on a short tripod, press the Record button, and disappear. A couple of hours later, I return to retrieve the camera and transfer what it’s captured to my computer. You may wonder which runs out first: the 60-minute recording time or the battery charge. I’m pleased to report that the loser is recording time. A Flip MinoHD will record until it’s full and then shut down, leaving just over half a battery charge.
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Even if your home isn’t haunted by potentially rabid mammals, this technique is a good one to use around bird feeders (particularly hummingbird feeders).
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Catch some act in the act.
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Some performers have no objection to your capturing bits of their work as long as you do it discreetly. A full-size camcorder is not discreet. A Flip camcorder is. Watch yourself.
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How’s your golf swing? Your backstroke? Your demi-plié? You’ll get a better idea if you can watch yourself in action. Set up a tripod, switch on the Flip, and do your thing. Watch. Review. Try, try again. View the unknown.
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You say the engine knocks when you step on the gas? Something behind the water heater is groaning? It sounds like there are zombies in the attic? Use the Flip as your eyes when your eyes can’t be there. If necessary, attach the thing to a stick and position it so that it can record what you can’t see. Store your stuff.
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When you plug your Flip into your computer, your PC or Mac views it as both a camera and a removable storage device. On a Windows PC, you’ll see it listed in the My Computer (XP) or Computer (Vista) area. On a Mac, it appears as a removable drive on the Desktop. You’re welcome to copy items from your computer to the Flip camera, unplug the camera, and take it to a different computer where you can access the files you copied. Amour.
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I’ll leave this one alone other than to mention that among the pocket camcorders, the Flip cameras perform reasonably well in low light.
2 The Flip Cameras I imagine that you’d feel a bit hoodwinked if I didn’t spend some time discussing Pure Digital’s cameras and the wonders they can perform. That’s the purpose of this chapter. I’ll start by waltzing through the Flip family. As I address each camera’s specific talents, I’ll fill in some detail on standard- and high-definition video and tell you how the cameras take advantage of these standards.
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The Lineup
I know, I know—the title of this book is The Flip Mino Pocket Guide. But Pure Digital’s pocket camcorders don’t begin and end with the Mino. The company has made six pocket camcorders: the Flip Video, Flip Ultra, Flip UltraSD, Flip UltraHD, Flip Mino, and Flip MinoHD. The differences lie in the cameras’ internal memory, optics, battery types, video quality, and exteriors. Each model has its particular charms and, therefore, is worthy of our attention.
Flip Video The Flip Video started it all. Although the Flip Video has been replaced by the Flip Ultra, for the sake of completeness I’ll talk about it here and then rarely mention it again. This $130 pocket camcorder is—for those of you who’ve flirted with this vice—about as thick and tall as a pack of cigarettes but about threequarters as wide. Even if you’ve wisely avoided tobacco products, it’s still that size, but a whole lot better for you. It can shoot up to 60 minutes of video in the MPEG-4 format (explained in the sidebar “Of Encoders and Bit Rates” later in this section) at 30 frames per second, carries 1 gigabyte (GB) of memory, has edges trimmed in either black or white, runs off two AA batteries, and shoots at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels (640 x 480 is the 4:3 standard-definition resolution in the video world). When discussing shooting times, I waffle a bit because although each camera is rated at so many minutes of storage, that time will vary slightly depending on the video you’ve shot. Because of the way video is encoded and compressed on these cameras, a minute of footage with a lot of motion in it takes up more storage than a minute of video of a fairly static scene.
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Chapter 2: The Flip Cameras
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Like all the other Flip camcorders except the UltraSD and UltraHD, the Flip Video has a 1.5-inch LCD display, measured diagonally. (The UltraSD and UltraHD have 2-inch LCD displays.) It also has a lower-resolution display (280 x 120 pixels) than the other Flip cameras. (The original Flip Ultra and Flip Minos have an LCD display of 528 x 132 pixels, whereas the UltraHD’s and UltraSD’s displays are 960 x 240 pixels.) This difference hints that the pixels in this camera’s display are larger and, therefore, that this display provides less detail. The Flip Video also uses a transmissive rather than transflective display. Transwha?!? It’s not terribly important to know the ins and outs of these technologies. What is important to know is that transflective displays— like those used in all Flip camcorders except the Flip Video—project video that’s easier to see in bright sunlight. Not only is its display’s resolution less impressive than that of its more recently released siblings, but the resolution of its video is less impressive too. Its average bit rate is 2.8 Mbps (megabits per second), which certainly captures the scene, but the resulting video is anything but pristine. (I explain bit rates in the sidebar “Of Encoders and Bit Rates.”) Like the original Flip Ultra, it has a fixed-focus 0.8m-to-infinity lens with an aperture of f/2.4 (reasonable for low-light shooting) and a 2x digital zoom. (I discuss this subject in the “Optical and Digital Zoom” sidebar later in this chapter.) Like all the Flip camcorders, the Flip Video has a built-in microphone; a TV Out port (a composite port, in this case) for connecting the camera to the video port of a TV set, AV receiver, or video recorder; a USB connector that flips out from the camera; and the Flip software planted right on the camera’s storage media. Like the original Flip Ultra, it has no pause, fast-forward, or rewind controls, and it’s the only Flip camera that doesn’t time-stamp videos or have a tripod mount.
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
Of Encoders and Bit Rates Throughout this small book, I’ll occasionally refer to the format in which a video is encoded and a video’s average bit rate. Now seems to be good a time as any to explain the importance of these things. Encoders How can a camcorder as small as one of the Flips possibly hold 1 or 2 hours’ worth of video? It does so with the help of a bit of technology called a codec (short for compressor/decompressor), which compresses (encodes) and decompresses (decodes) data. In the case of the Flip camcorders, the codecs are termed lossy because, to make smaller files, they perform several tricks to strip out data that you’re less likely to miss in the resulting video. The original Flip Ultra and Flip Mino use the MPEG-4 codec. The Flip MinoHD, UltraSD, and UltraHD use a variant of MPEG-4 called H.264, which produces very nice results at low bit rates, which is why you see it used increasingly in HD camcorders as well as on Web sites that stream high-definition video (such as YouTube and Vimeo). Bit Rates Average bit rate is the average amount of data transferred within a particular period of time. When discussing the amount of data (video) captured with a digital camcorder, you measure that data in megabits (millions of bits) per second. You can broadly say that the higher the bit rate, the better-looking the video (and the larger the file), with this caveat: You can’t compare the performance of one codec with another based solely on bit rate. As I mention earlier in this sidebar, the H.264 codec performs very well at even low bit rates. MPEG-4 video at that same low bit rate could look terrible in comparison.
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Of Encoders and Bit Rates (continued) To give you an idea of how the Flip stands up against full-size “real” camcorders, today’s high-definition AVCHD camcorders (cameras that use the H.264 codec) shoot at an average bit rate of 16 to 24 Mbps and a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The Flip MinoHD and UltraHD can manage an average bit rate of 9 Mbps using the H.264 codec at a reso lution of 1280 x 720 pixels. The Flip Ultra and Flip Mino shoot MPEG-4 video at an average bit rate of 4 Mbps, at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. The UltraSD also shoots 640 x 480 at 4 Mbps but uses H.264.
Where the heck is the composite video port? On today’s TVs, it’s the three red, white, and yellow RCA jacks. The red and white jacks are for audio, and the yellow jack is for video. Composite video is of lower quality than S-Video, component video, and HDMI. The UltraHD carries an HDMI output port.
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The Flip Video deserves praise for getting the ball rolling, but given the improvements introduced with the Flip Ultra, I won’t spend a lot of time mourning its departure.
Flip Ultra The Flip Video was replaced by the original Flip Ultra. (Throughout this book, I’ll refer to this camcorder as the original Flip Ultra, as it’s been replaced by the $150 Flip UltraSD and $200 Flip UltraHD.) This first $150 Flip Ultra (Figure 2.1) is the same size as the original Flip camcorder and also shoots approximately 60 minutes of standard-definition 640 x 480 video at 30 frames per second using the MPEG-4 encoder. It houses 2 GB
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
of flash memory, which allows it to shoot at a higher bit rate (4 Mbps) than the Flip Video. Its case can be trimmed in white, black, orange, pink, or green. Like the Flip Video, it has a fixed-focus 0.8m-to-infinity lens and a 2x digital lens. It also runs from two AA batteries and lacks pause, fast-forward, and rewind controls (though unlike the Flip Video, it does time-stamp video). Figure 2.1 The Flip Ultra camcorder. Image courtesy of Pure Digital
Why do I keep bringing up this m-to-infinity lens stuff? It matters in this way: The smaller that m number, the closer you can be to the object you’re shooting and still stay in focus, so you can be 2/10 of a meter closer to your subject with the Flip Ultra than you can with a Flip Mino and 1/2 meter closer with a Flip Mino than you can be with a Flip MinoHD. Also, at the same distance from your subject, you’ll capture more of the scene with an Ultra than you will with a Mino or MinoHD.
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Unlike the Minos, which are controlled by touch-sensitive switches, the Ultra has physical controls: a four-position rocker switch (+, –, Back, and Forward) that surrounds the Record button, as well as the Play and Delete buttons. The USB connector flips up from the side, and the bottom bears a tripod mount. To change the batteries, you push a lock/unlock switch on the bottom and slide down the faceplate, which is below the lens.
Optical and Digital Zoom Next time you’re strolling the camcorder aisle at Cameras ’n’ Things, take a gander at the X rating of the cameras on the shelves. No, I don’t mean the devices’ appropriateness for adults, but the amount of zoom they offer. You’re likely to see two numbers: 12x/120x. The first number is the amount of optical zoom offered by the camera; the second is the camera’s digital zoom. Optical zoom is controlled by adjustment of the optics (the lens) of the camera. Optical zoom is as clear as the camera can make it. Digital zoom enlarges the image through electronic means. It makes the image’s pixels larger, which leads to softer (blurrier) video. As a general tip, when you’re shopping for a camcorder other than one of these pocket camcorders, pay attention only to the optical-zoom number, which is the one that makes a real difference. Pocket camcorders such as the Flip cameras offer only a 2x digital zoom. Their small and inexpensive lenses don’t have the ability to perform optical adjustments.
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
Flip Mino The $180 Flip Mino (Figure 2.2) brings a lot of physical changes to the Flip line of camcorders. It’s thinner, shorter, and sleeker than the Flip Video and original Flip Ultra. It has touch-sensitive controls rather than physical buttons (other than the red Record button, which is still nice and pushy). Its USB connector flips out from the top in a completely cool James Bond kind of way. It focuses from 1 meter to infinity (the Ultra focuses closer). Also, it uses a nonremovable, rechargeable lithium-ion battery. (Such batteries can be fully drained and charged more than 400 times.) Battery life on these cameras is rated at up to 4 hours of use between charges. It takes approximately 3 hours to charge the camera from a computer’s USB port and 2 hours to charge it from a USB power adapter. The Mino is the first Flip camera that lets you pause, fast-forward, and rewind the video you watch. Figure 2.2 The Flip Mino camcorder. Image courtesy of Pure Digital
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If you shop for these devices in a retail store, you’ll find that they’re offered in black or white. But these colors aren’t your only two choices. Order the Flip Mino or Flip MinoHD directly from Pure Digital Technologies, and you can create a custom-designed exterior for your Mino at no extra charge. In Chapter 3, I walk through the process of creating such an exterior. In the meantime, you need to know only that you can tattoo your Mino with just about any kind of design you like, including a personal photo.
Hold Still! The reason video shot with a pocket camcorder can look jerkier than video shot on a full-size camcorder is that these small cameras lack something called image stabilization—a technology built into some cameras that smooths out the jerking motion you get when a camcorder is held with unsteady hands. (No amount of image stabilization can address footage from cameras that are rapidly swung about.) The Flip camcorders capture exactly the motion they’re dealt, so if you don’t want your video to look shaky, cut back on the caffeine, hold the camera close to your body when shooting, put the camera on a hard surface while shooting, or use a tripod or monopod.
Flip MinoHD Walk through many of today’s living rooms and sports bars, and you see that high-definition video has arrived in a big way. One reason is that the price of the technology necessary to capture and display it has
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
dropped significantly in the past year. Proof of exactly that phenomenon was the 2008 release of the $230 Flip MinoHD (Figure 2.3). Figure 2.3 The Flip MinoHD camcorder. Image courtesy of Pure Digital
The MinoHD looks exactly the same as the standard-definition Mino except for the words MinoHD printed just below the LCD on the back. But as they say, it’s what’s inside that counts. On the inside is 4 GB of storage, allowing the MinoHD to shoot approximately 60 minutes of high-definition video at a resolution of 1280 x 720 (720p) using the H.264 codec. Average bit rate for this camera is 9 Mbps. Pure Digital says the MinoHD has a slightly larger sensor (1/4.5 inch versus 1/4 inch for the Flip Mino and Flip Ultra)—the circuit that captures the images. Larger sensors generally equal better low-light shooting, and sure enough, Pure Digital claims that the MinoHD has better low-light sensitivity than the other Flip camcorders. It too bears a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, but it provides approximately 2 hours of shooting on a single charge. (You can capture more than twice as much data with this HD Flip than with the standard-definition Flips, which helps explain why the camera burns through its battery charge twice as quickly.)
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Defining High Definition You’ve undoubtedly heard the term high definition thrown around a lot lately, but you may not know exactly what defines high definition. Allow me to clear up that mystery. High definition comes in a variety of flavors, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p among them. The numbers refer to the number of horizontal pixels. The letter indicates the display format. Specifically, 1080 video offers a resolution of 1920 (vertical) by 1080 (horizontal) pixels, and 720 video offers 1280 (vertical) by 720 (horizontal) pixels. i and p stand for interlaced and progressive, respectively. Traditional video is made up of odd and even lines, or fields. With interlaced video, each video frame is displayed in alternating fields—horizontal lines that are painted on the screen from top to bottom. So in the case of 1080i, odd fields of 540-pixel rows are displayed first, followed by even rows of 540 pixels. Progressive video (often called full high-definition video by manufacturers) draws every line, from top to bottom, in one pass. Progressive video looks cleaner than interlaced video, particularly when you have a lot of movement in the image. You’re less likely to notice the difference between interlaced and progressive video on a television set because TVs are designed to account for interlaced video. They either support interlacing natively (standard-definition TVs) or include deinterlacing circuitry (HDTV) that converts interlaced video to progressive video. Computer monitors, which are progressivescan devices, don’t include deinterlacing, which is why interlaced video can look jagged. High-definition pocket camcorders such as the Flip MinoHD and UltraHD shoot in 720p—720 horizontal pixels displayed progressively. Although this type of HD isn’t the highest-quality HD around, it’s very good for the Web and computer screens, which is exactly where many of your videos shot with the MinoHD and UltraHD will end up.
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
The MinoHD requires more oomph from your computer than the other Flip cameras, largely because your computer’s processor will be dealing with a lot of data. Although one of the standard-definition Flips can get along with a computer several years old, that computer needs to meet certain requirements: Windows: A Windows PC must have at least a 3 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, 512 MB (Windows XP) or 1 GB (Windows Vista) of RAM, and a USB 2.0 port.
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Mac: Your Mac will need a 1.66 GHz or faster Intel Core Duo processor, 1 GB of RAM, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard), and a USB 2.0 port.
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Flip UltraSD and UltraHD In the spring of 2009, Pure Digital released two new models of the Flip Ultra: the $150 Flip UltraSD and $200 Flip UltraHD (Figure 2.4). As their names hint, the UltraSD shoots standard-definition video and the UltraHD shoots in HD. I gang them together this way not simply because they were released at the same time but because, despite their videoquality differences, the two have a lot in common. Figure 2.4 The Flip UltraHD (left) and UltraSD (right). Image courtesy of Pure Digital
Each one is the tiniest bit larger than the original Flip Ultra—just a smidgen taller and deeper. Like that original Ultra, these camcorders use a four-way toggle switch for the Plus, Minus, Back, and Forward controls, and include the big red Record button, a Play/Pause button, and a Delete button. The toggle switch and Record button are larger on these Ultras than on the original Ultra.
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Unlike the original Ultra, these Ultras can fast-forward and rewind. Just press and hold Forward or Back, respectively, to do just that. These Ultras also have a push-button power switch on the side rather than the somewhat clumsy power toggle switch on the side of the original Flip Ultra. The UltraSD and UltraHD provide a 2-inch LCD display and the 2x digital zoom you’ve come to expect, and record up to 2 hours of video. They’re also the first Flip cameras to record stereo audio; the others record mono audio only. The UltraSD comes in black, white, yellow, and pink; has a video resolution of 640 x 480 using the H.264 format; and has 4 GB of built-in memory. Like the original Ultra and the Minos, it includes a composite Video Out port. It shoots at an average bit rate of 4 Mbps and has the same 1/4-inch VGA CMOS sensor used in the Flip Mino. Pure Digital rates the battery life as up to 4 hours when you use the optional rechargeable battery pack. The UltraHD is available in black or white (each version has chrome trim), shoots at a resolution of 1280 x 720 (720p) and an average bit rate of 9 Mbps, and includes 8 GB of built-in memory. It holds the same 1/4.5–inch HD CMOS sensor used in the MinoHD. The UltraHD is the first Flip camera to include an HDMI connector for attaching the camera to a high-definition television set (cable not included). With the included rechargeable battery pack, you should get up to 3 hours of continuous use. Why use Pure Digital’s rechargeable battery pack rather than a regular set of rechargeable batteries? Only Pure Digital’s rechargeable batteries will charge when you plug the UltraSD or UltraHD into a powered USB port. You must remove standard rechargeable AA batteries from the camcorder and place them in a charging station.
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
Using Your Flip
Yes, I’m the tiniest bit embarrassed to describe how to shoot and play back video with a camera that’s so simple to operate. But in the interest of completeness (and the likelihood that not everyone is familiar with each and every control on these cameras), describe I must. Figure 2.5 points out the controls on the Flip UltraSD (they’re the same for the UltraHD except for the different TV output); Figure 2.6 does the same for the Flip Mino camcorders. F igure 2.5 The Flip Ultra’s interface. Image courtesy of Pure Digital
USB release switch Play Back/Previous
TV Out
Delete
+ (volume up/zoom in) Forward/Next Record – (volume down/zoom out)
Chapter 2: The Flip Cameras Figure 2.6 The interface of the Flip Mino models.
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Power
Image courtesy of Pure Digital
Play/Pause
Delete + (volume up/zoom in)
Back/Previous
Forward/Next Record – (volume down/zoom out)
Turning it on Holding the camera in the palm of your right hand with the lens pointing away from you, you’ll notice that the power button sits just under your thumb along the right side of the camcorder. To switch on the camera, just press the button. If you have an original Flip Ultra, you push the power switch down quickly. With the Minos, just press the button. Your
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
camera will tell you that it’s ready to rock by showing a green Ready message in the LCD display.
Recording In the video and audio recording worlds, a big red button invariably throws the host device into record mode. The Flips follow this convention. When you’re ready to record, press this button. The display will show minutes and seconds in red—01:35, for example—indicating the amount of video you’ve shot. To stop recording, press the Record button again. The LCD will display Ready and also show the remaining amount of recording time (Time left 12:42, for example).
Zooming To zoom in, press the plus (+) button above the Record button. To zoom out, the minus (–) button below the Record button will do the job. When you engage the camera’s zoom, a picture of a zoom slider appears along the right side of the display, indicating how far you’re zoomed in. Although this slider appears to show only four increments, the cameras actually zoom smoothly.
Playing clips To play any video files that your Flip camera holds, press the Play button on the top-left part of the camera’s controls. The video you shot most recently will play, and a green counter in the top-left section of the display will count down the number of minutes and seconds until the
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clip ends. You can increase or decrease the volume of the clip by pressing the + and – buttons, respectively. The Flip Video and original Flip Ultra cameras provide no way to pause playback. If you press the Play button again, the video stops. Press it again, and you start playback from the beginning of that clip. The Minos and UltraSD and UltraHD allow you to pause playback and then resume from the point where you paused. Just press the Play/Pause button while a video’s playing, and the clip will pause at that point. To start playback from that point, press Play/Pause again. To start the clip from the beginning, tap the Back button. The Minos, UltraSD, and UltraHD—unlike the Flip Video and original Flip Ultra—also let you rewind and fast-forward through a clip. To do so, just press and hold the Back or Forward button, respectively, as a clip plays. To move to a different clip, press the Forward or Back button. Again, when you first enter Play mode, you’ll see the video you last shot. To see the first clip on the camera, press the Forward button once. With a Flip Video or original Ultra, you move between clips by pressing the Forward or Back button for each clip. The Minos and the Flip UltraSD and UltraHD let you press and hold the Forward and Back buttons to march through the clips, viewing the first frame of each as you go.
Deleting clips The FlipShare software lets you delete clips from your Flip camcorder, but you can do it with the camera’s controls as well—a useful feature when you’ve filled your camera with clips (not all of them worth keeping) and need to free some space to catch a shot of a passing UFO. To delete clips, switch on the camera, navigate to the clip you want to delete by using
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
the Forward or Back button (no need to press the Play button), and press the camera’s Delete button (marked with a trash-can icon). With a Flip Video and original Flip Ultra camera, you’ll see Delete Video? flash on the screen. To do exactly that, press the Delete button again. If you’ve thought better of deleting the clip, just press the Play button. To delete all videos on one of these cameras, continue holding the Delete button until you see Delete All Videos? To make that happen, press the Delete button again. A confirming All Videos Deleted message appears briefly. If you’re using a Mino, UltraSD, or UltraHD, press the Delete button. The display asks Delete Video? and provides Yes, No, and All options below. You navigate these three choices with the Forward and Back buttons. To invoke one of these choices, press the Play button. To cancel, just press Delete again. On these same camcorders, you can lock the Delete button so that you don’t inadvertently toss out clips you want. To do that, just press and hold the Delete button. You’ll briefly see the Delete screen; then a new screen appears, displaying a padlock icon and the message Delete Locked. When you want to unlock the Delete button, just press and hold it again until you see the words Delete Unlocked accompanied by an image of an unlocked padlock.
Accessing settings When you first switched on your Flip, you were prompted to set the correct date and time. Should you want to change those settings, you can easily do so.
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If you have a Flip Video or original Flip Ultra, hold down the + or – button while switching on the camera. A Set Time and Date screen appears, allowing you to adjust the time (Hour, Minute, AM/PM) and the date (Month, Date, Year). You use the + and – buttons to adjust each field and the Forward and Back buttons to move between fields. To save your settings, press Play. To exit, press Delete. If you have one of the Flip Minos, the UltraSD, or the UltraHD, hold down the Record button while switching on the camera. Keep holding the Record button, and a screen appears that prompts you to set the date. Again, use the + and – buttons to change each field and the Forward and Back buttons to move from field to field. Press Play/Pause to accept the change or Delete to exit. Unlike the Flip Video and original Flip Ultra, the Minos have four separate configuration screens, and the UltraSD and UltraHD have five screens: The first screen is for setting the date as I’ve described for the Flip Video and original Flip Ultra camcorders.
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When you press Play/Pause in the Set Date screen, you’re taken to the Set Time screen. Again, adjust the hour, minute, and AM/PM fields, and press Play/Pause to accept the changes.
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The next screen lets you choose whether these cameras play tones when you press their buttons. Your options are On (the default) and Off. Use the Forward and Back buttons to choose; then press the Play/ Pause button to accept the change and move to the next screen.
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If you have an UltraSD or UltraHD, you’ll see that you have the option to turn off the red Record light. If you’d rather that your subjects not know they’re being recorded, this screen will be important to you.
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
The final screen for these Ultras and all Minos displays a Save Settings? message. Press Play/Pause to do that, or press the Delete button to cancel any changes you’ve made and return to the Play screen.
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Turning it off If you don’t care about wasting the Flip’s battery charge, you can just lay off the buttons, and the camera will shut off by itself after 2 minutes of nonuse. Better, though, that you press its power button again to shut it down.
3 Customizing Your Camera One thing that sets the Flip Mino camcorders apart from other camcorders—small or large—is the case, which you can customize. (And yes, this applies to the Mino only; you can’t customize a Flip Ultra’s case.) Although you can purchase a Flip from a retail store or online outfit such as Amazon.com and receive a Mino with a black, white, or chrome case, if you purchase the camera directly from Pure Digital’s Web site, you can have the camcorder’s case emblazoned with just about any design you like. No, I’m not talking about a little plastic sleeve or polymer case that you wrap around your camera: Your design is actually embedded in the camera’s plastic case. Like that large tattoo of Boyz II Men that seemed like such a good idea when you were 18, this design is permanent. In this chapter, I show you the ways you can personalize your Flip Mino.
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Trying out the Options
As I said, you can purchase a customized case only from Pure Digital directly. To begin your journey, visit the Flip Video Store at www.theflip.com/store. On the left side of the screen, you see a column that lists the available Flip models, along with links to gift cards and accessories. For the purposes of this chapter, you’re interested only in the Flip Mino and Flip MinoHD links. Go ahead and click the link for the Flip Mino. In the resulting page, you see four purchase options: Design Gallery, Use Your Own Image, Use the Pattern Generator, and either Black or White (if you’ve chosen a Flip Mino) or Chrome or Black (if you’ve chosen a Flip MinoHD). The four options break out this way.
Design Gallery Design Gallery is very much what it sounds like—a repository for premade designs. Some of the designs come from Pure Digital’s Flip Studio; others are from such designers as Beth Weintraub, Astro Studios, Elemental8, and Santa Cruz Skateboards. When you first click Design Gallery, you’re presented with a screen full of the best-selling designs (Figure 3.1). Best sellers are marked with an icon of a red box with a white star inside. Along the left side of the page, you see a Browse Designs by Category heading, followed by a series of categories including Flip Staff Picks, Hello Kitty & Friends (yep, you can have Sanrio’s designs applied to your Mino), Tattoos, Textures & Patterns, and Flip for Good. This last category is worth pointing out. If you purchase a Mino with a Flip for Good design, $10 of the purchase price goes to a charitable organization associated with that design. Organizations that benefit include Feeding America, Kiva, Witness, and World Food Programme. Each of these designs is marked with a green Earth icon.
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Figure 3.1 The Flip Video Store’s Design Gallery offers plenty of compelling case designs.
On each category page, you can sort the designs by Relevance, Best Selling (within that category), Recently Added, and Flip Picks. (Flip Picks are designs that Pure Digital’s staff particularly likes.) If you’d like to learn more about a design, just hover your pointer over the designed Mino. A pop-up bubble tells you who created the design and how much the cameras cost (as I write this chapter, $179.99 for the original Mino and $229.99 for the MinoHD), and also provides a short description of the design and designer. To get a closer look at a Mino with the design applied to it, just click the thumbnail image. A new page opens, showing you the face of the camera life-size. Four thumbnail images appear below this larger image. Hover your pointer over each of these thumbnails to see the large image from a different angle. Also on this page, you can choose whether to order a Mino or a MinoHD.
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Click the Add to Cart button, and as promised, you’re taken to the Shopping Cart page, where you can change the number of Flips you want to purchase as well as add any accessory items. When you’re ready to buy, just click Checkout. You’ll be walked through a series of screens where you create an account at the Flip Video Store and eventually pay for your item. Your order is relayed to CafePress (the outfit tasked with applying the design to the Mino’s case; see the “Going Direct” sidebar at the end of this chapter), and you’ll have the designed Mino in a couple of days.
Use Your Own Image If you’ve ever used an online photo service such as Flickr or Snapfish, you’re on your way to slathering a picture of your own onto a white Flip Mino (yes, only a white one; you can’t add an image to a black or chrome Mino). Click the Use Your Own Image option, and you’re taken to the Upload an Image page. Click the Choose File button, and—just like Flickr and Snapfish—the Flip Video Store prompts you to select a digital photo stored on your computer. Specifically, when you click Choose File, a small window appears. In this window, click the Browse (Windows) or Choose File (Mac) button to open a window (Windows) or sheet (Mac) that you use to navigate to an image you’d like to use. If you’re using a Mac along with Apple’s iPhoto to store your pictures, you don’t have a direct way to access those images from this window. To use one of your iPhoto images, open iPhoto, select the image you want, and drag it to the Mac’s Desktop. The image is converted to a full-size JPEG file (if it wasn’t one already). At that point, you can select it with the Choose File command.
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When you’ve found an image you like, click Open (Windows) or Choose (Mac), and the name of the chosen image appears in the Upload window. At the bottom of this window is a check box that, when checked, indicates that you have the right to use the image you’re uploading. Check that check box and then click the Upload button. That image must be in either the JPEG or PNG graphics format and must be no larger than 10 MB. You don’t want it to be a really tiny, low-resolution image either, of course. If you try to use such a low-quality image, you’ll see a warning message. The better the image, the better the results are likely to be.
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A new window appears, where you can manipulate your image. On the left side of this window, you see the outline of a Flip Mino camera and your image below that outline (Figure 3.2). Below your image are five buttons labeled Position, Rotate, Scale, Auto-Fit, and Replace Image. On the right side of the window is a full-size preview of the Mino with your image applied. Figure 3.2 You have a lot of control over the way your image is placed on the Mino.
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The first three buttons allow you to place the image exactly where you want it on the camera. Position lets you click and drag the image to move it around. Click Rotate, and a slider appears that lets you rotate the image left or right up to 180 degrees. And clicking Scale lets you shrink or expand the image. When you click Auto-Fit, the window provides three views: Horizontal, with the image in its original orientation and filling the camera from top to bottom
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Vertical, with the image rotated 90 degrees to the right and filling the camera from top to bottom
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A below-lens-divider view, with the image in its original orientation but filling only the area below the lens divider (the bar on either side of the lens that covers the microphone)
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If you’re unhappy with the image you’ve chosen, click Replace Image, and the Upload window appears again.
Use the Pattern Generator OK, so none of the cameras in the Design Gallery thrills you, and you don’t have any images of your own that you find compelling enough to plant on your Mino. You have one other choice, and that choice is Flip’s Pattern Generator: a tool for creating patterns based on a few conditions you set within a window. It works this way: 1. Click the Get Started link below the Use the Pattern Generator item. The resulting page tells you that you’re about to have the opportunity to create a one-of-a-kind pattern for your Mino. 2. Click Get Started again. In the Pattern Generator window that pops up, you can play with colors and styles.
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3. Experiment with primary and secondary colors in the Colors palettes in the top-left corner of the window. 4. Experiment with the options in the Styles palettes: Themes. Choose one of four themes (which I’ll describe as flowers, brush strokes, shapes, and paisley).
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Icons. Choose one of five icons (smileys, 3D smileys, cupcakes, dingbats, and circles).
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Stripes. Choose one of five stripe patterns (bold horizontal, waves, bold vertical, madras, and wavy madras).
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Circles. Choose one of six circle patterns (round, distorted, large, large distorted, mirrored, and distorted mirrored).
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5. Select two colors and one style. The large display on the right side of the window creates a moving pattern using these elements (Figure 3.3). Figure 3.3 The Pattern Generator.
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6. Experiment with the Mild/Wild slider below the Pattern Generator display. The closer to Mild the slider is, the stricter the generator is about its results. If you’ve chosen the round Circles pattern in navy blue and turquoise, for example, that’s pretty much what you’ll get. Slide all the way to Wild, and you’ll see a far broader range of colors and distorted patterns. 7. When you find a pattern that intrigues you, click the Pause button in the middle of the generator. The generator creates 16 patterns based on the original and arrays them around the central display. To get a closer look at one of these patterns, just click it; it appears in the center of the generator. To save one of the 16 patterns, click it and then click the Lock icon to save that pattern in its current position. When you click the central generator display, you’ll see two options: View More and Use This One (Figure 3.4). Click View More, and the generator starts up again, using the currently selected colors and style. (You’re welcome to change both the colors and style.) Click the Pause button again, and yet another pack of variations is arrayed around the generator (with the exception of locked patterns, which aren’t replaced). Figure 3.4 You can ask the Pattern Generator to continue creating patterns or apply the selected pattern to your Mino.
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It’s easy to be underwhelmed by the Pattern Generator until you actually preview a pattern applied to a Mino. The thumbnails and even the larger view within the central generator don’t give you a good idea of how cool some of these patterns really are. Apply and try, and you may very well buy.
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8. When you have just the pattern you want, click the central display and then click the Use This One option. You’re taken to a screen where the final pattern is applied to a Mino (Figure 3.5). In this screen, you’ll find the same sharing (discussed next), view, and purchase options that you see when creating your own design. Figure 3.5 There’s the Mino with your pattern applied.
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Just as you can with the designs you create (refer to “Use Your Own Image” earlier in this chapter), you can continue to adjust the position, rotation, and scale of the pattern, as well as autofit or replace the pattern. Should you click Replace Pattern, you return to the Pattern Generator, where you can take another stab at creating a pattern.
Black, White, or Chrome You have the option to purchase a plain ol’ black or white Flip Mino, of course (or a black or chrome MinoHD, as those are the choices offered in the high-definition model). Honestly, if that’s what you’d like to do, I urge you to direct your browser to www.amazon.com or visit your local Costco. You’ll find the Flip Minos more affordable at those retailers.
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Sharing Your Designs
In each of the design screens, you’ll see a Share This Flip Design link. Click this link, and a Share This Flip Design window eventually appears. (It can take a minute or two to show up, depending on the speed of your Internet connection.) Within this four-tabbed window, you can choose to send an e-mail message about your design; add an announcement about it to a Facebook, MySpace, or Bebo profile; post that same announcement to a Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress blog; and choose a badge style (horizontal or vertical) for your designed Mino. What’s the point of sharing your designs? Bragging rights, certainly, but there’s more to it.
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After you’ve designed a Mino and purchased it, you’ll be invited to share your design with others. You can choose to do this for free or offer the design for sale. When you choose to share your design for free, you name the design, give it a description, and agree to the terms of use. If you’d like to sell your design, you’re prompted to set up an account with CafePress.com (the company that custom-paints the Mino) after you’ve purchased your Mino. When you do, any designs that you create at the Flip Video Store are uploaded to CafePress automatically and added to your store. Flip.com reviews all these designs, and if the staff likes one of yours, it’ll be displayed on the Flip site. Regardless of whether people purchase your designed Mino directly from CafePress or from the Flip Video Store, you earn $10 per camcorder.
Going Direct Although Pure Digital doesn’t shout it from the heavens, you don’t have to purchase a custom-designed Mino before you can sell your designs. You can set up an account directly with CafePress without spending a dime. CafePress is an online emporium similar to a “make your own T-shirt” shop where you’re welcome to apply your designs to such unadorned items as coffee mugs, messenger bags, hats, buttons, magnets, and clothing. You do this by uploading images to CafePress, applying them to the plain items (furnished by CafePress) that you want to sell, and then adding a surcharge for the amount you’d like to be paid over and above the price charged by CafePress. If CafePress charges $18.99 for a messenger bag, you can ask it to sell every messenger bag with your design for $19.99, which means that a dollar per bag gets kicked back to you. continues on next page
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Going Direct (continued) It just so happens that CafePress also sells the Flip Mino and Flip MinoHD. As you can with any of its other products, you can customdesign and sell these camcorders—without going through the Flip Video Store or purchasing a Mino yourself. You can also ask for more money for your designed Mino than the $10 offered by the Flip Video Store. You can ask for as much as you like (though your design had better be pretty spectacular if you expect people to pay more than $179.99 or $229.99 for your Mino). If that’s the case, why would anyone bother going through the Flip Video Store to sell a design? Flip’s tools for editing images are vastly superior to what CafePress offers. At CafePress, you’ll find no way to rotate or scale images, for example. Instead, you’re expected to do all your image editing on your computer and then upload the finished design to CafePress, where you apply it to the products you want to sell. In my efforts to do this, I had to return to Adobe Photoshop several times to tweak the image so that it fit correctly on the Mino I was designing.
4 FlipShare In Chapter 1, I mention that one of the advantages of the Flip camcorders is that each holds a Windows- and Mac-compatible copy of the FlipShare editing software. This means that you can shoot video, jack your Flip camera into just about any Windows PC or Macintosh with a USB 2.0 port (the exception is a really old Windows PC or Macintosh whose processor is too poky to handle the HD output of a Flip MinoHD or Flip UltraHD), edit your video, and distribute the stuff you’ve shot. This computer can be your friend’s, your mom’s, or a school computer on which you’re allowed to install software. You don’t have to rush home to use your computer, drag a laptop around with you, or purchase or download additional software. Everything you need is right there on the camera. In this chapter, I look at installing and configuring FlipShare as well as using it to edit videos.
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Installing FlipShare
You can’t run the FlipShare software directly from a Flip camera. Instead, you install it from the camera. Here’s how. Regardless of the kind of computer and operating system on which you install the FlipShare software, if you have an active Internet connection when the software first launches, FlipShare checks Pure Digital’s servers for a new version. If one is available, the FlipShare installer updates automatically, ensuring that you have the most up-to-date version regardless of which computer you’ve plugged the camera into.
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Windows XP To install FlipShare in Windows XP, follow these steps: 1. Plug the camera into a free USB 2.0 port. The camera makes its little “ba-lip” power-on sound and starts charging. Then Windows takes a couple of seconds to recognize the camera and automatically install the proper drivers. 2. Instruct Windows to use FlipShare. A FLIPVIDEO window appears, offering you a variety of choices, from viewing video with a built-in program to viewing a slideshow of images. You’re interested in that first choice. 3. Choose View Your Flip Camcorder Videos Using the Program Provided on the Device, and click the OK button. The FlipShare installer application launches. It takes a little over a minute to install the software and place a FlipShare shortcut on the desktop.
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Windows Vista To install FlipShare in Windows Vista, follow these steps: 1. Plug the camera into a free USB 2.0 port. The camera makes its little “ba-lip” power-on sound and starts charging. Then Windows takes a couple of seconds to recognize the camera and automatically install the proper drivers. 2. Instruct Windows to use FlipShare. An AutoPlay window appears, with View Your Flip Camcorder Videos listed as the sole entry below Install or Run Program. 3. Click View Your Flip Camcorder Videos to install the FlipShare application. As is typical, Windows asks for permission. 4. Click Continue to install. The FlipShare installer application launches. It takes a little over a minute to install the software and place a FlipShare shortcut on the Desktop.
Macintosh To install FlipShare on a Macintosh, follow these steps: 1. Plug the camera into a free USB 2.0 port. The camera makes its little “ba-lip” power-on sound and starts charging. 2. Double-click the FLIPVIDEO icon that appears on the Desktop to reveal the contents of the camera. 3. Double-click Start FlipShare to launch the application’s installer. 4. In the resulting windows, agree to the license agreement, and enter your Administrator password when prompted. The FlipShare software is installed in the Applications folder at the root level of your Mac’s startup drive.
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Mac OS X allows only those with Administrator accounts to install software. If you don’t have such an account, find someone who has both access to that Mac and an Administrator account, and ask that person to install the software for you.
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If you’re installing FlipShare from an original Flip Ultra, the installer also installs the 3ivx (pronounced thri-vix) codec, a QuickTime plug-in that the Mac needs to play and edit the variety of MPEG-4 videos shot by the Flip Ultra. (See the nearby sidebar “3ivx and the Original Flip Ultra” for details.)
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If another application on your PC or Mac believes that it can import video files from the Flip camera—Adobe Photoshop Elements or iPhoto, for example—it may launch automatically and ask to grab the videos. For the time being, dismiss any such offers.
3ivx and the Original Flip Ultra The original Flip Ultra’s videos are in the MPEG-4 format encoded with the 3ivx (pronounced thri-vix) encoder. Neither Windows nor the Macintosh supports this format natively with Windows Media and QuickTime software, respectively. Fortunately, the FlipShare installer places both FlipShare and the 3ivx decoding software on your hard drive. PCs and Macs need this software to view and edit the Ultra’s footage. The Flip Minos, UltraSD, and UltraHD use H.264 video encoding, which is supported natively by both computer platforms, so 3ivx isn’t necessary for these cameras.
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Touring FlipShare
Generally, when an application is available for Windows as well as the Macintosh—Photoshop Express or Microsoft Word, for example—there’s some difference in the functionality and appearance of the application on the two computer platforms. That’s not the case with FlipShare. Oh, sure, the Windows version places the Preferences command in the Edit menu (as is typical), and the Mac version shifts that same command to the FlipShare menu (as is just as typical), but otherwise, the two versions are identical. For this reason, I can dispense with the usual “If you’re using Windows” this and “But on a Mac” that. It’s all good. With that out of the way, now I’ll show you around FlipShare’s interface: the filing structure on the left side of the FlipShare window; the play and edit views on the right side of the window; and the various buttons for editing and sharing your movies, located at the bottom of the window.
To the left If you look at my résumé on the back of this book, you’ll see that I’m a Mac guy (but I strive to not be a jerk about it). Having spent so many years mucking around with Apple’s stuff, I have a pretty good sense of when a software designer has been influenced by Apple’s work. FlipShare definitely bears signs of that influence. When you first open the application, you can’t help but notice its similarity to iPhoto, Apple’s photo management and editing application that’s part of the iLife suite. Similar to iPhoto, the left side of the FlipShare window displays Camcorder and Computer headings (Figure 4.1, on the next page).
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Figure 4.1 The FlipShare window.
Visit the Flip Video Store
List icon
Thumbnail icon
Large icon Help Window icon
Add New Folder
Should you need help with FlipShare (and I’m not sure why you would, given the book you’re now holding in your hands), click the Help Window icon—a question mark inside a blue circle in the top-right corner of the window.
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Camcorder If you have a Flip camera plugged into your computer, the Camcorder heading is black and displays the number of video clips on the camera. Next to that heading is a blue Eject symbol; click it to unmount the camera safely. If no Flip camera is plugged into the computer, or you’ve unmounted a camera but left it plugged in to charge, the Camcorder heading is gray. (You can remount the camera easily by disconnecting it from your computer’s USB port and then reconnecting it.)
Computer When you first jack your Flip camera into your computer, the only thing that appears below the Computer heading is a My Movies folder. As I’ve
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hinted, you can edit movies in FlipShare, and when you do, those edited movies appear in this folder. After you import movies from the camera to your computer (I’ll tell you how very shortly), they appear in folders below the Computer heading. These folders are dated, reflecting the month in which you shot each clip (September 2009, for example). “How does the software know?”, you may ask. When you first set the date and time on your Flip (see Chapter 2), you set up the camera to date- and time-stamp your movies correctly. When FlipShare imports movies from a Flip camera, it looks at the date and time stamps; then it files movies by the months in which they were shot (creating dated folders in the process, if necessary). Videos are not stuck in these folders forever. After you’ve imported a clip into FlipShare, and that clip’s been filed by date, you can move it to a different folder—one that you’ve created, the My Movies folder, or even another dated folder. (Why you’d want to mix March’s clips with January’s is beyond me, but to each his own.)
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Because FlipShare doesn’t leave a copy of a moved clip in the original folder, if you want clips to be filed by date as well as placed in another folder, consider selecting the clips, copying them, and then pasting them into that other folder.
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You’re welcome to create folders of your own to make it easier to file and find the movies you make. To do so, just click the Add New Folder button below the list of folders (or choose File > New Folder). You can add a folder called Family, another called Friends, and a final one called Complete Strangers Doing Stupid Things. (If you later regret creating such a folder, just click the Trash icon that appears next to it when you mouse over its name.)
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If you feel like visiting the Flip Video Store to purchase another camera for yourself or for a friend, click the Visit the Flip Store link in the top-left corner of the FlipShare window.
To the right Again, as in iPhoto, the right-central part of the interface is devoted to the play and edit views. You have three viewing options here.
List When you select a folder and choose List format (which you can do by choos ing View > List or by clicking the List icon in the top-right corner of the FlipShare window), all clips in that folder are displayed in the order in which they were saved to your computer (Figure 4.2). No, not when shot, when saved. (And yes, I would have sorted these things by when they were shot.) Figure 4.2
Export To link
List format.
Thumbnail Play button Timeline
Select buttons
Volume slider
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To the left of each clip is a thumbnail picture of the video’s first frame, with a Play button and timeline below. Click the right-pointing Play triangle, and the clip plays in that small thumbnail window. To the right of the thumbnail is information about the clip—when it was shot, its length, its file size, and its history (which can include such information as when it was copied to the computer, edited in FlipShare, and moved from another folder). Atop this information is a title field marked Unsaved if you’re viewing a clip on the camcorder that hasn’t been saved or Untitled if it’s a video you’ve imported but not named. To give the clip a more interesting title, just click Untitled and type a name of your choosing. Double-click a thumbnail, and it opens in Large format view (discussed later in this chapter). If you’d like to make a copy of a clip and save it somewhere on your computer, click the blue Export To link. When you do, an About Exporting Videos window appears, informing you that you now have the option to make an exact copy of the clip and save it somewhere on your computer. Click the Export button, and a navigation window (Windows) or sheet (Mac) appears. Select a location to save your movie, and click Choose to make the copy and save. To forget the whole thing instead, click the Don’t Export button in the About Exporting Videos window. You can delete clips from these folders by selecting their thumbnails and choosing Edit > Delete. You can also choose Delete from the contextual menu that appears when you right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac) the thumbnail. This contextual menu also includes Copy, Paste, Rename, Play Full Screen, and Export To commands. Right- or Control-click anything in the window except a thumbnail, and the contextual menu offers Paste, Select All, and Select None commands.
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You’ll find All and None buttons in the Select section at the bottom of this portion of the window. A volume slider appears here, too, allowing you to adjust the volume of a playing clip.
Thumbnail The next item in the View menu (and the icon next to List in the top-right corner of the FlipShare window) is Thumbnail (Figure 4.3). Thumbnail format gives you the option to see your movies in a larger view (click and hold the Thumbnail icon, and you’ll find you can view thumbnails in four views ranging from “really pretty big” to “eensyweensy”). You’ll also discover a new icon at the end of the timeline: the scissorslike Trim Video button. Click this icon, and the Trim window appears (which I’ll get to when I discuss editing with FlipShare). Figure 4.3 Thumbnail format.
Trim Video Clip date
As in List format, you can play your clips by using the Play button and timeline. You can also change the title by clicking the current title and typing a new name. Finally, you can change the clip’s date. Yes,
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strange as it seems, when you click the date above the clip—08/09/09, for example—a small calendar window appears, where you can alter the clip’s date and time. Why would you want to change the date? Other than covering your tracks (“No, Mom, I swear I was at the bar on my 21st birthday, not the day before. And here’s the video to prove it!”), you might want to do this if you’ve moved the camera to a different time zone. Maybe you shot some great footage in New Zealand (and changed the camera’s date and time to reflect the local time) but want the imported video to be in your home’s local time. Or perhaps you neglected to set the correct date and time when you first set up your camera. Here’s your chance to make things right.
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Large If the “really pretty big” Thumbnail format isn’t big enough for you, you can always live large by choosing View > Large or clicking the Large icon at the top of the FlipShare window (Figure 4.4). Just as you can with clips in Thumbnail format, you can edit a clip’s name, time, and date, as well as change its playing volume. The Trim Video button also appears at the far-right end of the timeline. Figure 4.4 Large format.
Trim Video
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Down below The area at the bottom of the FlipShare window houses buttons for importing video from the camera to your computer; saving videos to the camcorder; playing video full-screen; sharing your video with the world; and creating movies, snapshots, and DVDs (Figure 4.5). It’s also where the software displays messages about what it’s currently doing, such as FlipShare is working. Do not unplug camcorder! Saving. Here are the basics. Figure 4.5 FlipShare’s buttons for transferring, sharing, and creating movies.
Save to Computer/Camcorder The state of this button changes depending on whether you’ve selected the Flip camcorder or a folder or movie.
Save to Computer Select Camcorder and click Save to Computer, and a window appears that asks, “Do you want to save all unsaved video to your computer?” Click Yes, and another window appears, telling you into which folders the videos will be saved and offering two options: Remove Videos from Camcorder After Saving and Don’t Ask Me Again. Select that first option to strip the movies from the camcorder after they’re imported (a good idea if you need to clear some space). Then click the Yes button to accept or the No button to back out. You can also save individual movies by selecting those you want to save (by Command-clicking them on the Mac and Control-clicking them on a Windows PC) and then clicking the Save to Computer button. In this case, you get to skip one window. The only window that appears tells
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you which folder(s) the videos will be saved to, offers the option to remove videos from the camcorder after saving, provides the “stop bugging me about this” option, and displays the Yes and No buttons.
Save to Camcorder If you’d like to place a favorite video back on your Flip camcorder, just select one or more videos in FlipShare and click the Save to Camcorder button. If the movies are compatible with the camera, they’ll be copied to it, where they’re viewable just like any other clips you’ve shot. You may well ask, “Compatible with the camera? What movies wouldn’t be?” In fact, you can’t copy movies that you’ve edited with FlipShare’s Make Movie editor (covered later in this chapter). Neither can you copy a high-definition movie you’ve shot with a MinoHD or UltraHD to a standard-definition Mino. You can copy standard-definition movies shot with a regular Flip Mino to a MinoHD or UltraHD, however.
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Play Full Screen If even the Large format isn’t large enough for you, you can fill your computer screen by selecting a clip and clicking the Play Full Screen button. As the resulting window tells you, you can exit Full Screen mode (and stop playing the clip in the process) by clicking the mouse or pressing your computer’s Escape key. You can pause/resume playback by pressing the keyboard’s spacebar.
The Share buttons I’m going to deal with sharing your videos with the world in Chapter 7. For now, I’ll just say that with the Email, Greeting Card, and Online buttons gathered together under the Share heading, you can e-mail a video, e-mail a link to a video greeting card that the recipient can watch on Pure Digital’s Web site, and upload your videos to Web sites of your choosing, respectively.
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The Create buttons Using the buttons in the Create section, you can piece together movies and add titles, capture single frames from a video to create a snapshot, and prepare videos for burning to a DVD. I look at these options in the following section.
Making Stuff
By now, you should have the idea that the Flip camcorders are all about “quick and dirty.” Though you can do wonderful things with these tiny cameras, their strength is their immediacy, and that immediacy is reflected in FlipShare’s limited movie editing capabilities. If you need something done fast and without a lot of flash—be it movie, still picture, or DVD—you’ll find it easy to do by clicking the Movie, Snapshot, or DVD button below the Create heading.
Making a movie Making movies with FlipShare is largely a two-step process. First, you trim your clips; then you piece them together. I walk you through that process in the following sections.
Trimming clips Earlier in the chapter, I mention the Trim Video button—the scissors icon that leads to the Trim window. Now’s the time to put it to work: 1. Choose a folder of clips, select a clip within that folder, and choose either Thumbnail or Large view. When you do, you’ll see the Trim Video button at the end of the timeline (Figure 4.6).
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Figure 4.6 Open the Trim window by clicking the Trim Video button in this window.
2. Click the Trim Video button. The Trim window appears, displaying your video; a timeline; video startpoint and end-point controls; and Cancel, Save As, and Save buttons. 3. Drag the start- and end-point controls. Drag the start-point control to the place where you’d like your video to begin. (If you want the video to start from the very second when you pressed the Record button, of course, you can leave the control right where it is.) Likewise, drag the control on the right—the end-point control—to where you want the video to end (Figure 4.7). When you drag a control, the video above reflects its position—the part of the video where you’re just about to skateboard over 14 speedboats, for example. Figure 4.7 The Trim window’s startpoint and endpoint controls.
Start-point controls
End-point controls
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If you’d like finer control of your selection, just click the Back and Forward arrows in each control. When you do, the video moves back or forward just a little bit.
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4. Save your edit. When you’ve positioned the start-point and end-point controls exactly where you want them, click Save As or Save: If you click Save As, the Save Trimmed Video window appears, listing all your movie folders. Choose one and click Save. A trimmed copy of the clip is saved in the folder you’ve selected.
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If you choose Save, the original clip is trimmed and left in its original folder.
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Don’t worry—the original clip isn’t trimmed permanently. If you want to restore the clip to its original length, just click the Trim Video button again and readjust the start-point and end-point controls. FlipShare is nondestructive in this regard.
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5. Repeat Steps 1–4 for other clips. Trim the fat and gristle off any other clips that you want to assemble into a finished movie.
Assembling a movie Now that you’ve trimmed your clips, it’s time to piece them together into a movie, like so: 1. Click the Movie button. When you do, a Create Movie window appears (Figure 4.8). This window walks you through the four-step process of creating a movie.
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Figure 4.8 To begin creating a movie, start by arranging its clips.
2. Drag clips into the Create Movie window Step 1 of this process is adding the clips you want to use in the movie. To do this, simply select a folder in the FlipShare window, click and hold on a clip, and drag that clip into the Create Movie window. You can drag multiple clips into this window to add them all at the same time. You can also select multiple clips in a folder and then click the Movie button (refer to Figure 4.5). When you do, all the selected clips appear in the Create Movie window.
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3. Rearrange your clips. If you don’t care for the order of your clips, feel free to drag them to different positions. A light blue line appears just before a clip’s new position in the movie. You can preview how the clips will look by clicking the Play button in the small movie frame in the Preview section (on the right side of the Create Movie window).
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4. Click Next. Clicking the Next button takes you to the Add Title and Credit Screens window (Figure 4.9), where you complete Step 2 of the process. Figure 4.9 Add titles and credits in Step 2 of making a movie.
5. Add your titles and credits. You have three options: Include Title. Just enable this option, click the example text to the right (which reads Click Here to Change Title), and type some title text—My Gnarly Movie, for example.
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You can’t change the text style or size.
The example text is shoved all the way up against the top of the frame. It doesn’t have to be. Click the example text and press the Enter or Return key twice to center the title. Also, you can copy text from another application—a text editor, for example—and paste it into the title area.
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Include Credits. Again, enable the option by clicking the check box if you want credits, click the example text, and type your credits. Each line holds 15 characters, and you get five lines to work with. Again, you can’t change the text style or size.
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Although you can type a ton of text in the credits, only those first five lines of text will appear in your movie. Sorry—you don’t get scrolling credits if you’ve entered too much text.
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Share Credit with Flip. When enabled, the last option embeds a little ad for Flip Video at the end of your movie.
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6. Click Next. It’s on to the Include Background Music window and Step 3 of the process, in which you can add music. 7. Add background music—or not. Like I said, Step 3 is the musical step. You can choose to add no music, use one of the seven canned background-music soundtracks included with FlipShare (Figure 4.10), or choose an MP3 audio file from your computer’s music collection (its Windows Media or iTunes music library, for example). Figure 4.10 In Step 3, you can add music that’s included with FlipShare or MP3 files from your music library.
In this window, you can also choose to have the music play softer or louder than the video’s soundtrack, or to play just music with no video sound.
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To hear what the background music will sound like and how loud it will be, click the Play button in the Preview area on the right side of the window. Your video will play in a small window, and you’ll hear its soundtrack mixed with the background music (unless you’ve chosen the option to play music only, of course). Here’s another quick-and-dirty characteristic of FlipShare: This application doesn’t perform an intensive analysis of the movie soundtrack’s volume or the volume of the music. Rather, when you choose the softer option, the background-music track is set low enough that a moderately loud clip is audible over it. The louder option just cranks up the volume of the background music. In short, don’t be disappointed if the volume isn’t balanced exactly as you’d like.
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8. Click Next. You move to the Name Your Movie window and Step 4. 9. Name your movie. You’ve arrived! Step 4 asks only that you name your movie and then create the thing. By default, the movie is named with the title you entered in Step 2 of the process (Figure 4.11). If you want to use a different name, just type it in the Name Your Movie text box. Figure 4.11 Name your movie and click Create Movie to complete the moviemaking process.
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10. Click the Create Movie button. Your finished movie is saved in FlipShare’s My Movies folder. To play the movie, just click My Movies in the FlipShare window, locate your movie, select it, and click the Play Full Screen button to see the movie in all its full-screen glory. When you do, you’ll notice that FlipShare places a dissolve transition between clips. (A dissolve transition overlaps the end of one clip with the beginning of another and then gradually shows less of the first and more of the second until the second clip is all you see.) You’ll also notice that if you’ve chosen one of FlipShare’s canned music backgrounds, the music fades out at the end of your movie. MP3 files don’t fade, however; they cut off abruptly. In Chapter 8, I show you how to work around this problem.
Taking a snapshot Unlike full-size camcorders that include photo options for snapping stills while you’re also shooting a movie, the Flip camcorders shoot video only. The FlipShare software includes an option for capturing a frame from a clip, however, thus acting as an after-the-fact still camera. Here’s how to shoot a still: 1. Select a clip. 2. Preview the clip. Switch to Thumbnail or Large view (refer to “To the right,” earlier in this chapter), and drag the playhead (the box) in the timeline of the clip from which you want to capture a still picture.
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Output Formats Given that the Flip camcorders are equally at home on a Windows PC and a Mac, FlipShare should export movies in the same file format regardless of the kind of computer you’re using. Right? Wrong. FlipShare exports video in different formats depending on the computer platform it’s running on. When you create a movie with the Windows version of FlipShare and then export that movie, it will be saved as a Windows Media file. Create that same movie in the Mac version of FlipShare and export it, and it’s exported as a QuickTime movie file. Why? Because Apple invented QuickTime and Microsoft invented Windows Media. Although, with a small amount of effort, you can get movie files created for one computer platform to play on the other platform, most people don’t know how to make that small effort. They use what comes with the computer. For this reason, Pure Digital made sure that any movies its application exported would be playable on the computer on which the movie was created. This is all well and good, but it does make swapping movies between Macs and Windows PCs the tiniest bit problematic. Windows users who want to view movies created with the Mac version of FlipShare need to install a copy of QuickTime (www.apple.com/quicktime). Mac users attempting the same with a movie produced with the Windows-compatible flavor of FlipShare have to install the Windows Media for QuickTime component (www.microsoft.com/windows/ windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx), which allows a Mac to play Windows Media files such as those created by FlipShare in Windows.
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3. Click the Snapshot button. The Snapshot window appears, displaying the frame you selected in Step 2. In this window, you can use the control to zero in on the frame you’re after. Just click the Back or Forward arrow to move a little bit at a time. 4. Take the picture by clicking the Save Snapshot button (Figure 4.12). A Save window appears, where you can name your picture (saved as a JPEG file) as well as choose where to store it on your computer. By default, the picture is named with the clip’s title followed by its time—My Movie 04m 22s.jpg, for example. Click the Save button to save it. Figure 4.12 Although you can’t take a still picture with a Flip camcorder, you can capture a still from a video with the Snapshot feature.
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Making a DVD The last button under the Create heading (refer to Figure 4.5) is DVD. As you might suspect, this button is FlipShare’s avenue for creating a disc full of movies that you can play in a DVD player—one that’s part of your computer as well as a stand-alone DVD player. You can either record (called burn in the business) a disc of your own or have Pure Digital handle the process for you (as well as design and apply a custom label and case). Here’s what to do: 1. Click DVD. When you do, the Create DVD window appears. 2. Add movies. Drag any movies you’d like to have on the DVD from the main window to this window. You can add up to an hour’s worth of movies. 3. Name the folder. In the Name Your Folder text box, type a name for the folder full of movies you’re about to create—Snowboarding 2009, for example. 4. Save your folder full of movies by clicking Save. The Video Upload window appears, giving you the option to either burn your own DVD or order a DVD from Pure Digital. I look at both options in the following section.
Working with DVDs
Most of today’s computers are capable of creating movie DVDs, though not all come with the necessary software. Whereas new Macs ship with Apple’s iDVD (part of the iLife suite) DVD-burning software, and Windows Vista includes Windows DVD Maker, Windows XP doesn’t
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include a DVD-burning application. If one didn’t come with your computer, you can pick up a copy of Roxio’s MyDVD (www.roxio.com) or a disc- burning application from Nero (www.nero.com) for well under $100. Regardless of which application you use to turn your movies into a DVD, FlipShare is willing to get the process started for you. It does this with the Burn Your Own DVD option. Select this option and click Save, and a folder is created on your computer’s desktop, containing copies of your movies. Nothing more? No. Really? No Video_TS folder? No hierarchy of movies you might put on the DVD’s different screens? No artwork? No… No. Nothing. Just a folder full of movies. That’s not a terrible thing. You can easily import those movies into your DVD-burning application. It’s just that you’d expect a command like Burn Your Own DVD to do a little more than simply export your movies to a folder on the desktop. But it doesn’t, so allow me once more to invoke the phrase quick and dirty. You bought this book for something beyond the quick-and-dirty explanation, however, so I’ll walk you through the basics of creating a DVD with Windows Vista, with a common Windows XP application, and with Apple’s iDVD.
Burning your own DVDs in Windows Vista Windows Vista includes an application called Windows DVD Maker, which you launch by choosing Start > All Programs > Windows DVD Maker. Here’s how you use it to turn that folder full of movies into a DVD:
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1. In the Share Your Memories on a DVD window, click the Choose Photos and Videos button. The Add Pictures and Video to the DVD window opens. 2. Click the Add Items button. An Add Item to DVD navigation window appears. Use it to navigate to where the folder of movies resides (by default, the desktop). 3. Open the folder created by FlipShare by double-clicking it, press Ctrl+A to select all the movies in it, and click the Add button. The movies are added to Windows DVD Maker (Figure 4.13). Figure 4.13 Adding movies to Windows DVD Maker.
4. Arrange the movies’ order. To arrange the order in which the movies will appear on the DVD, click a movie, and drag it up or down in the list.
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5. Check out the options. At the bottom of the window, you’ll see an Options link. Click it, and you’ll see options for how the DVD acts when you first insert it into a DVD player (displaying a DVD menu, starting play automatically and ending with the DVD menu, or playing videos in a continuous loop without a menu), aspect ratio (4:3 for a standard-definition TV or 16:9 for a wide-screen TV), and video format (NTSC for the United States or PAL for Europe). You can also choose the DVD burner speed. The slower the speed, the more accurate the burn is likely to be (but the longer it takes, of course). 6. Click Next to design the DVD. When you click the Next button, you’re taken to the Ready to Burn Disc screen (Figure 4.14), where you’ll find options for editing the menu text, customizing menus (changing the font and button style, and choosing which video clips to show in the background and foreground), and choosing a menu style. After you’ve made these adjustments, you’re welcome to click the Preview button at the top of the screen to see what your DVD will look like before you burn it. Figure 4.14 In the Ready to Burn screen, you can choose a style for your DVD.
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7. Click the Burn button. When you’re satisfied with the design choices you’ve made, click the Burn button to create the DVD. You’ll be prompted to insert a blank recordable DVD disc. When you do, the computer begins burning your DVD.
Burning your own DVDs in Windows XP Windows XP doesn’t include a DVD-making application, but plenty of them are on the market. For this example, I’ll use Roxio’s Creator 2009, a commonly used application that includes the tools necessary to burn a DVD. To use it, follow these steps: 1. Launch Roxio Creator 2009. 2. In the Roxio Creator 2009 window that appears, select Video – Movies and click Create DVDs. The MyDVD Express application launches. You’ll use this application to burn a DVD of your Flip movies quickly. 3. Click New CineMagic. This step opens Roxio Creator’s quick-and-dirty (remember, it’s all about the q-and-d) DVD-burning application, CineMagic (Figure 4.15). You’ll use it to pull together your movies and burn them to a themed DVD.
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Figure 4.15 Choose CineMagic to start your quick-and-dirty DVD project.
4. Click Add Video/Photos. In the window that appears, navigate to your folder full of videos, open it, and select everything in it (by pressing Ctrl+A, if you like). 5. Click the Open button. The movies you’ve selected appear in the Create a CineMagic Movie window (Figure 4.16, on the next page). You can preview any movie by clicking the Play icon in the thumbnail. To edit a movie’s name, just click the current title and enter a new one.
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Figure 4.16 Movies added to the CineMagic movie window.
6. Choose an aspect ratio from the Select Aspect Ratio drop-down menu in the sidebar. Your options are 4:3 (standard-definition television) and 16:9 (highdefinition TV). This window has other options, but I want to keep this process as simple as possible. Feel free to explore the Select Scenes and Add Background Audio options on your own.
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7. Click the Next button to move to the Customize window. 8. Choose a style (theme) for your DVD from the scrolling list in the sidebar (Figure 4.17).
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Figure 4.17 Select a style in CineMagic’s sidebar.
9. Preview your project. To see what your project will look like with a particular style, click the Preview button in the bottom-left corner of the Customize window. The program assembles the project and shows you (in a Preview window) what the interface will look like. 10. Click the Finish button. The MyDVD Express window comes to the fore, with your project in it. 11. Type the name of your DVD in the title field. 12. Click the Create Disc button. The Burn to Disc window opens. 13. Insert a blank recordable DVD, and click Burn. Your project is burned to the DVD.
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Burning your own DVDs on a Macintosh If you purchased a Mac in the past couple of years, that Mac has a copy of the iLife multimedia suite on it. iDVD is part of that suite. Here are the steps for burning a DVD quickly with the version of iDVD that came with iLife ’08 and iLife ’09: 1. In the Dock, click the iDVD icon to launch that program. If the icon has been removed from the Dock, you’ll find it in the Applications folder at the root level of your hard drive. In the project window that appears when you launch iDVD, you have four choices: Create a New Project, Open an Existing Project, Magic iDVD, and OneStep DVD. 2. Click Magic iDVD (Figure 4.18). Figure 4.18 Choose iDVD’s Magic iDVD to start a quick DVD project on a Mac.
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3. Add your movies. To add the movies to iDVD, simply drag the folder that contains them to the Drop Movies Here area of the Magic iDVD window. When you do, the movies appear as separate clips, each displaying the image in the clip’s first frame (Figure 4.19). Figure 4.19 Drag movie clips into the Magic iDVD window to add them to your project.
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You can’t rearrange the clips, so make sure that you add them in the order in which you want them to appear.
4. Choose a theme. In the Choose a Theme area, you can choose how your DVD will look. To see other themes, click the pop-up menu that by default reads 7.0 Themes, and choose All; then click a theme to choose it. 5. Preview your DVD. If you’d like to see what your DVD will look like, click the Preview button in the bottom-left corner of the Magic iDVD window. In the iDVD Preview window that appears (Figure 4.20, on the next page), you can navigate through your DVD just as you can with a burned
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version (albeit more slowly, as all the navigation is done in software). Click the red Close Window button to dismiss the preview and return to the Magic iDVD window. Figure 4.20 Previewing your project in iDVD.
6. Burn your DVD. If you’re ready to burn the disc, click the Burn button in the bottomright corner of the Magic iDVD window. When you do, a standard DVD project window appears, prompting you to insert a blank recordable DVD. Do that, and your disc is burned. If you click the Create Project button rather than the Burn button, your project is loaded into a standard project view. Within this view, you can change the makeup of your DVD project—add submenus and folders, create slideshows, add background audio, and change fonts and themes, for example.
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Ordering a professionally produced DVD The other option in FlipShare’s Video Upload window (refer to “Making a DVD” earlier in this chapter) is to have Pure Digital make a DVD for you. Easy as it is to burn your own DVDs, you may have good reasons for taking this route instead. Maybe your computer doesn’t have a media player that can record DVDs. If it can record DVDs, maybe you’re running
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Windows XP, don’t have a DVD-burning application, and don’t care to purchase one just to create a single DVD for a family gift. Or maybe you can record a DVD but want one that has a professional-looking label and case. In all these cases, getting a DVD from Pure Digital is a viable option. Here’s how you get it: 1. Select Order a Professionally Produced DVD, and click Go. Your default Web browser launches and takes you to the Create DVD portion of Pure Digital’s site (www.theflip.com/redirect/createdvd.shtml). 2. Click the Start New DVD link. In the screen that appears, you’ll learn that it takes just three steps to create your DVD: Upload, Create, and Order. Clicking Start New DVD begins that process. 3. Enter details. The first screen asks for your name, e-mail address, DVD title, subtitle (optional), and producer information (Figure 4.21). Figure 4.21 Pure Digital needs some details about you and your DVD project.
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4. Click Next to move to the Upload Videos screen, where you choose the videos you want to upload. 5. Click Add Videos. You’ll be presented with a navigation screen, which you use to choose the movies you’d like to place on the DVD. When you add those movies, they appear in a list in the Upload Videos screen. Progress bars and a counter tell you how long it will take to upload your videos. You can put as much as 60 minutes’ worth of video on a DVD you create. 6. If you care to add more movies, click the Add More Videos link. When you do, the navigation screen appears again. Pure Digital warns you, and so will I: Configure your computer so that it doesn’t go to sleep during the upload process. If it does, the upload will cancel. Fortunately, when you start a DVD project, Pure Digital sends you an e-mail message with a link to your unfinished project, which lets you retrieve it if you lose your connection or need to resume the project later for some other reason (say, the video files took longer to upload than you anticipated, and you had to shut down your computer and bug out of town).
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7. Click Next. When you click Next, you’re taken to the screen where you organize and name your videos (Figure 4.22). On the right side of the screen, under the Step 3: Organize Videos heading, you can determine the order of your movies by dragging them up or down in the list. You can also choose to include or exclude the videos from your DVD. Finally, a text box appears below each video; type new names for your videos in these text boxes, if you like. At the bottom of the list, you’ll see the total number of videos on the disc and their total playback time. On the left side of the screen is a preview of the DVD’s main menu.
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Figure 4.22 In this screen, you organize and preview your DVD’s interface.
If you find that the total playback time is far less than you anticipated, and you’d like to add more movies, now would be a good time to click the Go Back link to return to Step 6 of this list, where you can put that Add More Videos link to good use.
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8. Click Next to create a label. Clicking the Next button takes you to the Step 4: Create Label screen. On the right side of this screen, you’ll see thumbnails of your movies. On the left side is a preview of the DVD’s label. You can add two of these thumbnail images to the label—one in the top-left corner and one in the top-right corner. By default, the first two thumbnail images are applied to the label, but you can remove them easily by clicking the Clear Thumbnails link at the bottom of the screen. To add different images, just drag thumbnails from the right side of the screen to the positions on the label where you want them.
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9. Click Next to create a cover. Creating a cover works exactly the way that creating a label does. The cover can contain two thumbnail images, which you add by dragging them from the right side of the window to the preview of the cover on the left side of the screen. The bottom of the DVD’s cover contains a plug for Flip video camcorders. 10. Click Next twice to pungle up. This disc isn’t free. Pure Digital rightly wants its one-penny-shy-oftwenty-bucks. In this screen and the next one, you’ll provide the information necessary to pay for and receive your DVD. The first screen is for your billing and shipping address. You also choose a shipping method here. Shipping is free if you have the DVD sent via the U.S. Postal Service and, as I write this chapter, just over $7 for second-day delivery from a delivery service. When you click Next one more time, you’ll be asked for credit card information: number, expiration date, and verification number (that three- or four-digit number on the back of the card). 11. After you enter all that info, click the Place Order link at the bottom of the screen, and you’re in business.
5 Editing with Windows Movie Maker When you read about the FlipShare software in Chapter 4, you undoubtedly observed the phrase “quick-and-dirty” thrown freely about. As I explain in that chapter, the reason is because FlipShare is pretty limited. It’s a great tool for performing very basic edits and then throwing the results on the Web, but if you have more ambitious ideas or want to add more polish to your movies, it’s not up to the job. Fortunately, tools provided with your computer are. In this chapter and the next, I look at those tools. I begin in this chapter with the XP and Vista versions of Windows Movie Maker. The Vista version has a slicker-looking interface, but other than the interface, the two versions aren’t very different. Where they are, I’ll draw the differences to your attention.
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Windows Movie Maker is a large step up from FlipShare in its ability to help you create more professional-looking movies. It does this by providing you more extensive titles and transitions, and (unlike FlipShare) by letting you apply effects to your clips. At the same time, Windows Movie Maker is intended to be easy to use so that it doesn’t overwhelm you with features, and it presents moviemaking as a logical workflow. Workwha…?! Sorry—got buzzwordy there for a second. Workflow is nothing more than a sequence of tasks—how you perform a job, starting at the beginning and making your way to the end. If you’ve ever walked through a Windows wizard to get something done (created a slideshow or configured an application, for example), you’ve been on the receiving end of a workflow. You’re asked to march through a particular number of steps to get something done. Windows Movie Maker can largely automate the process of making a movie; you just tell it which clips to use and give it a title, and it does the rest. But you get more interesting and personal movies when you do the moviemaking yourself. To do it yourself, you just follow three broad steps: 1. Import your video. 2. Edit the movie. 3. Save the movie for a particular destination or format. Yes, this process does sound similar to FlipShare’s workflow, and for good reason: These steps are the logical steps you take to make a movie on any computer. I’ll focus on those three steps just as soon as I cover the basics of the Movie Maker interface. Speaking of which …
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Tour the Movie Maker Interface
The Movie Maker interface contains several elements by default. Figure 5.1 shows the Vista window, and Figure 5.2 shows the same window in Windows XP. I describe all the default elements in the following sections. Figure 5.1 Vista’s Movie Maker window.
Menu bar
Toolbar
Preview Monitor pane
Tasks pane
Contents pane
Storyboard pane
Time readout Timeline and playhead
Figure 5.2 The Movie Maker window in Windows XP.
Toolbar
Menu bar
Preview Monitor pane
Collections pane Contents pane
Timeline pane
Timeline and playhead
Take Picture button Split Clip button Time readout
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Menu bar Within the menu bar, you’ll find typical commands—New Project in the File menu, for example. If you can’t find a command in a toolbar, you’re sure to find it here.
Toolbar The content of the toolbar depends on whether you’re using the XP or Vista version of Movie Maker. In the XP version, you’ll find New Project, Open Project, and Save Project buttons here, along with a Tasks button and a Collections button. Click the Tasks button, and a Tasks pane appears on the left side of the window. Click Collections, and the Tasks pane is replaced by a list of clips (organized by collection) available to you. In the Vista version, the toolbar includes Import Media, Undo, Redo, AutoMovie, and Publish Movie buttons. Just below the toolbar, in the main window, you find the Tasks and Collections buttons.
Tasks pane This pane is where Movie Maker’s workflow is most evident. In the XP version, this pane contains four sections: Capture Video, Edit Movie, Finish Movie, and Movie Making Tips. Vista includes just three sections: Import, Edit, and Publish To. In the XP version, a down arrow appears next to each section heading. Click that arrow, and a list of tasks in that section appears. Capture from Video Device and Input Video appear below the Capture Video heading, for example. In the Vista version, the section headings don’t unfold, but they contain similar commands (though some are named a little differently).
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Collections pane The Collections pane contains not only audio and video clips that you can use to create a movie, but also Movie Maker’s video effects and transitions. Click Video Effects or Video Transitions in the Collections pane, and the effects or transitions available to you appear in the Contents pane to the right. You can see these items in either Thumbnail or Detail view, and you choose the view you’d like to use from the Views menu in the toolbar. When you click a collection, the clips within that collection appear in the Content pane.
Contents pane I’ve pretty much given away the plot on this one. This pane is where you view lists of effects, transitions, and clips, depending on what you’ve selected in the Collections pane.
Preview Monitor pane Along the right side of the window is the Preview Monitor pane, where you preview your clips and movies. You can change the size of the Preview Monitor pane by choosing View > Preview Monitor Size and then choosing Small or Large or by dragging the separator between the Contents and Preview Monitor panes. This pane includes the controls you typically find in windows of these types. The XP version, for example, has a Full Screen button below and to the left of the movie window; click this button, and … well, you know. (The Vista version doesn’t have this button. Instead, choose View > Full Screen or press Alt+Enter.) Below the movie is a time readout, displaying the playhead’s location as well as the clip’s or movie’s total time.
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Below that readout is the timeline, bearing the playhead that you’ve just heard so much about. You can click and drag that playhead to move backward or forward through the clip or movie. At the bottom of the Preview Monitor pane in the XP version are Play, Stop, Back, Previous Frame, Next Frame, and Forward buttons. The Vista version dispenses with some of these buttons and instead offers a single Play/Pause button and Previous Frame and Next Frame buttons (you rewind and fast-forward by clicking and holding these buttons). To the bottom right is the Split button, which you click to split the clip at the playhead’s current position. XP’s Movie Maker also includes a Take Picture button for capturing the current frame as an image file. (You can capture a frame in the Vista version too. Just choose Tools > Take Picture from Preview.) The universal keyboard shortcut for playing and pausing movies and music is the spacebar. It works here too. Just give it a tap to start or stop your clip or movie.
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Storyboard pane By default, you find the Storyboard pane at the bottom of the Movie Maker window. This pane is made up of alternating clip and transition slots. You drag clips into these slots to create your movie and then drag transitions—fades and dissolves, for example—between the clips. Above these slots and to the left of the slots in the XP version, you see a Set Audio Level button for adjusting the overall volume of the material in the storyboard. Next to that is a Narrate Timeline button. Click this button, and this pane becomes the Timeline pane (discussed next), with the Narrate Timeline pane (discussed shortly) above it. Vista has the same commands; they’re just placed in a pop-up menu in this same location.
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Timeline pane If you click the Show Timeline button (XP), choose Timeline from the pop-up menu (Vista) in the Storyboard pane, or choose View > Timeline (both XP and Vista), the Timeline pane replaces the Storyboard pane (Figure 5.3). In this pane, you view your project not as multiple clips and transitions but as tracks: Video, Audio/Music, and Title Overlay. If you’ve worked with video editing software for a while, this timeline view is what you’re accustomed to seeing. It provides more information for the user but can be confusing to newbies. Figure 5.3 The Timeline pane.
When you invoke Timeline view, you also produce two zoom buttons: Zoom Timeline In and Zoom Timeline Out. If you need finer control of the clips in the timeline, you’ll find that the Zoom Timeline In button comes in handy. In Timeline view, you also have the option to rewind and play the contents of the video via the Rewind Timeline and Play Timeline buttons. Now that you’re familiar with the interface, you’re ready to walk through the three tasks of making a movie.
Import a Movie with Capture Video
Capture Video (called Import in the Vista version) is the first task in the Tasks pane, so what better place to start?
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In XP’s Movie Maker, click the arrow next to Capture Video, and you see four options: Capture from Video Device, Import Video, Import Pictures, and Import Audio or Music. Vista slims these commands down to From Digital Video Camera, Videos, Pictures, and Audio or Music. As far as the Flip camcorders are concerned, you can dispense with most of these commands. Movie Maker recognizes the Flip cameras as storage devices rather than video cameras, so clicking Capture from Video Device/from Digital Video Camera results in nothing but an error message saying that no such device can be found. The Import Pictures command would be ducky if the Flip camcorders took still pictures, but they don’t, so count that one out too. And Import Audio or Music? Nope. That leaves Import Video/Videos, which works quite nicely and works this way: 1. Click Import Video (XP) or Videos (Vista). When you do, up pops an Import window. 2. Navigate to the clips. I’ve found that the fastest way to do this is to click the My Computer entry in the Windows sidebar. Your Flip camera will be represented by FLIPVIDEO followed by a drive letter—FLIPVIDEO (E:), for example.
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Dig down by following this path: FLIPVIDEO > DCIM > 100VIDEO. Within this 100VIDEO folder are the Flip’s movies (Figure 5.4).
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Figure 5.4 Importing clips from the Flip camera.
3. Select the clips. 4. In the Import window, choose Views > Thumbnails (XP) or Views > Large Icons (Vista). This command plants a thumbnail image of the video’s first frame on the clip’s icon, thus giving you a better idea of what the clip contains. 5. Import the clips by clicking the window’s Import button. An Import window appears, with a progress bar (two progress bars, in the case of the XP version) showing you how the import process is progressing. The imported clips appear in the Contents pane. If you click the Collections button in the XP version, you’ll see that your clips are now listed below the Collections heading. The Vista version doesn’t list the clip names in the Collections pane.
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Import, but Not Copy Normally, when you ask an application to import something from another device (such as a camera), the imported item is copied to the computer. That’s not the case with Flip cameras. Instead, the clips you “import” into Movie Maker remain on the camera. The clips you see in Movie Maker are actually links to those clips on the camera. Should you unplug your Flip camera and try to work with the clips, Movie Maker will tell you that it can’t find them. For this reason, to access your clips you must either leave the camera plugged in while you’re editing, so that Movie Maker can access the clips, or copy them to your computer. I prefer the latter option because I don’t always have my Flip camera with me when I want to edit movies. Unfortunately, Movie Maker doesn’t provide a direct way to copy movies from the camera to the computer. To do that, you have a few options: Use FlipShare to import your clips. (In XP, follow this path: My Documents > My Videos > FlipShare Data > Videos. In Vista, use this path: user name > Videos > FlipShare Data > Videos.)
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When you first plug the Flip camera into a PC running XP, take advantage of the Autoplay window that appears, and choose the Copy Pictures to a Folder on My Computer command. When you do, the Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard appears. Click the Next button to get to the Choose Pictures to Copy screen. Scroll to the bottom of the window, and click the Clear All button to uncheck everything in the window (because it’s likely that some things you don’t want to import will be checked). In the 100VIDEO area, check those videos you want to import. (Regrettably, no preview icon tells you what each clip holds.) Click Next, type a name for the clips you’re importing, and choose a place to store them. Click Next again, and the selected videos are imported.
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Import, but Not Copy (continued) Vista doesn’t include the option to copy pictures within Autoplay. Instead, choose Open Folder to View Files within the Autoplay window. In the Windows Explorer window that appears, navigate to the video files (DCIM > 100VIDEO), and copy the files you want from that folder (or the entire folder, if you like) to a location on your PC’s hard drive. (I suggest the Videos folder inside your user folder.) Finally, you could use the brute-force method. Just go to My Computer (XP) or Computer (Vista), double-click the Flip camera’s icon, and drag the 100VIDEO folder to the desktop to copy it.
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Now that you’ve imported your clips, you’re ready to use them to create a movie.
Enhance a Movie with Edit Movie
Below the Edit Movie heading in the XP version of Movie Maker are five entries: Show Collections, View Video Effects, View Video Transitions, Make Titles or Credits, and Make an AutoMovie. In Vista, you’ll see Imported Media, Effects, Transitions, and Titles and Credits. (Vista puts an AutoMovie button in the toolbar.).The first entry in the XP version does nothing more than show you the Collections pane instead of the Tasks pane; the other entries are more interesting. Let’s take a look.
View Video Effects (XP)/Effects (Vista) Movie Maker in XP includes 28 video effects, and the Vista version includes 49 effects. You drag these effects on top of clips to change the video’s appearance. Drag the Sepia Tone effect on top of one of your clips,
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and your video adopts a brown hue and old-timey look. Drag File Age, Oldest, and your clip turns black and white, jitters about, and adopts dust and scratches. You can add multiple video effects to a clip just by dragging one effect after another on top of it. If you find that you’ve gone too far, right-click the clip, and choose Video Effects (XP) or Effects (Vista) from the contextual menu. In the Add or Remove Video Effects dialog box that appears, select the effects you don’t want in the Displayed Effects list, and click the Remove button (Figure 5.5). Figure 5.5 Adding and removing effects in Vista’s Movie Maker.
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While you’re in this dialog box, you’re welcome to add more effects by selecting them in the Available Effects list and clicking the Add button.
View Video Transitions (XP)/Transitions (Vista) Video transitions are different from effects in that you don’t apply them on top of a clip. Rather, you use them to join two adjacent clips in an interesting way. In Storyboard view, you just drag a transition to one of the transition slots between clips to create the transition. In Timeline view, you drag a transition to the line that separates two clips to insert the transition. XP’s Movie Maker includes 60 transitions, and the Vista version offers 63.
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By default, transitions are 1.25 seconds long. You can change their length in two ways: To change the default length, choose Tools > Options, and click the Advanced tab in the Options dialog box that appears. You’ll see a Transition Duration option set to 1.25 seconds. You can adjust this setting to as little as 0.25 seconds and as much as 5 seconds.
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To change the length of an individual transition, click the Show Timeline button to reveal the timeline. Then select the transition in the Transition track (which appears when you add a transition), and drag the left side of the transition to the left to lengthen the transition or to the right to shorten it.
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Tasteful Transitions and Effects: Less Is More Use effects and transitions sparingly and tastefully. If you pile effects on top of one another and use a lot of sweeping motion transitions (Circles, Diamond, and Eye, for example), your movie is going to scream, “Beware! Made by aesthetically impaired amateur!” You rarely should need to use effects unless you’re going for a very specific mood—if you want that old-timey feel for a Frontier Day project, for example, or are trying to re-create the look of a silent movie. The same goes for transitions. If you’re using more than quick cuts (meaning no transitions), fades, and dissolves, you’re trying too hard. Yes, it’s nice that Movie Maker gives you careening Zig Zag, Wheel, and Stars transitions, but just because you can use them doesn’t mean you should. Believe me, they’ll make your movie look incredibly cheesy.
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Make Titles and Credits (XP)/Titles and Credits (Vista) If you’re left cold by FlipShare’s very limited titling feature, you’ll be a happier camper working in Movie Maker. Click this option, and the Where Do You Want to Add a Title? pane appears. Within this pane, you have multiple options. The XP version includes Add Title at the Beginning of the Movie, Add Title Before the Selected Clip in the Timeline, Add Title on the Selected Clip in the Timeline, Add Title After the Selected Clip in the Timeline, and Add Credits at the End of the Movie. Vista again trims things down, offering Title at the Beginning, Title Before the Selected Clip, Title on the Selected Clip, and Credits at the End. What each option does is largely self-explanatory. The one that may be confusing is Add Title on the Selected Clip. Every title effect except this one places text on a colored background; this one overlays the title on top of the video. You can apply overlay titles only in Timeline view.
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Click any of these items, and the Movie Maker window displays the message Enter Text for Title and includes a text box for entering your title or credit. Below this text box are two additional options: Change the Title Animation. Click this option, and you’ll see 25 animation styles listed for one-line titles, including Typewriter, Ticker Tape, News Banner, and Scroll Perspective (read: Star Wars title style). Movie Maker also offers nine two-line title styles and another nine credit styles.
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Change the Text Font and Color. Click this option to do exactly that, choosing any font you like and any font color. (You can also choose a different background color.) You can change the text’s transparency with a slider, adjust the size of the text, and change the text’s position (flush left, flush right, or center).
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When you’re working with titles, you’ll see the results of your changes in the Preview Monitor pane on the right side of the window (Figure 5.6). If you’ve changed the font to, say, Times New Roman, pink, bold, italic, underlined, and right-aligned, the Preview Monitor pane will display exactly that awful mess over the background color you’ve chosen. For titles that you’ve overlaid on a clip, the Preview Monitor pane shows the title over a bit of clip art, such as a flower. To see the overlay on the clip, you must click the clip in the timeline. Figure 5.6 You can overlay titles on clips with Movie Maker and see the results in the Preview Monitor pane.
The text in the Preview Monitor pane is likely to look jagged and jumpy. Don’t worry about it. This image is just a rough idea of what the title will look like in the finished movie. It’ll be smoothed out when you export your movie (see “Save and Distribute a Movie with Finish Movie” later in this chapter).
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Changing the duration of a title is similar to changing the length of a transition. Just select the title in the Video track (refer to Figure 5.3 earlier in this chapter) and then drag the left or right edge of the title to shorten or lengthen it. If you’ve added a title on top of a clip, it appears in a separate Title Overlay track. You can not only shorten and lengthen the title as I’ve described, but also change its location. In Timeline view, just drag the title to place it somewhere else in the video.
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Make an AutoMovie For those times when you want to make a movie as easily as possible, you choose Make an AutoMovie entry in Movie Maker for XP (or click the AutoMovie button in the Vista version). How easily? Really easily. All you need to do is select some clips and click Make an AutoMovie in XP (or the AutoMovie button in Vista). When you do, the Select an AutoMovie Editing Style pane appears. You have a choice of five styles in this pane in XP: Flip and Slide, Highlights Movie, Music Video, Old Movie, and Sports Highlights. Vista adds one extra style: Fade and Reveal. Next to each style is a description of it. Highlights Movie, for example, is described as “Clean and simple editing with cuts, fades, a title, and credits.” The description of Old Movie reads, “Film age video effects applied to clips to make an older-looking movie.” Below these styles, you see two options: Enter a Title for the Movie and Select Audio or Background Music. As you’d expect, when you click the first option, you’re prompted to enter title text. You don’t have an option to edit the title text or color. After you create the movie, however, you can simply right-click the title in Storyboard or Timeline view; choose Edit Title from the contextual menu; and then muck with the animation, style, and color settings as you normally do with titles and credits.
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When you click Select Audio or Background Music, the Add Audio or Background Music pane appears. In this pane, you can browse to the music you’d like to use, as well as set that music’s volume with a slider. When you create your movie, the audio automatically fades in and out at the beginning and end, respectively. To make your AutoMovie, just click Done in the XP version of Movie Maker and Create AutoMovie in the Vista version. Movie Maker goes about its business, creating a movie and placing its parts in Storyboard or Timeline view (depending on which view you’ve called up). You’re welcome to tweak this movie just as you can any movie you’ve built from the ground up. The clips, transitions, effects, audio, and titles remain editable.
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Make a Movie from Scratch
Now that you understand how to import clips and how to use the commands in the Edit Movie/Edit section of the Movie Maker window, you’re ready to make a movie from scratch. Just follow these steps: 1. Drag in a clip. In Storyboard view, go to the Contents pane; choose the clip that you’d like to appear first in your movie; and drag it into the first slot. 2. Repeat Step 1 for all additional clips. 3. Edit your clips. If a clip is longer than you want—with, say, 15 seconds of your subject screaming “Not yet! I’m not ready!”—you can trim it. To do this, click Show Timeline (XP) or choose the Timeline command from the pop-up menu (Vista).
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In Timeline view, you can drag either edge of the clip to shorten it. The Preview Monitor pane shows you where you are in the video. When you’re happy with the edit, just let go of the mouse button. This change isn’t permanent. You can always lengthen that clip again by dragging the edge in the direction opposite the one you used to shorten it.
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4. Add effects. If you feel that you must have effects (despite my advice earlier in this chapter, in the sidebar “Tasteful Transitions and Effects: Less Is More”), click the Collections button at the top of the window and then click Video Effects (XP)/Videos (Vista). Select an effect you like, and drag it on top of a clip. If you want multiple effects, just drag another effect on top of the clip. Repeat for other clips and other effects. 5. Add titles and credits. Click the Tasks button at the top of the window, and click Make Titles or Credits (XP)/Titles and Credits (Vista). Click Add Title at the Beginning of the Movie. In the pane that appears, enter your text and, if you want, change its animation, title, and color. (Again, you can see what you’re doing in the Preview Monitor pane.) Click Done, Add Title to Movie (XP)/Add Title (Vista) when you’re happy with what you’ve done. If you’d like to add titles between clips—useful if you want to let your audience members know that they’re looking at events from different dates or watching a completely new chapter in your movie—click that same Make Titles or Credits entry, click the clip you’d like the title to appear before, and click Add Title Before the Selected Clip on the Storyboard. Again, edit at will and then click Done, Add Title to Movie (XP)/Add Title (Vista).
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6. Click Make Titles or Credits (XP)/Titles and Credits (Vista) one more time if you’d like to add credits to your movie, this time clicking Done, Add Credits at the End of the Movie. 7. Add transitions. Your movie will look more polished if you add transitions between the clips and titles. Click the Collections button; select Video Transitions (XP)/Transitions (Vista); and, in Storyboard view, drag in the transitions you want to use between your clips. Unlike effects, transitions can’t be stacked on top of one another as a means of combining them. (And thank goodness—what an unearthly mess that would be!)
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8. Add narration. This step is optional, because not all movies benefit from narration. But if you’re putting together a screencast or documentary, it’s a nice thing to have. To add narration, click Narrate Timeline (XP) or choose the Narrate Timeline command from the Storyboard/Timeline pop-up menu (Vista). In the window that appears, you see a Start Narration button, along with an Input Level slider and meter. Speak into your computer’s microphone, and watch the level meter. Ideally, the meter will peak at just under the red in the yellow—indicating that the volume is loud but not so loud that it will distort. If it’s not loud enough, adjust the Input Level slider until the volume is in the yellow. If your movie has sound that will be playing while you narrate, it’s a good idea to click the Show Options link in this window and then enable the Mute Speakers option. This option prevents sound that’s already in the video from playing through your computer’s speakers and then being picked up by your microphone.
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When you’re happy with the sound level, click the Start Narration button and start speaking. When you’re done, click Stop Narration. You’ll be prompted to save your narration. When you do, the recording will be placed in the timeline where the playhead was when you started the recording. note
As you can with video clips, you can lengthen or trim an audio clip by selecting it and then dragging the left or right edge.
9. Add some music. Music may seem to be a little thing, but the right music can enhance your movie in unexpected ways. Transitions that felt abrupt now feel smoother, and the actions within your video suddenly seem poignant or goofy (depending on the character of the music you’ve chosen). Everything just seems more polished. Adding music isn’t difficult. Just click the Collections button, import some audio by choosing File > Import into Collections (XP) or File > Import Media Items command (Vista), click the Show Timeline button, and drag the audio clip into the Audio/Music track (refer to Figure 5.3 earlier in this chapter).
Save and Distribute a Movie with Finish Movie
Your movie is assembled, and it’s ready to be saved and distributed. You do this by using the commands in the Finish Movie (XP)/Publish To (Vista) section. In the XP version of Movie Maker, you’ll find Save to My Computer, Save to CD, Send in E-Mail, Send to the Web, and Send to DV Camera commands. In the Vista version, you get This Computer, DVD, Recordable CD, E-Mail, and Digital Video Camera commands. They work this way.
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Save to My Computer (XP)/This Computer (Vista) When you want the greatest control of how your movie is encoded and saved, follow these steps: 1. Click Save to My Computer (XP)/This Computer (Vista) A window appears. In XP, this window is called Save Movie Wizard. In the Vista version of Movie Maker, it’s named Publish Movie. Regardless of what it’s called, it includes a text box for naming your movie and the means for navigating to the location on your computer where you’d like to save your movie. 2. Click the Next button to move to the Movie Setting pane. The default setting for the XP version of Movie Maker is to show a single option: Best Quality for Playback on My Computer. But you’re after all three options, so click Show More Choices. You see Best Quality for Playback on My Computer, Best Fit to File Size, and Other Settings. In the Vista version, you see similar options without having to ask to see more choices. These options are called Best Quality for Playback on My Computer, Compress To, and More Settings. Functionally, they’re the same as the XP options. Here’s what these options are for: Best Quality for Playback on My Computer. This setting produces a movie at a resolution of 720 x 480 (if the source material is HD) or 640 x 480 (standard definition) at 30 frames per second. In the XP version of Movie Maker, the bit rate is in the high hundreds. For the Vista version, the bit rate is variable—on average, in those same high hundreds, but the encoder will compress more or less depending on the material it’s given.
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As the name suggests, this setting is perfectly fine for watching the movie on a computer. It’s not a great option to choose if you’re e-mailing the movie to someone, however, as the file is likely to be pretty large.
Best Fit to File Size (XP)/Compress To (Vista). Suppose that your Internet service provider (ISP) allows you to e-mail files no larger than 10 MB. This setting could be the one for you, allowing you to create a file as large as will fit through your ISP’s e-mail gateway. Similarly, some video sharing services put a cap on the sizes of movies they’ll accept. Again, using this setting, you can get the best-looking video within a particular size constraint.
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Other Settings (XP)/More Settings (Vista). This innocent-sounding command is where the good stuff happens (if, of course, you believe that having a lot of output options is good). When you enable this option, you have access to a pop-up menu from which you can choose a variety of encoding options (Figure 5.7).
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Figure 5.7
Movie Maker provides plenty of export options.
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As Windows XP and its version of Movie Maker were developed in a time when broadband Internet access wasn’t as prevalent as it is today, its pop-up menu includes options for very-low-bandwidth video, including settings for dial-up modems among its 18 encoding options. Vista offers just nine encoding options, but they’re more realistic for modern video and Internet connections in that they account for larger files and for high definition. (Movie Maker for Windows XP doesn’t include any HD export options.) For the most part, the options’ names describe where your video will eventually be played. The XP version includes Video for Broadband (512 Kbps) and Video for Local Playback (2.1 Mbps NTSC), for example; Vista includes Windows Media HD 720p, Windows Media Low Bandwidth (117 Kbps), and Windows Media DVD Widescreen Quality (3.0 Mbps). I needn’t describe each of these settings. Rather, I’ll point out that when you choose a setting, its details are revealed at the bottom of the window, where you’ll find such details as bit rate, display size, aspect ratio, and frames per second. In the Movie File Size area, you’ll see the estimated space required for your movie. I’ll also remind you that the higher the bit rate and larger the file size, the better the video is likely to look. 3. Click Next (XP) or Publish (Vista) to encode and save your movie. A single click of that Next/Publish button tells Movie Maker to encode and save your movie. In the window that appears, you’ll see the single Play Movie When I Click Finish option. If you’d like that to happen, enable the option and click the Finish button at the bottom of the window. Your movie opens and plays in Windows Media Player.
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DVD (Vista only) This option, which isn’t available in the Windows XP version of Movie Maker, saves your movie and brings it into Windows DVD Maker (which I describe in Chapter 4).
Save to CD (XP)/Recordable CD (Vista) When you click Save to CD/Recordable CD, you’ll encounter a process similar to the one I describe in Save to My Computer/This Computer: 1. Click Save to CD. The Save Movie Wizard/Publish window opens, this time prompting you to insert a blank recordable CD. 2. Insert the CD. You’re prompted to name both the movie and the CD. 3. Enter a name, and click Next. The Movie Setting window opens, giving you three options: Best Fit for Recordable CD (XP), Best Quality for Playback on a Recordable CD (Vista), Best Fit to File Size (XP)/Compress To (Vista), and Other Settings (XP)/More Settings (Vista). 4. Choose an encoding option. If you choose Other Settings in the XP version, you see that you have fewer options. These options are for higher-bit-rate movies and faster destinations—such as local playback, video for a local area network, video for 512 Kbps broadband, and playback on your computer from your computer’s hard drive. The Vista version shows the same options as when you choose This Computer. 5. Click Next. Movie Maker records your movie on the CD in your PC’s media drive.
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When the CD is burned, the Completing the Saved Movie Wizard window appears, giving you the option to burn another CD if you like. Choose that option and click the Finish button, and the wizard takes you back to the beginning, prompting you to insert a new recordable CD.
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Send in E-Mail Click Send in E-Mail (XP)/E-Mail (Vista), and you’re given no choices about how your movie will be encoded or saved. Movie Maker knows best in this regard and just starts encoding your movie. When the encoding is complete, you have the option to play the movie, save a copy on your computer, or—by clicking the Next (XP)/Attach Movie (Vista) button— launch your PC’s e-mail application. If you choose the latter option, you’ll find your movie attached to an otherwise blank, unaddressed e-mail message. Your job is to address this message, type some cheery sentiment in the message body (or a threatening sentiment, I suppose, depending on the kind of movie you’re sending), and send the message. Movie Maker errs on the side of size when it creates these movies. It does everything it can to create movies smaller than 10 MB (and warns you if the resulting movie will be larger than 10 MB). If your video is very long— more than a couple of minutes in length—the resulting video can look pretty awful due to the small frame size and the low bit rate necessary to shrink it. These movies are encoded as Windows Media files; Mac users won’t be able to open them without some fiddling on their end. For this reason, it’s a good idea to check with the person to whom you intend to send your movie, to see whether he can play it. If not, it’s worth your while to post your movie on a site such as YouTube (in a private area, if you like) where everyone can see it. I talk about sharing in Chapter 7.
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Send to the Web (XP only) The Windows XP version of Movie Maker has the ability to upload your movies to a couple of movie-hosting Web sites that you’ve likely never heard of before. These Windows Movie Maker Partners—Neptune and Mydeo—may have had a shot at becoming name-brand video sharing services back when XP was Microsoft’s current operating system, but they never achieved YouTube or even Vimeo status. This history helps explain why this option is missing from the Vista version. I cover it here for the sake of completeness, not because I think it’s a good idea. To use this option, click the Send to the Web link, name your movie in the Save Movie Wizard window that appears, click the Next button, choose a connection type (dial-up modem, ISDN, or DSL or cable broadband) or choose Other Settings to see a list of choices, and click the Next button. Movie Maker encodes your movie and then produces a window where you can choose to upload your movie to Neptune or Mydeo. Both services require that you have an account. If you happen to have one, feel free to upload your movie. If not, vow that you’ll never click this option again.
Send to DV Camera (XP)/Digital Video Camera (Vista) This option is another one that you can ignore. Movie Maker can archive movies only to traditional camcorders. The Flip cameras are anything but traditional camcorders, so this option doesn’t work with them.
6 Editing with iMovie ’09 If you’re a Windows PC user, you’re welcome to skip this chapter. iMovie, part of Apple’s iLife suite, works only with Macs, so you’ll learn nothing helpful here. Windows Movie Maker is every bit as good as iMovie— better, probably—so just move along; nothing to see here. We’ll see you in Chapter 7. Bye! Dum, dee, dum, dah, dum, dee … Coast clear? Windows users gone? OK, now that it’s just us Mac users, let me assure you that I was lying through my teeth when I said Windows Movie Maker is a better movie editing application than iMovie. In fact, iMovie kicks Movie Maker’s patoot from here to eternity in terms of functionality and features. At the risk of sounding like an Apple fanboy,
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if you master iMovie, I guarantee that you’ll produce a far slicker video than you ever could with Movie Maker. There have been several iterations of iMovie. With iMovie ’08, Apple essentially built a new video editing application from the ground up and slapped the iMovie name on it, even though the new app shared very little (code included) with the original iMovie. When Apple built this version of iMovie, it drastically changed the moviemaking metaphor, getting rid of the timeline and providing very little in the way of tracks. iMovie ’09 builds on the iMovie ’08 interface to become an even more capable movie editing application. Given iMovie’s new approach to editing video, those who’ve used traditional movie editing applications in the past may find that wrapping their heads around iMovie ’09 takes a little time. Fear not—the whole point of this chapter is to assist in that head-wrapping. Grab your Flip, and let’s explore!
Plugging in Your Camera
You’ve jacked your Flip camcorder into your Mac’s USB port, and what happens? That depends on the kind of Flip camcorder you have. If you plug in a Flip Mino, MinoHD, UltraSD, or UltraHD, and you have iLife ’09 installed on your Mac, both FlipShare and iPhoto will launch. Make iPhoto the frontmost application, and you’ll see the Flip camera listed under iPhoto’s Devices heading and all the clips on the camera displayed in the main area of the window. At this point, you’re welcome to import all the clips on the camera or just the ones you select (Figure 6.1).
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Figure 6.1 Importing clips with iPhoto.
Ah, but launch iMovie ’09 and plug in a high-definition Flip camcorder (MinoHD or UltraHD), and an Import window appears, offering to import the camera’s clips—all the clips or just those you select—directly into iMovie (Figure 6.2). note
This feature works only with the high-definition Flips. iMovie doesn’t automatically recognize clips from the standard-definition Flip camcorders.
Figure 6.2 Importing high-definition Flip clips with iMovie ’09.
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If you’re given the option to import clips into iMovie or iPhoto, which should you pick? Personally, I let iPhoto import the clips. It may sound like I’m bringing the clips into the wrong program, but it makes sense for this reason: iMovie ’09 includes an Event Library pane. (I’ll tour iMovie’s interface soon and show you where this pane is.) Within that pane is an iPhoto Videos entry. When you click that entry, you can see and access every video file that you’ve imported into iPhoto. Because the only video clips I import into iPhoto come from my Flip camcorders, this method makes it very easy for me to find these clips and not mix them up with clips I may have imported from my DV or HD camcorder, which I file elsewhere in iMovie. Also, I don’t always want to edit movies the minute I plug my Flip into my Mac. Rather, I just need a place to store them so I can erase them from the camera to free space. As iPhoto launches automatically and presents that Import All button, I find it convenient to take advantage of its offer to move the clips quickly from camera to computer. If you have iMovie open while you import new clips with iPhoto, iMovie won’t be aware of those new clips until you relaunch it. When you do, iMovie will notify you that it wants to index the iPhoto video clips and create thumbnail images for them. This process doesn’t take long, so let iMovie do it.
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Touring the iMovie ’09 Interface
If you happened to glance at Chapter 5, you saw the reasonably spartan interface of Windows Movie Maker: a few panes and lots of white space. Launch iMovie ’09 for the first time, and you see something quite different: an imposing, largely dark-gray window with multiple
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panes that’s a bit of a jumble at first glance. In this section, I give you a long second glance at this window and help you make sense of its elements.
Pane management Microsoft and Apple may have their differences in the way they approach design, but there are only so many ways you can present and edit video. Although iMovie and Movie Maker may look very different, they have some common elements because they have to. You need to be able to see a list of your clips, find a way to discover what kind of material each clip holds, preview your work, and assemble those clips into a finished movie. iMovie manages all these tasks in a series of panes (Figure 6.3). Figure 6.3 The main interface elements of iMovie ’09.
Edit Project pane
Viewer pane
Toolbar
Event Library pane
Events Browser pane
In the following sections, I look at these panes and the toolbar from the perspective of a workflow, starting with the list of clips and ending with project assembly.
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Event Library pane In the bottom-left section of the iMovie window, you see the Event Library pane, within which you’ll spy at least two entries: Last Import and iPhoto Videos. When you select Last Import, all the clips that you last imported within iMovie appear in the Events Browser pane to the right. (Nothing will appear if you haven’t imported any video yet.) If you select iPhoto Videos, any clips you’ve imported into iPhoto and indexed in iMovie appear in that same Events Browser pane. If you’ve imported video into iMovie, you’ll see year listings in the Event Library pane—2009, 2008, 2007, for example. Below the year heading is a list of clips that were imported during that year (Figure 6.4). (iMovie displays the year when the clips were imported—not shot. It cares only about when you imported the movies, so it ignores the Flip cameras’ date and time stamp.) Figure 6.4 The Event Library pane.
An event can contain more than one clip. If, for example, you’ve shot four clips with your Flip camcorder and then import them all at the same time—either with iPhoto or iMovie—they’ll be part of the same event. Again, iMovie cares about when the clips were imported, not shot.
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If you Control-click (or right-click, if you have a multibutton mouse) any entry in the Event Library pane, you can choose different ways to organize your clips: Group Events by Disk, Group Events by Month, Most Recent Events at Top, and Show Separate Days in Events.
Events Browser pane As I mention in the preceding section, when you select an event in the Event Library pane, all the clips that belong to that event appear in the Events Browser pane in the bottom-right section of the iMovie window (Figure 6.5). Figure 6.5 The Events Browser pane.
This pane serves a couple of purposes: It provides a preview, in the form of thumbnail images, of what a clip contains.
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It’s where you choose clips (or portions of clips) that you’d like to add to your movie project.
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Unlike Windows Movie Maker, iMovie shows far more than just single thumbnails in this pane. You see a series of thumbnails of scenes— like a film strip—within each clip. By default, these thumbnails are drawn from every 5 seconds of video. (You can adjust this setting by moving the slider just below the Events Browser pane so that you can see thumbnails for as little as every half-second of video to as much as every 30 seconds.)
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But wait—as they say in the late-night-commercial biz—there’s more! Scoot your mouse pointer over the top of those thumbnails, and move it to the left or right. The video plays—backward or forward, depending on the direction in which you move the mouse—in the Viewer pane above, complete with sound. I don’t intend to spend the entire chapter repeating “Try that with Windows Movie Maker!”, but this is just one more example of how advanced iMovie is. But wait again—there’s even more! Now that you’ve located a particular point in your clip, you can play the clip from that point simply by pressing the keyboard’s spacebar. (Alternatively, you can click the Play button at the bottom of the screen or play the video in full-screen mode by clicking the Play Full Screen button next to that Play button.) Should you want to select a portion of a clip, just click and drag over it. You could click at the beginning of that exciting car chase and drag until the local constabulary makes its appearance, for example.
Viewer pane The Viewer pane, in the top-right quadrant of the iMovie window, is the big window where you preview clips and projects (Figure 6.6). Again, to play video in the Viewer pane, just position the mouse pointer over a clip and press the spacebar. The video will play in the Viewer pane from the point of your selection. Figure 6.6 The Viewer pane.
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Edit Project pane As its name implies, the Edit Project pane is where you piece together clips and add titles, transitions, effects, and audio to make your finished movie (Figure 6.7). Much like the Events Browser pane, the Edit Project pane lets you preview your video by clicking and dragging over any bit of video in the pane or by positioning the mouse pointer and pressing the spacebar. This pane also bears a slider for adjusting the frequency of thumbnail images, as well as Play and Play Full Screen buttons. Figure 6.7
The Edit Project pane.
Project Library pane The Project Library pane doesn’t appear by default, but you can produce it easily enough. Just choose Window > Show Project Library or click the Project Library button in the top-left corner of the Edit Project pane. Do either one of these things, and the Edit Project pane is replaced by the Project Library pane (Figure 6.8, on the next page), which lists all the projects you’ve created with iMovie. You can easily open a previous project by selecting its name in the list and then clicking the Edit Project button in the top-left corner of the iMovie window.
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Figure 6.8 The Project Library pane.
On the left side of this pane, you’ll see the name of your project, its length, and when you created it. On the right side are thumbnail images of your project. You can click inside a project to see the selection in the Viewer pane and drag to see a motion preview, but in this case, the motion preview doesn’t contain sound. To hear sound as well as see video, place your mouse pointer somewhere in the preview and press the spacebar to play from that location. If you’d like to create a new project and just don’t have the strength to choose File > New Project, you can click the plus (+) button in the bottom-right corner of this pane to produce the New Project sheet.
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Toolbar Apple has a knack for planting its toolbars just about everywhere in its iLife applications except the tops of windows. iMovie is no exception. You’ll find that its toolbar divides the window right down the middle, horizontally (Figure 6.9). You access many of iMovie’s important features via this toolbar, so in the following sections, I break it down into its individual buttons.
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Open Camera Import Window
Swap Events and Projects
Crop, Mark Rotate, Turn Audio Selection Skimming and As On/Off Ken Burns Favorite Reject Thumbnail Selection Size
Figure 6.9 iMovie ’09’s Toolbar elements.
Unmark Inspector Selection Add Voiceover Selection to Project
Music and Sound Effects Browser
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Maps and Backgrounds Browser Titles Browser
Photos Browser Volume Transitions Level Browser
Open Camera Import Window If you have a compatible video camera attached to your Mac and want to import video from it, you click this button. In the case of the Flip camcorders, this button works only with the high-definition models: the MinoHD and UltraHD. Within the import window, you can import every clip on the camera by clicking the Import All button, or you can flip the Automatic/Manual switch on the left side of the window to Manual and clear the check boxes next to the clips you don’t want to import. (Alternatively, you can click the Uncheck All button, check the boxes next to the clips you do want to import, and then click the Import Checked button that now appears.) When you’ve imported your clips, just click the Done button to dismiss the window.
Swap Events and Projects If you’d prefer to have the Event Library and Events Browser pane at the top of the iMovie window and the Edit Project/Project Library panes at the bottom, just click this button and marvel at the swoopy effect that occurs as the two areas change positions.
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Thumbnail Size You use this slider to make the thumbnail images in the Events Browser pane larger or smaller.
Add Selection to Project Normally, you add clips to a project by selecting them in the Events Browser pane and dragging them into the Edit Project pane, but you can use this button for the same task. Just select some video in the Edit Project pane and click this button. The selected portion of video is added to the end of the project as a separate clip.
Mark Selection As Favorite If there’s a bit of video that you’d like easy access to at a later time, select the video in the Events Browser pane and click the Mark Selection As Favorite button. When you do, a green bar appears across the selected video’s thumbnail view. You can find your favorites by choosing View > Favorites Only. (As an alternative, you can choose Favorites Only from the Show pop-up menu at the bottom of the window, as shown in Figure 6.10.) Your favorites are displayed in the Events Browser pane. Figure 6.10 You can choose to view just your favorite clips.
If you want to see all your favorites, regardless of which event they’re part of, select an event in the Event Library pane, press Command-A to select all the events, and then choose View > Favorites Only.
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Unmark Selection If you’ve determined that a clip marked as a favorite is now out of favor, you can remove its favorite status with this button. Just select that clip and click Unmark Selection.
Reject Selection You can hide selections by marking them as rejected. This process works just like creating a favorite: Make your selection and then click this button. If you’d like to see rejected selections, choose View > Rejected Only, or choose Rejected Only from the Show pop-up menu at the bottom of the window. As with favorites, you can unreject a rejected selection by selecting it and then clicking the Unmark Selection button I just mentioned.
Voiceover This button is the gateway to recording an audio narration track. Click it, and the Voiceover window appears (Figure 6.11, on the next page). Within this window, you choose the microphone source (a microphone built into your Mac, for example, or a mic plugged into the Mac’s audio input port), adjust and monitor the mic input levels (via a slider and meters, respectively), add noise reduction, enable voice enhancement (iMovie will save your narration with an equalization setting that helps make your voice stand out), and decide whether the Mac’s speakers will play back a video clip’s audio while you’re recording. As I mention in Chapter 5, unless you’re recording with headphones on to monitor your movie’s sound, it’s best to switch off the computer’s speakers when you’re recording a narration track so that you don’t also record the sound of the movie.
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Figure 6.11 The Voiceover window.
Crop, Rotate, and Ken Burns iMovie has the power to crop and rotate video clips and to add a panand-scan effect to still images—an effect that Apple calls the Ken Burns effect, after the acclaimed documentary maker of the same name. As the Flip camcorders don’t take still images, I’ll skip Ken and concentrate on Crop and Rotate. If you’d like to focus on a particular element within a clip, you can use the Crop feature to do that. Here’s how: 1. Make a selection in the Events Browser pane, and click the Crop, Rotate, and Ken Burns button. In the Viewer pane, you’ll see a frame of the selection with a greenbordered rectangle imposed on it. 2. Click and drag one of the sides or corners of the rectangle so that it surrounds the area you want to focus on (Figure 6.12).
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Figure 6.12 Cropping an iMovie clip.
3. Click Done. The image enlarges to fill the frame, showing everything within the rectangle and nothing outside it. 4. If you decide that you don’t like the crop, repeat Step 1 and then click the Fit button in the top-left corner of the Viewer pane. iMovie removes the crop and restores the selection to its original appearance. If you’ve held the Flip camera incorrectly—on its side or upside down— you can rotate the video that it took. Select the video you’d like to rotate; click the Crop, Rotate, and Ken Burns button; and then click either the left or right rotation arrow that appears at the top of the Viewer pane. The selection rotates 90 degrees for every click.
Inspector The Inspector button leads you to the Inspector window, which lets you adjust a clip’s stabilization (make it less shaky), change its speed, and adjust video and audio settings. This Inspector window contains
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three tabs: Clip, Video, and Audio. The contents of the Clip tab change depending on whether you’ve made a selection in the Events Browser or Edit Project pane. The Video tab offers the same options regardless of where the selection resides. Finally, the Audio tab differs only slightly depending on the location of the selection. Here are the details: Clip (with Events Browser selection). Click the Clip tab, and you’ll see how long the selection is—39.9 seconds, for example. More interesting is the Analyze Entire Clip button that appears after the word Stabilization. iMovie ’09 includes a feature that can help stabilize your clips. This feature is amazingly cool, particularly if you’re using a Flip camcorder, because the Flips don’t have image stabilization of their own.
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To make this feature work, just click Analyze Entire Clip. iMovie takes a while to analyze the clip (and by “a while,” I mean a long while, even on a really fast Mac). When it’s finished, you can add that clip to your project—and when you do, the video will be far smoother than it once was. Don’t expect miracles from image stabilization. If you’ve waved the camera around wildly, stabilization won’t do much for you. Also note that iMovie performs this magic by cropping the outside of the image. If you have important details on the edges of the frame, you’ll lose them.
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Clip (with Edit Project selection). Click the Clip tab when you’ve selected something in the Edit Project pane (Figure 6.13), and you see a Duration entry that tells you how long the selection is. A Source Duration entry indicates the length of the original clip from which the selection is taken. Below it is a Video Effect button. Click this button, and the window flips around to reveal 16 effects that you can apply to the clip simply by clicking them (Figure 6.14). (You can apply just one effect to a clip.)
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Chapter 6: Editing with iMovie ’09 Figure 6.13 The Inspector’s Clip tab lets you choose video effects, change the speed of the clip, and stabilize the video.
Figure 6.14 iMovie’s video effects.
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Next is a Speed button that reads “Convert Entire Clip.” Click this button, and iMovie converts the clip to a form in which you can slow it down or speed it up. After that conversion, a Speed slider appears (refer to Figure 6.13). Drag the slider toward the turtle or the rabbit to adjust the speed of the clip; the range is 12.5 percent to 800 percent. Alternatively, you can enter the amount of time you’d like the clip to run in the Duration text box. If you’d like the clip to run for 10 seconds, for example, enter 10. If the clip was originally 15 seconds, it speeds up; if it was originally 5 seconds, it slows down. You can also make the clip run backward by enabling the Reverse option. Finally, you can ask iMovie to analyze and stabilize the clip by checking the Smooth Clip Motion box at the bottom of the tab. After iMovie analyzes the clip, you’ll have the option to adjust the clip’s maximum zoom with a slider. Move the slider all the way to the right, and the image is more stable, but more of it is cropped. Move the slider farther to the left, and the motion gets bumpier, but you see more of what was originally in the frame. Video. Click the Video tab (Figure 6.15) to see a histogram view of your selection. (A histogram is a graph that tells you how frequencies are distributed along the visible light spectrum. Peaks to the right indicate lots of white; peaks to the left indicate dark colors.) Within this tab, you can adjust exposure, brightness, contrast, and saturation via sliders that run from 0 percent to 100 percent. You can also click the Auto button, and iMovie will do its best to adjust these elements automatically for you. Alternatively, with this tab open, click a white or gray area of the clip, and iMovie will adjust the white balance. (Essentially, you’re telling iMovie, “This is white. Make the colors around it realistic based on my command, even though that white looks yellow or blue to you.”)
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Figure 6.15 The Inspector’s Video tab.
Audio. Finally, the Audio tab (Figure 6.16) is where you adjust the clip’s overall volume with a slider, enable ducking (a feature that automatically diminishes the audio of other tracks when the audio in this track plays), and fade in and fade out. Your fade choices are Automatic (a clip’s audio automatically starts quiet and gets louder, or vice versa) and Manual (you can determine how long the fade will last, in a range of 0 to 2 seconds).
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Figure 6.16 The Inspector’s Audio tab.
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If you’ve made a selection in the Events Browser pane, you’ll see an active Normalize Clip Volume button. Click it, and the clip’s volume increases so that the loudest portion of the clip is raised to the point just below audio distortion. The rest of the clip’s audio is raised in relationship to that loudest bit. Some people have a hard time visualizing normalization. Try this: Think of the shape of a mountain range, and imagine the peaks and valleys as loud and soft sounds. When you normalize audio, you don’t turn the valleys into peaks; you simply raise the entire range, in its current shape, so that the highest peak touches the top of the sky.
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Turn Audio Skimming On/Off I mentioned that when you skim through clips with your mouse, you hear audio, yes? Click this button to silence this skimmed audio.
Volume Level This volume-level meter doesn’t behave like one. What I mean by that is that although it changes as you play a clip, reflecting louder and softer volumes, it can also tell you the volume at the location of the mouse pointer even when you’re not playing the clip. Just drag to any point in a clip, and you’ll see how loud the volume is at that point.
Music and Sound Effects Browser Click this button, and you see evidence of the Mac’s Media Browser— a browser full of media elements that appears throughout the iLife and iWork applications. Specifically, you’ll see four entries by default: iMovie Sound Effects, iLife Sound Effects, GarageBand, and iTunes (Figure 6.17).
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Figure 6.17 The Music and Sound Effects Browser.
Select iMovie Sound Effects, and iMovie displays a list of 95 sound effects that you can add to your movie. Click iLife Sound Effects, and you get a mix of 418 sound effects and music tracks. (To help you tell one from another, click the triangle next to the iLife Sound Effects entry to view collections of sound filed by folder—Ambient, Jingles, and Textures, for example.) When you select GarageBand (Apple’s music‑making application), you see the six canned background-music tracks included with the application as well as any GarageBand projects you’ve created. Finally, when you choose iTunes, you see the contents of your iTunes library. You can add these tracks to your video as background music or sound effects. To do that, just select an audio track in this browser and, in the Edit Project pane, drag it to the location where you’d like it to play. note
You can add multiple audio tracks to a clip. The tracks just stack on top of one another and play simultaneously where they overlap.
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Photos Browser An iMovie project can contain not only video, but still images as well. (Still images can be useful for placing a slideshow in the middle of a video or creating documentary projects.) To access all the photos in your iPhoto library quickly, just click this button. You’ll see listings for iPhoto’s Events, Photos, and the albums you’ve created (Figure 6.18). Select one of these items, and all the images within that group appear at the bottom of the Photos pane. To add an image, just select it and drag it into the Edit Project pane. Figure 6.18 The Photos Browser.
Titles Browser This window is where you create titles for your movie (Figure 6.19). iMovie ’09 includes 32 title styles. Unlike Windows Movie Maker, which you have to tell what kind of title you’d like to create (one at the beginning of the movie over a background, one over a clip, or credits at the end, for example), iMovie is smart enough to do the right thing depending on where you drag the title.
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Figure 6.19 The Titles Browser.
If you drag, say, the Boogie Lights title so that it’s the first thing that appears in your movie, a green bar appears in the Edit Project pane before the first clip to indicate where you’re putting the title. When you let go of the mouse button, a Choose Background window appears, offering 20 background styles. Click the style you’d like to use to select it and close the Choose Background window. In the Viewer pane, you see the words Title Text Here. Just click that text and enter the text you’d really like to use. If you want a title that appears over a video clip with no background other than what’s playing in the clip, drag the title to where you want it to appear. iMovie will understand that you don’t want a background pattern because you’re dragging the title on top of the clip. The Viewer pane will display the video clip with the title field on top of it. Again, just click the example text and enter the title you want.
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If you’re unsure what a particular title style will look like, place your mouse pointer on top of it in the Titles Browser. The title animation will play in the thumbnail.
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After you’ve dragged a title into the Edit Project pane, you can change the font, color, text size, and alignment by clicking the Show Fonts button in the Viewer pane. You can also make title text bold, italic, or outlined.
Transitions Browser iMovie ’09 includes 20 transitions—everything from fades, dissolves, and wipes to page curls, doorways, and ripples (Figure 6.20). To add a transition, drag it from the browser to a place between two clips in the Edit Project pane. By default, transitions last half a second. You can change the duration by selecting the transition in the Edit Project pane; clicking the Inspector button in the toolbar; and, in the resulting Inspector window, entering a new value in the Duration text box. Figure 6.20 The Transitions Browser.
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Maps and Backgrounds Browser Suppose that you took your Flip camcorder on a round-the-world trip (you jet-setter, you), and in the travel movie that you’re making, you want to give your audience a good idea of where you were (other than shouting, “Oh! Oh! That’s Kalgoorlie! Or was it Coober Pedy?”). This browser will come in handy. Here’s what you can do: 1. Click the Maps and Backgrounds Browser button. You’ll see 12 maps of the world (Figure 6.21). Figure 6.21 The Maps and Backgrounds Browser.
2. Select a map and drag it into the Edit Project pane. The map appears in the Viewer pane, and the Inspector window opens. 3. In the Inspector window, specify start and end locations (Kalgoorlie and Kefalonia, for example) by clicking the appropriate buttons and then choosing the location in the Choose Location window that appears.
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iMovie creates an animation on the map that draws a line between the start and end locations. You probably won’t use this effect all that often, but it’s nice to have when you’re putting together a video record of your travels. This browser also includes the same 20 background patterns that you see when you’re working with titles. Should you want to toss a background pattern into your project without a title, this browser is where you’ll find it.
Making a Movie
Now that you have an idea of where things are in iMovie ’09, you’re ready to make a couple of movies. Let iMovie lend a hand with the first one, and cobble the second one together from scratch.
Making a themed movie Windows Movie Maker includes an AutoMovie feature that takes the clips you select and automatically stitches them together into a movie with titles, transitions, and effects. iMovie ’09 does the same kind of thing through the use of themes. To make a themed movie, just follow these steps: 1. Launch iMovie, create a project, and choose a theme. In iMovie, choose File > New Project to open the New Project sheet. Then do the following: Enter a name for your movie in the Project Name text box.
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Choose an aspect ratio from the Aspect Ratio pop-up menu. Your choices are 16:9 (for an HD movie from your Flip MinoHD or UltraHD) and 4:3 (for a standard-definition movie from your Mino, original Ultra, or UltraSD).
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Select a theme other than None: Photo Album, Bulletin Board, Comic Book, Scrapbook, or Filmstrip (Figure 6.22).
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Figure 6.22 Choosing a theme.
Leave the Automatically Add Transitions and Titles option enabled, and click the Create button. 2. Import some video. To do this, plug your Flip camcorder into your Mac. If you’ve plugged in a MinoHD or UltraHD, a sheet appears, indicating that iMovie is scanning the camera for clips. In the Import From window that appears, click the Import All button if you want to import everything on the camera, or flip the Automatic/Manual switch to Manual, check just those clips that you want to import, and click the Import Checked button. If you’ve plugged in a Flip Mino or UltraSD, iPhoto will likely launch. In iPhoto, either click the Import All button to import all the clips on the camera, or select just the clips you want (by Command-clicking them) and clicking the Import Selected button. Quit iMovie and launch it again so that it indexes the movies you imported with iPhoto, thus making the clips available to you. You can also import clips from a Flip camera manually. Within iMovie, choose File > Import > Movies. In the sheet that appears, follow this path: FLIPVIDEO/DCIM/100VIDEO. You’ll find the movies inside that 100VIDEO folder. Select the ones you want (again, by Command-clicking), and click the Import button.
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3. Place the video in the Edit Project pane. In the Event Library pane, select the event you imported your video into. In the Events Browser pane on the right, click and drag inside a video clip to select the portion of the video you want to use. A yellow highlight appears around the selection. Then either click that selection and drag it into the Edit Project pane to add it, or simply click the Add Selection to Project button in the toolbar. 4. Edit the title text. The first clip automatically has a title added to it. Just click the brown title track that appears above the clip; then, in the Viewer pane, click the sample text and enter some text of your own (Figure 6.23). If you’d like to see how your title will look, just click the Play button in the Viewer pane. When you’re happy with your efforts, click the Done button in the Viewer pane. Figure 6.23 Editing title text.
5. Fling other clips into the Edit Project pane. Continue selecting and dragging clips into the Edit Project pane. iMovie automatically adds appropriate transitions between clips. 6. Edit the credits.
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The last clip will have a title track with a credit style applied to it. As with the opening title, click the title track and edit the text in the Viewer pane. Click Done when you’re . . . well, done. 7. Tweak (if you like). iMovie has done all the heavy lifting, and your movie is ready to export. (I cover exporting movies later in the chapter.) You’re welcome to make adjustments, if you want. You can select a clip in the Edit Project pane, click the Inspector button, and adjust the clip’s duration and video and audio settings. You can speed it up or slow it down, as well as apply stabilization to it. You’re also welcome to add effects and to replace the transitions that iMovie inserted automatically with your own choices. Just because you chose a particular theme at the beginning of your project doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with it. You can change your project’s theme at any time by choosing File > Project Properties. In the sheet that appears, just choose a different theme, and click OK. iMovie will change the title and transitions to match the theme you selected.
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Making a movie from scratch Great as iMovie’s themes are, there are only five of them. When one of these themes doesn’t float your boat, or you’d simply like to create a completely personal project, pick the None theme and piece together the movie on your own, like so: 1. Create a new project. Launch iMovie, and choose File > New Project. In the resulting New Project sheet, name the project, choose an aspect ratio, click the None theme, and click OK. Optionally, you can enable the Automatically Add option and choose one of 20 transitions from the pop-up menu.
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As I mention in Chapter 5, be tasteful with your transitions. I’ve yet to meet a dissolve or fade transition that offended anyone. For me, those choices are safe ones. Constant spins, wipes, and circle transitions, on the other hand, will drive viewers up the wall (or out the door).
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2. Import your video. I tell you how to do this in the preceding section, “Making a themed movie.” 3. Place video clips in the Edit Project pane. Yes, I tell you how to do that as well in “Making a themed movie.” 4. Add transitions. Click the Transitions Browser button in the toolbar, choose a transition you like, and drag it between two adjacent clips. 5. Adjust transitions. iMovie uses a default transition length of half a second, which is too short for some transitions. I like fades that run a little over a second, for example. If you’d like to adjust a transition, highlight it and click the Inspector button in the toolbar (or simply press the i key on your Mac’s keyboard). In the Inspector window that appears, enter a new value in the Duration text box, and click Done. 6. Add titles. Click the Titles Browser button in the toolbar, select a title style you like, and drag that title just before the beginning of the first clip in the Edit Project pane. A green line should appear before that first clip, indicating where your title will appear when you let go of the mouse button. (If the clip instead turns blue, it means that the title will be overlaid on that clip.) Repeat for other titles. 7. Edit the title text. If the title track isn’t highlighted, click it. In the Viewer pane, click inside the title field, and enter the title text. To change the title’s font,
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style, color, or alignment, click the Show Fonts button in the Viewer pane. Repeat for other titles. You can reposition tracks by dragging them to another place in your project. You can also shorten or lengthen them by dragging the left or right edge. 8. Add some music. Click the Music and Sound Effects Browser button in the toolbar, select some music you like from your iTunes library, and drag it into position in the Edit Project pane. Wherever your mouse pointer sits when you let go of the mouse button is where the beginning of the audio track will appear. As with title tracks, you can drag audio tracks to other locations in the project. 9. Adjust the project’s volume. If you have audio in more than one track—the audio you’ve recorded with your Flip camera plus a music track—you should balance the two so that the more important audio is up front. A quick way to do this so that the sound from the Flip’s video track is louder is to select the video clip, click the Inspector button, click the Audio tab in the window that appears, and enable the Ducking option (refer to Figure 6.16 earlier in this chapter). This option tells the music track to be quieter than the audio in the video track. You can also edit the volume of tracks separately by adjusting the volume slider in the Audio tab for each track.
Exporting Your Movies
You’ve put your movie together, and thrilling though it may be to watch it on your computer within iMovie’s Viewer pane, confining your masterpiece to your computer makes it tough to share with your dearest and nearest. That’s why iMovie’s Share menu exists. It’s the means for exporting your movies and making them available to the world.
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Apple tries to make this process as easy as possible by listing destinations in the first portion of this menu: iTunes, iDVD, YouTube, and MobileMe Gallery. If you’d like to have greater control of exactly how your movies are encoded and exported, you have that option too, thanks to the Export Using QuickTime command. I explore these commands in the following sections.
iTunes At one time, Apple’s iTunes application was only for playing music on your Mac (and, later, on Windows PCs). Later, iTunes adopted the ability to play video. When it did, Apple made sure that you could easily export the movies you make in iMovie to iTunes. This command is the result of that work. When you choose iTunes, a table in the sheet that appears offers four export sizes: Tiny, Mobile, Medium, and Large (Figure 6.24). The sheet also lists four devices: iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, and Computer. Below these devices are dots, indicating which video size works best (or at all) with a particular device. A Medium movie, for example, is playable on a traditional iPod, Apple TV, and computer but not on an iPhone or iPod touch, because the latter two devices don’t support this resolution. Figure 6.24 Exporting a movie to iTunes.
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Near the end of each size row are the dimensions (in pixels) of the resulting movie. If you’re exporting a movie with a 4:3 aspect ratio (as you would with a movie shot on a Flip Ultra, UltraSD, or Mino), those numbers will be 176 x 144, 480 x 360, 640 x 480, and 720 x 540. Export a 16:9 movie shot from a Flip MinoHD or UltraHD, and you’ll see dimensions of 176 x 144, 480 x 272, 640 x 360, and 960 x 540. At the very end of each size row is a small i character. Hover your mouse pointer over that character, and you’ll learn some important details about the resulting movie: The encoder used to compress it (H.264 is present for everything except the Tiny option, which uses 3GP, a codec often used to compress video for mobile phones)
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The frame rate (in frames per second)
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The data rate
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The estimated size of the movie after you export it
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Looking at this information, you can make more informed decisions before exporting your movie—decisions such as “Do I really want to burn up a gigabyte of storage just for 10 minutes of the family hamster tirelessly running on his wheel?” To export your movie and add it to iTunes’ movie collection, select the movie sizes you’d like to export. (Yes, you can select multiple sizes, and iMovie will export multiple copies using the different settings.) Then click the Publish button. iMovie will churn away for a while. How long “a while” is depends on the length of the movie and your Mac’s speed. Then, by default, iTunes launches automatically and starts playing the movie after the first version (if you chose multiple sizes) is encoded and created.
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After your movies are in iTunes, you can play them within that application and sync them with compatible devices such as an iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV.
iDVD I cover making DVDs in Chapter 4, so I won’t belabor this option here. All you need to know is that if you choose Share > iDVD, iMovie will prepare your project for iDVD, launch that application, and create a new iDVD project that plants the title of your movie on a new DVD project’s Menu screen (and the movie itself within the project). At this point, you can customize the DVD—change the theme and add other movies, for example—or you can just insert a blank recordable DVD and click the Burn button to record the project on the disc. Yes, iDVD is smart enough to create a project with the same aspect ratio as the movie you’ve exported. If you have a high-definition movie that you’ve shot with your MinoHD or UltraHD, your iDVD project will have an aspect ratio of 16:9.
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Media Browser Apple’s Media Browser is a repository for media files (movies, pictures, and audio files). It’s available in a variety of Apple applications, including most of the iLife and iWork applications. What this thing does is allow you to easily access and add your media files to projects created in compatible applications. You might open Apple’s presentation application, Keynote; expose the Media Browser; and drag a movie that you created with iMovie into a slide, for example. This option in iMovie’s Share menu lets you encode movies and place them in the Media Browser. The basic setup of its settings sheet (Figure 6.25) differs very little from the settings sheet for iTunes (refer to Figure 6.24). When you choose the Media Browser command, you see five sizes: Tiny, Mobile, Medium, Large, and HD (1280 x 720, which
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is 720p). You also see six destinations: the four from the iTunes sheet, plus MobileMe and YouTube. Again, select the sizes you want and click Publish. When iMovie finishes exporting the movies, they’ll be available within Media Browser. Figure 6.25
Exporting a movie to Apple’s Media Browser.
Exactly where are these movies stored? When you create an iMovie project, a project file is born within an iMovie Projects folder within the Movies folder inside your user folder (your user name/Movies/iMovie Project/name of iMovie project). If you hold down the Control key, click the project file, and choose Show Package Contents from the resulting menu, a new window opens that contains a variety of items. One of these items is a folder called Movies, in which you’ll find the movies iMovie created when you chose the Media Browser command.
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YouTube It’s fair to describe YouTube as today’s most popular video sharing service. Because it’s so popular, Apple tries to make it easy for you to create YouTube-compatible videos and upload them to this service. To do so, just follow these steps: 1. Choose Share > YouTube. 2. In the sheet that appears, add your YouTube account name by clicking the sheet’s Add button and then entering your password in the Password text box.
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3. From the Category pop-up menu, choose the kind of movie you’re uploading (Science & Technology, Gaming, or Film & Animation, for example). 4. In the appropriate text boxes, enter the movie’s title, description, and tags (bits of information such as ducks, skateboard, or explosion that help YouTube sort your movies and users search for them). 5. At the bottom of the sheet, choose a size: Mobile, Medium, Large, or HD. The HD option is grayed out if you’re working with a standarddefinition movie. In that case, you can choose just a single size. (YouTube doesn’t want multiple versions of your movie, thank you very much.) Figure 6.26 shows what your settings may look like at this point. Figure 6.26 Exporting a movie to YouTube.
6. If you want, make your movie personal by checking the Make This Movie Personal check box at the bottom of the screen.
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When this option is enabled, only those whom you’ve invited to see your movie can see it. 7. When you’re ready to proceed, click the Next button. In the succeeding screen, you’ll be warned about not uploading copyrighted material. 8. Thus informed, click the Publish button. iMovie will encode your movie at the requested setting and upload it to YouTube.
MobileMe Gallery Apple offers a $99-per-annum Web-based service called MobileMe. With a MobileMe subscription, you get online storage, a customized e-mail address, a place to build a Web site with Apple’s iWeb application, synchronization between your Macs and Apple’s servers, and a location for uploading and displaying pictures and movies. That last item is the MobileMe Gallery, and the MobileMe Gallery command is iMovie’s tool for moving your movies to this location. note
This command works only if you have a MobileMe account.
Here’s how to use this command: 1. Choose MobileMe Gallery. iMovie connects to the Internet and makes sure that the MobileMe account configured for your Mac is in good standing. When it confirms your account, iMovie displays a sheet that looks similar to the one you see after choosing Share > YouTube. 2. In the appropriate text boxes, enter the title of your movie and a description.
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3. Choose a size: Tiny, Mobile, Medium, or Large (or multiple sizes). 4. From the Viewable pop-up menu, choose exactly who gets to view your movie: everyone, just you, or people who belong to specific groups that you’ve created. You create these groups by choosing the Edit Names and Passwords command from the bottom of this menu, clicking the + button in the resulting window, and entering a name and password for the group in the text boxes that appear. Provide the group’s name and password to those people you want to participate in that group, along with a link to the movie. When your invitees arrive at the page via their Web browsers, they’ll be prompted for the group name and password. When they enter both successfully and click OK, they can watch your movie. 5. If you want to let people download your movie, enable the Allow Movie to Be Downloaded option. Your settings may look something like Figure 6.27 at this point. Figure 6.27 Exporting a movie to a MobileMe Gallery.
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6. Click the Publish button. iMovie encodes your movie and uploads it to your MobileMe Gallery. When the process is complete, a sheet appears, telling you that the movie has been published and is available at such and such a Web address— http://gallery.me.com/example/111111, for example. Within that sheet are Tell a Friend, View, and OK buttons. Click Tell a Friend, and your Mac’s default e-mail client opens with an unaddressed message. The message body invites the recipient to check out this movie in your gallery and provides a link to that movie. Just address the message to your pals and send it along, and movie goodness is theirs. If you choose Visit instead, your Web browser (Safari, by default) opens and whisks you to the Web page where you’ve stored your movie. If you’ve made the movie accessible only to a group, you’ll have to enter that group’s name and password to view the movie.
Export Movie Maybe you don’t know what you want to do with your movie but would like to have a copy outside iMovie. No problem—that’s what the Export Movie command is for. Choose this command, and there’s the sheet again (Figure 6.28, on the next page). This time, enter a title in the Export As text box, and navigate to the location on your hard drive where you’d like to store the movie. Choose the size of the exported file—Tiny, Mobile, Medium, Large, or HD (you can choose only one size)— and click the Export button. iMovie encodes the movie at the setting and to the location you’ve chosen.
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Figure 6.28 The results of iMovie ’09’s Export Movie command.
Export Using QuickTime Up to this point, iMovie has taken a lot of the toil out of encoding and exporting your movies. It chooses the encoder (usually, H.264), frame rate, and bit rate. If you want complete control of how your movie is exported—if you want to choose and configure the encoder, for example—this option is the way to do that. Personally, I love this option and use it quite often. I’ve spent a lot of time mucking with encoders and QuickTime, though, so I have a notion of how to squirrel around with these settings and produce a video worth watching. You may not. You’re welcome to invoke this command and choose a setting from the Export pop-up menu in the resulting Save Exported File As window (Figure 6.29). Some of these settings—Movie to Apple TV, Movie to iPhone, and Movie to iPod—are not configurable and provide the same encoding settings you get in the Export Movie sheet, so don’t bother.
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Figure 6.29 Choose Export Using QuickTime, and you have a lot of encoding options.
If you want to really dive in, try choosing something like Movie to QuickTime Movie from the Export pop-up menu, clicking the Options button in this window, and then clicking the Settings button in the Movie Settings window that appears. In the window that finally materializes, you’ll find a list of encoders in the Compression Type pop-up menu. Choose an encoder, and then you can play with frame rates, data rates, and quality settings.
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Regrettably, given the size and mission of this small guide, I can’t provide greater detail. If you’d like to learn more, have a gander at Peachpit’s Apple Pro Training Series: QuickTime Pro Quick-Reference Guide. iMovie ’09 is a rich enough application that I could easily write a book about it. Fortunately, Jeff Carlson saved me the trouble. His iMovie ’09 and iDVD for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide (also from Peachpit Press) is an outstanding guide to iMovie ’09. In it, you’ll learn more about the features I discuss in this chapter and discover iMovie ’09’s many advanced features.
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7 Delivery Think back to the first chapter of this pocket-size adventure, and you may recall my suggestion that one of the primary reasons for owning a Flip camcorder is to shoot embarrassing footage of those around you and then easily post the results on the Web. I’ll leave it up to you to handle the embarrassment part of the equation. My job is to focus on taking the results and making them available to others via the Internet.
FlipShare Sharing
In Chapter 4, when writing about FlipShare, I largely blew off that application’s delivery capabilities, promising to cover it later. Now’s the time to address just what FlipShare can do in this regard.
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In your tour of the FlipShare software in Chapter 4, I pointed out the Share area at the bottom of the FlipShare window on the way to the Create area. Now I return to show you what the Email, Greeting Card, and Online buttons are for (Figure 7.1). Figure 7.1 FlipShare’s Share area.
Email The name Email is the tiniest bit misleading, but that single word is a heck of a lot easier to slap under an onscreen button than Send an e-mail link to a movie that FlipShare uploads to a Web site—which is exactly what this command does. When you tap this button, FlipShare encodes your movie in Adobe Flash format (a video format used by just about every Web site you’ve ever visited) and uploads it to Pure Digital’s Web site. At the same time, it generates an e-mail message with a link to that movie, sending that e-mail to people whom you’ve determined worthy to view said movie. When they click the link, their Web browsers open and whisk them to the page that features your movie.
Send your movie by e-mail The process works like this: 1. Click the Email button in the Share area of the FlipShare window. When you do, up pops a Share by E-Mail window. 2. Fill in the blanks. In this window, you’re asked to enter your name, your e-mail address, and the e-mail addresses of those whom you’d like to receive a link to your movie (separating multiple addresses with commas, please).
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By default, the Subject text box contains the text You have received a Flip video!, but you can change that text to anything you like. Finally, type something cheery in the Message box so that those who receive your movie will have a better idea of what the movie’s about and why you sent it to them (Figure 7.2). Figure 7.2 Add e-mail addresses and a descriptive message about your videos in this window.
3. Take a look at your movie. On the right side of the Share by E-Mail window is a Videos to Email column, where you see a thumbnail image of your movie and a timeline and play controls below. Click the Play button to see your movie in an eensie-weensie window. 4. Add another movie. If you’d like to add another movie, just drag one from a folder in the main FlipShare window to the space marked Add Videos by Dragging Them from the Main Window. 5. Click the Share button to encode the movie and send it on its way to Pure Digital’s Web site.
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The Share by E-Mail window disappears, and in the bottom-left corner of the FlipShare window, you see the message FlipShare is working displayed above the word Emailing, with a progress bar indicating how far along in the process FlipShare is (Figure 7.3). If you’d like to cancel this operation, just click the small red X next to the progress bar. When the job is complete, you see a Videos emailed message followed by the day and time when the message was sent—Tue 3:34 PM, for example. Figure 7.3
FlipShare works out.
6. Check your e-mail. You may wonder why you were required to include your own e-mail address in the Share by E-Mail window (check back to Step 2). The reason is to let Pure Digital notify you that your message was sent to the addresses you requested, as well as provide you a copy of that message and a link to the movie. If you’re slightly bummed that those to whom you e-mailed your movie don’t get a real copy of it—just a link to a copy—dry those tears. If you’d like to give people the real deal, just create a movie as I describe in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, and attach a finished movie to an e-mail message rather than using the FlipShare method.
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7. Watch the video. Go ahead and click the link in the e-mail message to see how your movie looks. Not bad, right? Your movie should look nearly as good as it did in the FlipShare software.
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The video is placed in a frame, and within that frame, you can play or pause the movie, check its length, adjust its sound, and view the movie full-screen (Figure 7.4). Figure 7.4
A FlipShare movie published to Pure Digital’s Web site.
I question the wisdom of including the full-screen option. These movies look pretty jagged and pixilated (blocky) when they’re blown up to full-screen size.
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Why would Pure Digital go to all the trouble of posting your movies on a Web site when it might be easier simply to send a movie as an attachment? Advertising, partly. When you send one of these e-mail messages, the Flip logo appears at the bottom of the message, along with a link to info about Flip camcorders. When the e-mail recipients click the link to visit Pure Digital’s site, they see a couple of ads for the Flip cameras.
Know your rights If you’re at all concerned about your rights to this video, think long and hard before you use the e-mail feature. When you view one of these movies on Pure Digital’s site, you see a Terms of Use link. Click it, and you’ll discover that by posting a movie in this fashion, you essentially
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grant Pure Digital the right to do anything it likes with it, without giving you a nickel. You also warrant that you have “the written consent, release, and/or permission of each and every identifiable individual person in the User Submission to use the name or likeness of each and every such identifiable individual person in the manner contemplated.” Surrrrre you do. I’m not urging you to go through life agreeing to licenses that you have no intention of honoring. I’m just suggesting that if you believe that every person who appears in a video posted to the Web has signed a release, I’ve got this very nice piece of property in Hades that I’d like to discuss with you.
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Personally, I don’t think that Pure Digital’s up to mischief. Rather, as with just about every place in the world where users share content, the company has to cover itself should someone upload the Wrong Thing. I can say with some degree of confidence that Cisco’s and Pure Digital’s executive teams aren’t making a fortune off your 37-second video of the snowboarding crayfish.
Greeting Card Maybe a largely unadorned movie posted to a Web site doesn’t have the kind of sentiment you’re after. No problem. How about an adorned movie posted to a Web site? That’s what the Greeting Card option brings you. Here, I count it down: 1. Select a movie that you’d like to encase in a decorative theme, and click Greeting Card. The Share Greeting Card window appears. 2. Choose a category from the Category pop-up menu. Your choices are Holiday Season, Other Holidays, Love and Friendship, Birthday, Thank You, Vacation, Wedding and Anniversary, New Baby, and Others (which includes things like Get Well and Congratulations).
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When you make a choice, a large thumbnail image of each card in that category appears in the window (Figure 7.5). You can see how your movie will look by clicking the Play button below the thumbnail image. Figure 7.5 Creating a greeting card with FlipShare.
3. Choose your card, and click the Next button. You go to the Arrange Your Videos window, which is the second step of creating a greeting card. 4. Add more videos, if you want, by dragging them from the main FlipShare window. When you add another video, you don’t create a separate greeting card. Rather, you append it to the first one within the greeting card you’ve already selected. 5. Rearrange the videos to your heart’s content. In the Arrange Your Videos window, you can delete movies you added but later regretted adding, as well as rearrange the order of the movies by dragging them to different positions.
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(If you drag Movie #3 in front of Movie #1, for example, Movie #1 moves to the second position and bumps Movie #2 to third place.) In the Preview column on the right side of the window, you can see how the greeting card will look with all your movies in it. 6. Fill in the blanks (you’ve been here before, in “Send your movie by e-mail”), and click Next. You move to the Select Recipients window. 7. Once again, enter your name and e-mail address, the addresses of your recipients, Subject text (if you don’t like You have received a Flip video!), and a message. 8. Send the card on its way by clicking the Share button. FlipShare encodes the video, uploads it to Pure Digital’s site, and sends a message to the recipients you entered in Step 7. As with the Email feature, you and your recipients receive e-mails that reveal your greeting card’s existence. Click the link, and off you go to Pure Digital’s site to view the movie in all its Hallmark-like glory (Figure 7.6). Figure 7.6 A published greeting card.
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Online Finally, the Online button is your avenue for moving your movie directly to YouTube or MySpace, or exporting a copy of your movie in a Web-friendly format. The process works this way: 1. Select a movie (or more), and click the Online button. When you do, a Share Online window appears. Within this window, you see three choices: MySpace, YouTube, and Other Web Sites. 2. Add or delete movies just as you do in the other sharing windows. The right side of the window displays any movies you’ve added in a thumbnail preview (and each movie has the expected play controls and timeline). You can delete any of those movies by clicking the red X next to it. You can add movies by dragging them from the main window to the Add Videos slot in this window. 3. Pick one of the three options, and skip to the appropriate section for the rest of the process.
MySpace MySpace is one of the most popular places for people to share their lives, including video representations of those lives. You can upload your Flip videos to your MySpace Video page by following these steps: 1. Choose the MySpace option, and click the Next button. In the resulting Sign In window, you’re prompted for your MySpace e-mail address (Figure 7.7, on the next page). If you don’t have a MySpace account, you can sign up for one by clicking the Create a MySpace Account button near the bottom of the window. Do that, and off you go in your Web browser to a sign-up screen in MySpace.
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Figure 7.7 Logging in to MySpace.
2. Enter your MySpace e-mail address, and click the Login button at the bottom of the window. You’re whisked back to your Web browser and taken to the MySpace Video page, where you’ll be asked to authorize the computer you’re using to upload videos directly to your MySpace account. 3. Click the Authorize button on the MySpace page. When you do, your MySpace account is ready to accept movies from FlipShare on that computer. 4. Return to FlipShare, and choose to upload a public or a private movie. Now that your computer is authorized, the FlipShare software asks whether you want your movies to be public (everyone can see them, and they’ll appear in MySpace’s search results) or private (they won’t appear in search results). 5. Click the Share button.
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FlipShare encodes your movie and uploads it to your MySpace page. When the process is complete, FlipShare’s alert section in the bottomleft corner of the main window displays the message Your videos are ready!, followed by a Return to Browser link. 6. Click Return to Browser. Your computer’s Web browser opens again and takes you to your MySpace video page, where you see your uploaded movie. Do this immediately after you upload your movie, and you’re highly likely to see an animated icon indicating that MySpace is processing the movie.
YouTube Uploading a movie to YouTube is similar to uploading one to MySpace. The process works this way: 1. Choose the YouTube option, and click the Next button. If this is the first time you’ve used FlipShare to upload a movie to YouTube, you’ll be asked for your YouTube user name and password (Figure 7.8). Figure 7.8 Signing in to YouTube.
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As with MySpace, if you don’t have a YouTube account, just click the Create a YouTube Account button. Your browser will open, and you’ll be taken to YouTube’s site, where you can sign up for an account.
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2. Enter your user name and password. t ip
If you like, enable the Remember Me check box so that you don’t have to fill in your user name and password when you next upload videos.
3. Click the Login button. The resulting window asks whether you’d like to share your video with the world (in other words, make it public) or keep it private (make it viewable by up to 25 people whom you invite to see it). 4. Choose the public or private option (Figure 7.9); then read and memorize every syllable of YouTube’s copyright notice. Figure 7.9 Designate your YouTube video as public or private.
5. Click the Share button. Once again, FlipShare goes to work, displaying the word Uploading and a progress bar in the alert section of the main window. When
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your video has been encoded and uploaded, you see the message Your videos are ready! and a Return to Browser link. 6. Click Return to Browser. Your browser launches and takes you to your YouTube My Videos page. As with a movie you share on MySpace, it’ll be a few minutes before the movie is available, because YouTube has to process it.
Other Web sites After all the excitement of the MySpace and YouTube rigamaroles, you might expect that selecting Other Web Sites brings up a window listing other popular video sharing Web sites, such as blip.tv (www.blip.tv), Dailymotion (www.dailymotion.com), Facebook (www.facebook.com), Flickr (www.flickr.com), Motionbox (www.motionbox.com), and Vimeo (www.vimeo.com). But no. Instead, FlipShare offers to encode your movie in a format that’s compatible with any of these services and save a copy on your hard drive. When the encoded movie is on your hard drive saved inside a folder on your computer’s desktop), it’s up to you to upload the movie to the service of your choice. I needn’t go into great detail regarding the steps. Just choose Other Web Sites and keep clicking the Next button until your movie’s exported. At the end of the process, FlipShare throws up a window telling you that your videos are ready. If you click the Go button in this window, you’re taken to a Web site that reports that your videos are in a folder on your computer’s desktop. If you’re like me, you’ll choose to skip this unnecessary trip. What I can do is suggest that this option may not be the best way to go about the job. The reason I can is that although the resulting video looks pretty good, it’s smaller than the original. A 1280 x 720 movie, for example, is reduced to 640 x 360. That size was perfectly acceptable not terribly long ago, but today’s most popular video sharing services
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(including those I list at the start of this section) accept 720p HD video files. The days when the only videos you could upload were tiny, horribly pixelated things are rapidly coming to an end. Therefore, you shouldn’t fear exporting a full-size copy of your movie and uploading it to your favorite video sharing service. To do just that: 1. Select the movie you want to export, and choose File > Export To. A window appears to tell you that FlipShare will create an exact duplicate of the video you’ve selected. 2. Click the Export button in this window. You’ll be prompted for a location in which to save your movie. 3. Specify that location and click OK (Windows) or Choose (Mac). FlipShare exports the movie. 4. With finished movie in hand, just log in to a video sharing service; upload your movie; and let friends, family, and foes know where it is.
Streaming Services
Earlier in this chapter, I mention blip.tv, Dailymotion, Facebook, Flickr, Motionbox, Vimeo, and YouTube as places to share standard-definition and HD videos. They don’t all offer the same services, and not all are free, but all of them will take any standard-definition movie you’ve shot with your Flip camera. HD movies uploaded to one of these services are encoded by the service at 1280 x 720 pixels—the native format for the Flip MinoHD and UltraHD, so you’re fine there too.
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These services recommend that uploaded movies have a data rate of 3,000 to 5,000 Kbps. The Flip HD camcorders shoot at around 9,000 Kbps, but it’s worthwhile uploading your movie as it is. It’s quite possible that the service, in encoding your movie, will take care of the data-rate issue on its end. If not, you can use a program such as Windows Movie Maker or Apple’s iMovie to save your movie at a lower data rate. (See Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, respectively, for details on using these programs.) The Flash format is commonly used on these sites (which are increasingly moving to H.264), but the source material can be in MOV, AVI, MPEG-4, or H.264 format, because the sites re-encode what you upload. The Flips use MPEG-4 or H.264, so you’re set there as well. Each service operates a bit differently in terms of upload limits and price. Dailymotion, blip.tv, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube allow you to upload videos for free without limiting the number of uploads. All these services except Dailymotion and Flickr impose a 1 GB file-size limit, however. (Dailymotion has no limits on file size, and Flickr allows you to upload only up to 90 seconds of video.) Vimeo has a free plan that limits indi vidual movies to 500 MB each, allowing one movie per week and 2 GB per month. If you pay Vimeo $60 a year, you can upload 1 GB movies and upload up to 20 GB of movies per month. Motionbox has no limits, but the service costs $30 a year. Each service provides an upload tool, and as I mention in Chapter 6, iMovie ’09 includes an option for uploading your movies directly to YouTube. (Although MobileMe users can export an iMovie video to a Web gallery, iMovie offers a maximum resolution of 960 by 540 pixels and no HD support.)
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Of these services, I like the venerable YouTube for a lot of reasons. It’s free, it has no upload limits, it has massive exposure, and the quality of its video has improved a lot recently. (YouTube says that it’s still experimenting with HD uploads and warns that the HD videos you upload may not appear in high-definition format. All my high-definition test uploads displayed in 720p format, however.) HD is clearly where the world is headed. Given that fact and the willingness of sites like these to support high-definition streaming, I wouldn’t be surprised to find an HD uploading option in a future version of FlipShare.
8 Tips and Techniques Think about all the awful videos you’ve seen on YouTube. What are their common characteristics? Shaky camera
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Lousy lighting
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Wretched sound
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The obvious solutions to these problems are Hold still!
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Turn on a light or go outside!
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Stand closer to or farther away from the camera!
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Like I said, these solutions are obvious, but some nuances are involved. Keep these nuances in mind as you take a deeper look at each of these issues and their solutions in the following sections.
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Stop Shakin’ All Over
As I’ve mentioned a time or two, the Flip camcorders (like all the other pocket camcorders I’ve ever used) have no image-stabilization circuitry. This lack makes their video potentially jumpier than movies made with traditional camcorders, so you need to pay greater attention when you’re setting up your shots and shooting. Consider these tips.
Handheld shooting Take this book in both hands, and hold it out in front of you so that your arms are nearly fully extended. How steady are your arms? If you’re like most people, the answer is “Not very.” Hold a Flip camcorder that way, and you’ll see that same kind of sway—which will be readily apparent in your videos. Now try holding the camera closer to your body, with your elbows held against your sides. Better? Should be. You’ve got less arm meat to manage—just the stuff from your elbows on out—and that difference makes it easier to hold your hands steady. Don’t hold the camera as you would a pair of binoculars. Yes, your arms would be closer to your body, but with your elbows jutting out, you’d still have to control the entire weight of your arms.
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Three-legged shooting Flip your Flip so that you can see its underside, and there you’ll spy its tripod mount. If you want to get steady shots from your Flip, coupling this mount with a tripod or monopod is a good idea.
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Although you’re welcome to carry a full-size tripod (which makes sense in some cases), in most situations you’ll get by just fine with a small tabletop tripod. Tabletop tripods are compact, lightweight devices less than a foot long; you can easily shove one into a backpack or large pocket. You can find a load of these tabletop tripods around. I recommend one of Joby’s Gorillapod tripods (www.joby.com/products/gorillapod). At $25, the original Gorillapod isn’t terribly expensive, and it’s got something going for it that other tripods don’t: flexible leg joints. The Gorillapod’s legs are made of connected balls (Figure 8.1). These connections bend as well as rotate, allowing you not only to create a perfect shape for your tripod, but also to bend the legs so that the tripod wraps around things—the pole supporting a parking meter, your car’s rear-view mirror, or the top of your computer’s monitor. Figure 8.1 The amazing Gorillapod!
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The Quick-and-Dirty Tripod When I’m traveling light, I don’t have room for even a tripod as small as the Gorillapod, so I’ve developed the habit of also jamming a large rubber band into my pocket. With that rubber band, I can secure my Flip camcorder to any number of objects, such as a broomstick, ax handle, microphone stand (I’m in a band, y’see), or table leg (Figure 8.2). This rubber-band gimmick is great not only for that quick-and-dirty tripod, but also for moving the Flip to places you can’t reach. Just attach the camera to the end of a broom handle via rubber band, and you have a way to check your attic for zombies without exposing your head (and the delicious brains within it). Or, for purposes of blackmail, use this same broom-handle trick to surreptitiously catch your older sister making out with her boyfriend on the couch when they’re supposed to be studying. In a more practical vein, you can cock a virtual eye behind a noisy water heater or knocking engine.
Figure 8.2 The old rubber band-andbroomstick trick.
Light up Your Life
Video, like photography, is all about the light. The Flip camcorders have no lighting or white-balance controls; as with everything they do, light and white balance are handled automatically. They try their best, but they’re not going to produce terrific results under some conditions, such as extremely low light and some types of indoor lighting.
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Your job, therefore, is to help them along if you can. Here are some light suggestions for doing just that.
Using natural light The Flip cameras are tuned to use natural light that’s neither too bright nor too dark. When conditions permit, putting these tips to good use will make for better-looking video: Don’t shoot into the light. When the light is behind your subject, there’s a good chance that said subject is going to appear as nothing more than a silhouette. Unless you’re going for that shadow-againsta-bright-background look, move so that the sun is to the side or your back.
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Seek out the golden hours. The hours just after sunrise and just before sunset are termed the “Golden Hours” or “Magic Hours” by photographers because the light is so flattering—not too harsh, and with shadows that add depth to images.
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A word of caution: Mix a really orange sunset with a bright yellow or orange shirt that a subject is wearing, and your Flip camera may blow out these colors, making them far brighter than they really are.
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Avoid midday shooting. If your roommate is proposing to jump off the frat-house roof into a pitcher of beer, and you want to capture the event with your Flip camera, suggest that he perform in the morning or late in the afternoon. When you shoot under direct sunlight in the middle of the day, you lose shadows, which make video interesting. In such a situation, however, the event may be more compelling than the idea of making it look great on video. Use your judgment (as he’s certainly not using his).
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Use windows. If you have to shoot indoors during the day and have the option, try to position your subject near a window—not in front of a window, because of the backlighting problem, but to the side or facing it.
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Seek consistent light. When you’re looking for a place to shoot, camp in a location where the lighting is uniform—sun or shade; your choice. Just try to be where the lighting is the same (at least in terms of how it falls on your subject).
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If it’s a cloudy day, that’s all the better for shooting. The light will be consistent regardless of where you are.
Be careful moving from light to dark (and vice versa). It takes video cameras (particularly pocket video cameras) longer to adjust to changing lighting conditions than our eyes do. When you move from bright light to shadow or from shadow to bright light, your Flip camera takes a second or so to make the adjustment. During that adjustment, you may see blown-out (really white) images or a lot of darkness.
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Using indoor lights It may seem that indoor lights are the better way to go because, unlike the sun, you can control them. Indeed you can, but you need to know how. Here are a couple of tips that may help: Use full-spectrum lights. Shoot indoors using the light provided by a typical incandescent light bulb, and you may find that your videos have a yellow cast. If you’re seriously serious about lighting, consider getting a few full-spectrum light bulbs. Although they’re not complete miracle workers, they can help remove some of the unnatural color cast.
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Use multiple lights. If you can, use more than one light source indoors. A light behind the camera (and facing your subject), one overhead, and one to the side are ideal. The light facing your subject illuminates her face; the light to the side makes one side of her face brighter than the other (thus introducing a shadow and giving the face some depth and detail); and the overhead light makes the background visible, giving the entire shot some depth.
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Record Sound Audio
Great though rinky-tink piano accompaniment and subtitles may be, sound helps convey information and emotion in a movie. Your Flip camera has a microphone. There are ways that you can help it do its job (or work around it when it doesn’t do that job well enough).
Stay close A Flip camcorder’s microphone will pick up much of the sound in a large room, but the farther you get from the source of the sound, the quieter the sound becomes and the more “room” you hear in that sound. (By “room,” I mean that the microphone has the chance to pick up sound reflections from the walls, floor, and ceiling.)
Keep your ears open when choosing locations When you think about places to shoot, use your ears as well as your eyes. What may look like the perfect location can turn out to be wrong because it has too much traffic noise, planes keep flying over, or the place is so seismically active that car alarms keep going off.
Forget the mic altogether Convenient though a Flip’s mic may be, it’s not as good as a dedicated microphone. Unfortunately, the Flip camcorders don’t have an audio input for plugging in an external microphone. That doesn’t mean you can’t use one, however. Here’s how: 1. Frame your shot so that it shows the subject’s head and shoulders. t ip
If that subject is you, see the “Shooting Yourself” sidebar later in this chapter for pointers on framing.
2. Out of the frame, just below the subject’s shoulders, place a microphone. A USB mic on a desktop microphone stand will do.
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3. Plug that microphone into your computer, launch an audio editing application (I mention a program called Audacity a little later in the chapter), and start recording. 4. Start recording with your Flip. 5. When you’re done, switch off both devices, and save your audio recording as an MP3 file. 6. Import your video into Windows Movie Maker (Windows PC) or iMovie ’09 (Mac). Flip back to Chapter 5 for details on using Windows Movie Maker and Chapter 6 for the same story on iMovie ’09. 7. Import the MP3 audio file. 8. Align the audio file from the microphone with the video’s audio track. 9. When the audio file and track are in sync, mute the audio in the video track, and export your movie. You’ll wind up with video from the Flip and audio from your external microphone.
Fade those music tracks In Chapter 4, when I discussed FlipShare and the music tracks that you can apply to your movie, I told you that the music will be cut off abruptly at the end of the movie. You can put things right this way: 1. Assemble your movie in FlipShare. Go through the steps I outline in Chapter 4 to put together a movie, using the Movie command in the Create section of FlipShare. 2. In the Add Title and Credit Screens window, note the time of your movie (Figure 8.3). This time is how long you’ll need to make your music track.
Chapter 8: Tips and Techniques
171
Figure 8.3 Check out the length of your movie in the preview thumbnail. Time display
3. Download Audacity. Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) is a free, open-source audio editing application that’s available for Mac and Windows. 4. In Audacity, choose File > Open; then navigate to and open the music track you want to use. Audacity supports WAV, AIFF, AU, Ogg Vorbis, and MP3 files (but not AAC or WMA). 5. Select the portion of the audio that you want to use (and that will fit the time of your movie) by clicking the point of the track where you want the music to begin and dragging to the end of the selection. At the bottom of the Audacity window, you see the length of your selection in minutes and seconds, which helps you make a selection of the correct length (Figure 8.4). Figure 8.4 Selecting an audio track in Audacity.
Selection display
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
6. Choose Edit > Trim to trim the selection. Everything outside the selection disappears. 7. Choose Project > Align Tracks > Align with Zero to move the selection to the beginning of the track. 8. Click and drag over the last 3 or 4 seconds of the track, and choose Effect > Fade Out (Figure 8.5). This step fades the end of the track so that it doesn’t end abruptly. Figure 8.5 Fading a track in Audacity.
9. Choose Effect > Fade In to add a fade-in effect at the beginning, if you like. 10. Choose File > Export As MP3 to export your track. note
As you may remember, FlipShare can add only music files in the MP3 file format.
11. In FlipShare, move to the Include Background Music window; select the Use an MP3 from My Computer option; and click the Browse button to select the MP3 file you created in Audacity (Figure 8.6). 12. Give your movie a listen. In the preview thumbnail for your movie, click the Play button; then watch and listen to your movie. The soundtrack should fade at the end, just as you edited it to do.
Chapter 8: Tips and Techniques
173
Figure 8.6 Adding your faded track in FlipShare.
Frame Your Shots
I don’t know what your experience is, but a lot of the YouTube videos I watch have these little tiny people in them. No, I don’t mean people who aren’t very tall. I mean that in these videos, I see a fair amount of space on either side of people, and everything from their feet up is included. I wonder whether their creators have ever seen a movie or TV show. More often than not, when someone has his mug on your TV set or on the big screen, he fills up an awful lot of the frame—and for that to happen, he has to be shot from the waist (or higher) up. When you frame your shots, don’t be afraid to get close to your subject. Moving close may make her nervous, but you’ll get a better shot, and (as I mention earlier in this chapter) the sound will be better. Another reason to step close to your subject: The Flip cameras’ digital zoom feature makes your video look blockier. To prevent that blockiness, step close to your subject instead of using the digital zoom. You may be more intimidating to your subject, but the resulting video will look far better.
t ip
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
If, on the other hand, you’re shooting some kind of action that requires seeing the entire body—your brother dancing in front of a full-length mirror singing into a hairbrush or your best friend just about to take a header into a trash bin—by all means back up and catch everything.
Shooting Yourself It’s not difficult to frame someone else you’re shooting, but what do you do when you want to shoot yourself? Sure, you can hold the Flip camera at arm’s length and point it back at your face, which is a completely appropriate shot in some cases. But there may come a time when you want to shoot yourself in a more formal way— when you’re putting together an instructional video and need to talk to the camera without having it bounce around, for example. Full-size camcorders have an LCD display that flips around so that you can watch yourself while you’re filming. This display helps you ensure that you stay in the frame. You don’t have that luxury with a Flip camcorder, but you have a couple of ways to keep yourself in the frame: Set a mark for yourself. Set up your camera on a tripod (see “Three-legged shooting” earlier in this chapter), and point it at where you’ll be—the chair you’ll sit in, for example. Put something in that place that’s about your height—a broom, a mannequin, a passing stranger—and move the camera so that there’s a lot of “you” in the frame. Push the Record button, get into position, and go to it.
n
Use a mirror. If you want to make sure that you’re centered in the frame while the camera’s rolling (sometimes, in a tight shot, you can wriggle out of the frame without knowing it), set a mirror behind the Flip so that you have a general idea of what’s showing on its LCD (and, thus, in the frame).
n
Index 3ivx codec, 44 4:3 aspect ratio, 67, 70, 130, 137 16:9 aspect ratio, 67, 70, 130, 137 100VIDEO folder, 86–87 720p video, 19 1080 video, 19
A
Add Audio or Background Music pane, Movie Maker, 95 Add or Remove Video Effects dialog box, Movie Maker, 90 Add Selection to Project button, iMovie ’09, 116 Analyze Entire Clip button, iMovie ’09, 120 animal videos, 7–8 animated titles, 92 Apple Pro Training Series: QuickTime Pro Quick‑Reference Guide, 146 aspect ratios, 67, 70, 130, 137 assembling movies, 56–61 Attach Movie button, Movie Maker, 103 Audacity software, 171–172 audio clips. See also music; sound ducking feature, 123 editing, 171–172 fading in/out, 123, 172 lengthening/trimming, 98 normalizing, 124 recording, 169–173 sound effects, 125
Audio Skimming button, iMovie ’09, 124 Audio tab, iMovie ’09 Inspector, 123–124 Auto-Fit customization option, 34 automatic shutoff, 28 AutoMovie feature, Movie Maker, 94–95 Autoplay window, 88, 89 average bit rate, 12
B
Back button, Flip camcorders, 25 background music FlipShare movie, 59–60, 172–173 Movie Maker AutoMovie, 95 backgrounds, iMovie ’09, 127, 130 batteries installing in Flip Ultras, viii Pure Digital rechargeable, 21 recording time from, 7, 18, 21 Best Fit to File Size setting, 100 Best Quality for Playback on My Computer setting, 99–100 best-selling designs, 30, 31 bird feeders, 8 bit rates, 12–13 blip.tv Web site, 159, 161 broom-handle trick, 166 burning DVDs, 64–74 on a Macintosh, 72–74 in Windows Vista, 65–68 in Windows XP, 68–71
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
C
CafePress, 32, 39–40 Camcorder heading, FlipShare, 46 camcorders. See also Flip camcorders archiving movies to, 104 high-definition, 13, 17–21 pocket versus traditional, 2–6 Capture Video, Movie Maker, 85–86 capturing frames, 61, 63 Carlson, Jeff, 146 case designs, 29–40 choosing in Design Gallery, 30–32 creating in Pattern Generator, 34–38 sharing with others, 38–39 using your own images for, 32–34 CineMagic application, 68–71 Clip tab, iMovie ’09 Inspector, 120–122 clips. See audio clips; video clips codecs, 12 Collections pane, Movie Maker, 83 Colors palettes, Pattern Generator, 35 Completing the Saved Movie Wizard, 103 Compress To setting, 100 Computer heading, FlipShare, 46–48 computers HD video requirements for, 20 installing FlipShare on, 42–44 saving videos to, 52–53 configuration screens, 27–28 consistent light, 168 Contents pane, Movie Maker, 83 copying Movie Maker importing versus, 88 video clips in FlipShare, 49 covers for DVDs, 78 Create buttons, FlipShare, 54 Create DVD window, FlipShare, 64 Create Movie window, FlipShare, 56–57 Create Project button, iDVD, 74 credits in FlipShare, 58–59 in iMovie ’09, 132–133 in Movie Maker, 92–94, 97 Crop, Rotate, and Ken Burns button, iMovie ’09, 118–119 Crop feature, iMovie ’09, 118–119 customizing camcorders, 29–40 Design Gallery for, 30–32 Pattern Generator for, 34–38 sharing designs from, 38–39 using your own images for, 32–34
D
Dailymotion Web site, 159, 161 data rates, 161 date/time settings changing in FlipShare, 51 specifying on Flip camcorders, 27
deinterlacing circuitry, 19 Delete button, Flip camcorders, x, 26 Delete Locked message, 26 deleting video clips, x, 5, 25–26, 49 delivery features, 147–162 Design Gallery, 30–32 designing cases, 29–40 Design Gallery for, 30–32 Pattern Generator for, 34–38 sharing designs from, 38–39 using your own images for, 32–34 Digital Video Camera option, Movie Maker, 104 digital zoom, 15, 173 dissolve transition, 61 distributing movies, 102–104 DVDs and CDs for, 102–103 e-mail options for, 103 Web upload options for, 104 ducking feature, iMovie ’09, 123 duration options for titles, 94 for transitions, 91, 128, 134 DVDs, 64–78 applications for creating, 64–65 burning in Windows Vista, 65–68 burning in Windows XP, 68–71 burning on a Macintosh, 72–74 creating in FlipShare, 64 creating in iMovie ’09, 138 creating in Movie Maker, 102 label and cover design for, 77–78 ordering professionally produced, 74–78 warning about uploading, 76
E
Edit Movie feature, Movie Maker, 89–95 Edit Project pane, iMovie ’09, 113, 120, 132 editing software Audacity, 171–172 FlipShare, 4, 41–78 iMovie ’09, 105–143 Movie Maker, 79–104 effects iMovie ’09, 120, 121, 125 Movie Maker, 89–90, 91, 96 sound/music, 125 tasteful use of, 91 e-mailing links to FlipShare movies, 148–151 movies from Movie Maker, 103 encoders, 12 encoding options FlipShare, 159–160 iMovie ’09, 144–145 Movie Maker, 100–101, 102 end-point control, 55, 56 Event Library pane, iMovie ’09, 108, 110–111, 132 Events Browser pane, iMovie ’09, 111–112, 120, 132
Index experimentation, 6 Export Movie command, iMovie ’09, 143–144 exporting movies. See also sharing; uploading from FlipShare, 49, 62, 159–160 to hard drives, 143 for iDVD projects, 138 from iMovie ’09, 135–146 to iTunes, 136–138 to Media Browser, 138–139 to MobileMe Gallery, 141–143 from Movie Maker, 100–101 to QuickTime, 144–146 to YouTube, 139–141 external microphone, 169–170
F
Facebook Web site, 159, 161 fade in/out feature Audacity, 172 iMovie ’09, 123 fast-forward capability, 16, 21, 25 favorites, iMovie ’09, 116 Flash-format movies, 161 Flickr Web site, 159, 161 Flip camcorders advantages of, 2–6 computer requirements for HD, 20 customizing, 2, 29–40 ideas for using, 6–8 models of, 10–21 portability of, 3 saving videos to, 53 shaky footage and, 17, 164 steps for setting up, vii–viii turning on, viii, 23–24 using controls on, 22–28 zoom capability of, 15 Flip for Good designs, 30 Flip Mino camcorder, 16–17 customizing, 29–40 interface, 23 Flip MinoHD camcorder, 17–20 customizing, 29–40 interface, 23 Flip Ultra camcorder, viii, 13–15 Flip UltraHD camcorder, viii, 20–21, 22 Flip UltraSD camcorder, 20–21, 33 Flip Video camcorder, 10–11, 13 Flip Video Store, 30, 40 FlipShare, 4, 41–78 assembling movies in, 56–61 Camcorder heading, 46 Computer heading, 46–48 Create buttons, 54 delivery features, 147–162 DVD creation in, 64 e-mailing movies from, 148–151 exporting movies from, 49, 62, 159–160
177
Greeting Card option, 152–154 Help Window icon, 46 installing on computers, 42–44 interface overview, 45–54 Large format view, 51 List format view, 48–50 making movies with, 54–61 Movie Maker compared with, 80 moving clips within, 47 music added to movies in, 59–60, 172–173 MySpace uploads from, 155–157 Online button, 155 ordering professional DVDs from, 74–78 output formats in, 62 Play Full Screen button, 53 Save to Camcorder button, 53 Save to Computer button, 52–53 Share buttons, 53, 148 taking snapshots in, 61, 63 Thumbnail format view, 50–51 trimming clips in, 54–56 YouTube uploads from, 157–159 font options iMovie ’09, 128, 135 Movie Maker, 92 Forward button, Flip camcorders, 25 framing shots, 173–174 full high-definition video, 19 Full Screen mode, FlipShare, 53 full-spectrum lights, 168
G
GarageBand application, 125 golden hours, 167 Gorillapod tripods, 165 Greeting Card option, 152–154
H
H.264 codec, 12, 44, 161 handheld shooting, 164 HDMI connector, 21 Help Window icon, FlipShare, 46 high-definition video aspect ratio for, 67, 70, 130, 137 bit rates for, 13 computer requirements for, 20 definition of, 19 Flip camcorders capable of, 17–21 recognized by iMovie ’09, 107 resolution for, 13 sharing on the Web, 160 Highlights Movie style, 94 histogram, iMovie ’09, 122 hummingbird feeders, 8
I
iDVD software, 64, 72–74, 138 iLife sound effects, 125
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
image stabilization, 17, 120 iMovie ’09, 105–143 audio controls, 123–124, 135 creating new projects in, 114, 130, 133 Crop feature in, 118–119 Edit Project pane, 113 Event Library pane, 108, 110–111 Events Browser pane, 111–112 exporting movies from, 135–146 favorites displayed in, 116 importing clips into, 107–108, 115, 131 index of iPhoto ’09 clips in, 108 Inspector window, 119–124 interface overview, 108–130 launching/relaunching, 106–107, 108 making movies from scratch in, 133–135 Maps and Backgrounds Browser, 129–130 Movie Maker compared with, 105–106 Music and Sound Effects browser, 124–125 narrating movies in, 117–118 Photos Browser, 126 Project Library pane, 113–114 resource guide on, 146 storage of project files in, 139 themed movies created in, 130–133 Titles Browser, 126–128 toolbar features, 114–130 Transitions Browser, 128 Viewer pane, 112 iMovie ’09 and iDVD for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide (Carlson), 146 importing video clips in FlipShare, 52–53 in iMovie ’09, 107–108, 115, 131 in Movie Maker, 85–89 indoor lights, 168 Input Level slider, Movie Maker, 97 Inspector window, iMovie ’09, 119–124 Audio tab, 123–124 Clip tab, 120–122 Video tab, 122–123 installing batteries in Flip Ultras, viii FlipShare editing software, 42–44 interlaced video, 19 Internet connection settings, 101, 104 intimidation factor, 4 iPhoto ’09 customizing Flip Mino with images from, 32 image access from iMovie ’09, 126 importing video clips into, 107–108 iTunes exporting from iMovie ’09 to, 136–138 library view from iMovie ’09, 125
J
JPEG file format, 33
K
Ken Burns effect, 118
L
labels for DVDs, 77 Large format, FlipShare, 49, 51 LCD display, 11 lighting tips, 166–168 for indoor lights, 168 for natural light, 167–168 List format, FlipShare, 48–50 lithium-ion battery, 16 lossy compression, 12 low-light sensitivity, 8, 18
M
Macintosh computers Administrator accounts on, 44 burning DVDs on, 72–74 editing with iMovie ’09 on, 105–106 FlipShare output format on, 62 HD video requirements for, 20 installing FlipShare on, 43–44 Magic iDVD window, 73–74 Maps and Backgrounds Browser, iMovie ’09, 129–130 Mark Selection As Favorite button, iMovie ’09, 116 Media Browser, 138–139 menu bar, Movie Maker, 82 microphone built-in, 11, 169 external, 169–170 Microsoft Scanner and Camera Wizard, 88 midday sunlight, 167 Mild/Wild slider, 36 minus (–) button, Flip camcorders, 24 MobileMe Gallery, 141–143, 161 motion footage, 10 Motionbox Web site, 159, 161 Movie button, FlipShare, 56 Movie Maker, 79–104 AutoMovie feature, 94–95 burning CDs in, 102–103 distributing movies from, 102–104 DVD creation in, 102 effects in, 89–90, 96 e-mail options in, 103 encoding options in, 100–101, 102 enhancing movies with, 89–95 FlipShare compared with, 80 iMovie ’09 compared with, 105–106 importing video into, 85–89 interface overview, 81–85 making movies from scratch in, 95–98 music added to movies in, 95, 98 narration option in, 97–98 playing movies in, 84 saving movies in, 99–103 send to camcorder options, 104 titles and credits in, 92–94, 96–97 transitions in, 90–91
Index Web upload options, 104 workflow for, 80 Movie Setting pane, Movie Maker, 99–100, 102 movies. See also video clips assembling, 56–61 automatically creating, 94–95 background music for, 59–60, 95, 170–173 creating DVDs of, 64–78, 102 distributing, 102–104 effects in, 89–90, 96 e-mailing, 103 exporting, 100–101, 135–146 full-screen option for, 151 greeting cards from, 152–154 importing, 52–53, 85–89 making from scratch, 95–99, 133–135 naming and creating, 60 narration added to, 97 playing, 61, 84 saving, 99–103 sending to camcorders, 104 themed, 130–133 tips for shooting, 163–174 titles/credits in, 58–59, 92–94, 96–97, 126–128 transitions in, 61, 90–91 trimming clips for, 54–56 understanding rights to, 151–152 uploading to the Web, 104 MP3 files, 170, 172 MPEG-4 codec, 12, 44 m-to-infinity lens, 14 music. See also sound editing software for, 171–172 FlipShare movie, 59–60, 172–173 iMovie ’09 controls for, 124–125, 135 Movie Maker movie, 95, 98 Music and Sound Effects browser, iMovie ’09, 124–125, 135 Mute Speakers option, Movie Maker, 97 Mydeo Web site, 104 MyDVD Express application, 68 MySpace, 155–157 account setup, 155 uploading movies to, 156–157
N
naming movies, 60, 99 video clips, 49, 50 Narrate Timeline button, Movie Maker, 84, 97 narrating movies in iMovie ’09, 117–118 in Movie Maker, 97–98 natural light, 167–168 Neptune Web site, 104 Nero application, 65 New Project sheet, iMovie ’09, 114, 130, 133 Normalize Clip Volume button, iMovie ’09, 124 normalizing audio, 124
179
note taking, 6–7 NTSC video format, 67
O
Old Movie style, 94 Online button, FlipShare, 155 Open Camera Import window, iMovie ’09, 115 optical zoom, 15 output formats, FlipShare, 62
P
PAL video format, 67 Pattern Generator, 34–38 pausing video clips, 84 Photos Browser, iMovie ’09, 126 Play button, Flip camcorders, 24 Play Full Screen button, FlipShare, 53 Play/Pause button, Flip camcorders, ix, 25 playing video clips on Flip camcorders, 24–25 in FlipShare, 49, 50 in iPhoto ’09, 112 keyboard shortcut for, 84 in Movie Maker, 84 plus (+) button, Flip camcorders, 24 PNG file format, 33 pocket camcorders Flip lineup of, 10–21 high-resolution, 17–21 ideas for using, 6–8 shaky footage and, 17, 164 traditional camcorders versus, 2–6 zoom capability of, 15 point-and-shoot capability, 4 portability of camcorders, 3 power button, 23–24, 28 Preview Monitor pane, Movie Maker, 83–84, 93 previewing DVD projects, 71, 73 professionally produced DVDs, 74–78 progressive video, 19 Project Library pane, iMovie ’09, 113–114 Projects folder, iMovie ’09, 139 Publish button, iMovie ’09, 137, 139, 141, 143 Publish Movie window, 99, 102 Pure Digital ordering DVDs from, 75–78 personal technology by, 1–2, 29 Terms of Use agreement by, 151–152 uploading to Web site of, 148
Q
quick-and-dirty tripod, 166 QuickTime FlipShare output for, 62 iMovie ’09 export to, 144–146 reference guide on, 146
R
rechargeable battery pack, 21 Record button, Flip camcorders, 24
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The Flip Mino Pocket Guide
Recordable CD option, Movie Maker, 102 recording audio, 169–173 controls for, ix, 24 ideas for, 6–8 light indicating, 7, 27 Reject Selection button, iMovie ’09, 117 resolution high-definition video, 13, 19 LCD display, 11 rewind capability, 16, 21, 25 rights to movies, 151–152 Rotate feature, iMovie ’09, 119 Roxio Creator, 68 rubber-band gimmick, 166
S
Save to Camcorder button, FlipShare, 53 Save to CD option, Movie Maker, 102 Save to Computer button, FlipShare, 52–53 Save Exported File As window, iMovie ’09, 144–145 Save Movie Wizard, 99, 102, 104 Save to My/This Computer options, Movie Maker, 99 Save Settings message, 28 Save Snapshot button, FlipShare, 63 saving camcorder settings, 28 clips to camcorders, 53 clips to computers, 52–53 exported files from iMovie ’09, 144–145 movies in Movie Maker, 99–103 snapshots, 63 trimmed video, 56 video in FlipShare, 52–53 Select an AutoMovie Editing Style pane, 94 Send in E-Mail option, Movie Maker, 103 Send to DV Camera option, Movie Maker, 104 Send to the Web link, Movie Maker, 104 Set Audio Level button, Movie Maker, 84 Set Time and Date screen, 27 settings, Flip camcorder, 26–28 Share buttons, FlipShare, 53 Share by E-mail window, FlipShare, 149 Share Greeting Card window, FlipShare, 152–153 Share menu, iMovie ’09, 138 sharing, 5–6 case designs, 38–39 Flip videos, 53, 147–162 full-screen option for, 151 Greeting Card option for, 152–154 iMovie ’09 export for, 135–146 MySpace option for, 155–157 YouTube option for, 157–159 shooting video framing tips for, 173–174 handheld technique for, 164 lighting tips for, 166–168
sound recording with, 169–170 storage time available for, 10 tripods used for, 164–166 of yourself, 174 Show Timeline button, Movie Maker, 85 Smooth Clip Motion box, iMovie ’09, 122 Snapshot window, FlipShare, 63 snapshots, capturing, 61, 63 software Audacity, 171–172 FlipShare, 4, 41–78 iMovie ’09, 105–143 Movie Maker, 79–104 sound editing, 171–172 recording, 169–173 Sound Effects, iMovie ’09, 125 spacebar controls, 84, 112 Speed controls, iMovie ’09, 122 Split button, Movie Maker, 84 Stabilization feature, iMovie ’09, 120 Start/Stop Narration button, Movie Maker, 98 start-point control, 55, 56 still frames, 61, 63 Storyboard pane, Movie Maker, 84 streaming services, 160–162 styles iMovie ’09 Title Browser, 126–128 Movie Maker AutoMovie, 94 Styles palettes, Pattern Generator, 35 Swap Events and Projects button, iMovie ’09, 115 system requirements, 20
T
tabletop tripods, 165 Take Picture button, Movie Maker, 84 taking notes, 6–7 Tasks pane, Movie Maker, 82 Terms of Use agreement, 151–152 text iMovie ’09 options for, 128 Movie Maker options for, 92 themes FlipShare DVD, 70, 73 use of in iMovie ’09, 130–133 three-legged shooting, 164–165 Thumbnail format, FlipShare, 50–51 Thumbnail Size slider, iMovie ’09, 116 time/date settings. See date/time settings Timeline pane, Movie Maker, 85 tips and techniques, 163–174 for fading music tracks, 170–173 for framing shots, 173–174 for lighting subjects, 166–168 for recording sound, 169–170 for shooting yourself, 174 for steady shooting, 164–166
Index Title Overlay track, Movie Maker, 94 titles in FlipShare, 49, 58 in iPhoto ’09, 126–128, 134–135 in Movie Maker, 92–94, 96 Titles Browser, iMovie ’09, 126–128, 134 toolbar iMovie ’09, 114–130 Movie Maker, 82 transflective displays, 11 transitions FlipShare, 61 iMovie ’09, 128, 133–134 Movie Maker, 90–91 tasteful use of, 91, 134 Transitions Browser, iMovie ’09, 128, 134 transmissive displays, 11 Trim Video button, FlipShare, 50, 54–55 Trim window, FlipShare, 50, 55–56 trimming clips in FlipShare, 54–56 in Movie Maker, 95–96 tripods, 164–166 quick-and-dirty, 166 tabletop, 165 turning on camcorders, viii, 23–24 TV Out port, 11
U
uniform lighting, 168 Unmark Selection button, iMovie ’09, 117 uploading movies to the Web, 104, 156–162 projects for professional DVDs, 64, 76 USB connector, 11
V
video clips copying, 49 deleting, x, 5, 25–26, 49 exporting, 49, 62 importing, 52–53, 85–89 information about, 49 moving between, 25 naming, 49 playing, 24–25 rearranging, 57 sharing, 5–6, 53 snapshots from, 61, 63 transitions between, 61 trimming, 54–56, 95–96 video effects iMovie ’09, 120, 121 Movie Maker, 89–90, 91 tasteful use of, 91 video formats, 67 video sharing Web sites, 5, 159–162 MySpace, 155–157 YouTube, 139–141, 157–159
181
Video tab, iMovie ’09 Inspector, 122–123 video transitions FlipShare, 61 Movie Maker, 90–91 tasteful use of, 91 Video Upload window, FlipShare, 64, 74 Viewer pane, iMovie ’09, 112, 132 Vimeo Web site, 159, 161 Voiceover window, iMovie ’09, 117–118 volume controls Flip camcorders, 25 iMovie ’09, 123, 124, 135
W
Web sites Audacity, 171 CafePress, 39–40 Flip Video Store, 30 MySpace, 155–157 Pure Digital, 75, 148–151 YouTube, 139–141, 157–159 Webcasts, 6 window light, 167 Windows computers burning DVDs on, 65–71 FlipShare output format on, 62 HD video requirements for, 20 installing FlipShare on, 42–43 Movie Maker interface on, 81–85 Windows DVD Maker, 64, 65–68, 102 Windows Media files, 62, 103 Windows Movie Maker. See Movie Maker Windows Vista Autoplay window, 89 burning DVDs in, 65–68 installing FlipShare on, 43 Movie Maker interface in, 81–85 Windows XP Autoplay window, 88 burning DVDs in, 68–71 DVD-burning applications for, 65 installing FlipShare on, 42 Movie Maker interface in, 81–85 workflow, 80
Y
YouTube account setup on, 158 advantages of using, 162 exporting movies to, 139–141 FlipShare uploads to, 157–159 upload size limits on, 161
Z
Zoom Timeline In/Out buttons, Movie Maker, 85 zooming camcorder controls for, ix, 24 Movie Maker timeline, 85 optical versus digital, 15
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