iPhlip: Flip Mino HD

Man these past few weeks have been busy, this time of year is always crazy and I'm always running around trying to get everything I need done in the inadequate amount of time I have to do it in...but anyways, I figured I'd fill you all in on a new toy I picked up called the Flip Mino HD. I'm going to come right out and say it, if you don't already own a video camera and you have kids or are recording important family stuff, don't buy a Flip, get a real camcorder first! I bought the Flip HD because I've was given a Flip Mino (non-HD) to test out for about a week or so to use earlier this year and found it pretty fun to have around, since Apple still doesn't allow me to record video with my iPhone. When the HD version came out I decided to give it a go, but low and behold a couple other similar products came out around the same time so I wanted to give them all a go to see which I liked better. I decided to really test out the Kodak Zi6 and the Flip Mino HD when it came down to it as most of the other similar products just didn't seem to be built all that well. I originally intended to go out and shoot video specifically for this review using both my FX1 and the Flip for a side by side comparison, but I've been just been too busy for that, so what I've decided to do instead is throw up a compilation of various video clips in varied lighting conditions to run the gamet of the situations you might find yourself recording video in. I originally was procrastinating on getting this up online because I originally thought I'd have to edit it all in Final Cut (a awesome app, but a pain to get quick clips edited), but I just got iLife 09, and the new iMovie was able to handle the footage just fine. I threw some clips together, didn't spend a whole lot of time on this, but wanted you to get a broad range of lighting examples... so you'll see that the Flip wouldn't be ideal for spelunking! I didn't use iMovie's stabilization feature, so you'll see a little shake due to the small size and light weight of the Flip. I'm fairly steady, but this video could still make you sea-sick, you've been warned! (just kidding)

(the end of the video alludes to an upcoming blog post...check back very soon)

The Kodak Zi6 has some nice features, such as removable/expandable memory (the Flip has a permanent 4GB built-in...no upgrading later) and the double edged sword of AA batteries...I say this because if you're out camping or just out with friends and your battery kicks out, you need to go find a computer to charge up the Flip, whereas you can just toss in a couple AA's from your local Walmart or convenience store. This however makes the Zi6 a bit larger and heavier, and ultimately I wanted something that was smaller (the Flip is about 1/2" smaller in every dimension) that I would be more likely to take everywhere I go. There are two other aspects of the Zi6 that made me want to keep it too, better contrast in the video as well as a larger LCD screen. The Flip has a 1.5" display, definitely not good for showing to more than 1-2 people at a time, the 2.4" display on the Kodak isn't huge but is definitely nicer for group viewing. The other primary trade-off between the two is the lenses. The Kodak has a slightly slower lens (f/2.8 vs f/2.4) so the Flip performs better in low light (Flip claims down to 1.4 lux) although the Kodak can focus much more closely, all the way down to two inches in macro mode (~28 inches in normal viewing), where the Flip has a fixed focus of about 5 feet (1.5 meters).

As you can probably tell from the above videos, this is not something you would want to record an episode of Lost on, nor would I recommend it for important family events like birthday parties, weddings, family reunions, kid's sports, ect. I would, however, recommend it (or the Zi6) for use as a backup device to always have with you even when you're not expecting to need to record something, it quick to turn on, dead-easy to use and small enough to carry everywhere. It also makes a fantastic gift for kids and teens who want to upload video onto Youtube and share with their friends. The Flip I think will become like the gateway drug for young kids who want to get into video but don't have parents that want to risk buying a $600 camcorder that gets used once or twice and spends the next 4 years collecting dust in the closet. Both products come with really simple software that allows you to do some basic editing (although I find Flip's software far more stable and faster) and do a direct upload to Youtube or Myspace. You'll notice that I've uploaded my videos to Vimeo for this test, and that is because Vimeo supports better image quality so you can get a better feel of the actual results out of these cameras.

What this also means, is now that I don't have to take out and setup all my HD Sony production gear to record things like this (wireless mics, tripods, firewire cables, ect.), I might actually start integrating some video clips into this blog, just maybe though...LOL! BTW, check out Armin's review... he was quicker to write a review than I was :(

Camera of the Year

Hope everyone had a great holiday and a happy New Year! I've been absent from updating my presence here on the internet for a LONG time. The past month or so has been total madness, I literally worked every day from the 11th of December until the 30th with the only exception being Christmas, and sometimes Christmas with the family sometimes feels like work, LOL. So I'm realizing the 3 or so posts I started working on about stuff over the past month will probably not get done so I'm starting fresh with this one. I just happened upon this hot camera today and just had to have it, so I took it(no I didn't steal it)... it had been ABANDONED! Thrown away! This will be the camera I use at all of my weddings and events in 2009 (the lens is a little wide for portraits, so I'm just going to have to suck it up and use the D3 for those I guess...) Without further ado, I present the Apple QuickTake 200...

The what? That's right you read it right, the camera no one had ever heard of is now in my poessesion. Apple apparently made three digital camera models over a decade ago in 1994-1997 (the product line was killed when Steve Jobs returned). The one now in my possession is the third model the QuickTake 200 which sports a rockin' .3MP (thats right point-three mega pixels...you know, for those 1/2" by 1/4" prints) and a beautiful 1.5" LCD display. Please don't be jealous, I know you other photogs just bought your 5D Mark II's and D3X's and are now kicking yourselves. LOL! (please note: I'm not seriously going to use this thing...it only takes upto 32 photos with the largest memory card it will support, this will be a new paperweight for me)

Anyway, I didn't get around to doing a proper product shot of these, just a quick shot with my TV as a light source and a lens cloth as a backdrop..maybe if I have some time off this week I'll get around to doing a better shot for your viewing pleasure. In addition I hope to finally go out and field test my customized Flip Mino HD this week and share comparison clips between the Flip and a "real" video camera.

Game changer...

I usually don't like to post about things I haven't actually spent time using or was not present for, but this is too big and most people won't have heard about it (and most won't for a while until this company starts to pick up speed). About a year or so ago a company called RED decided to build a video camera called RED ONE, but this wasn't a regular consumer video camera, it was a fullblown professional digital cinema system that is completely modular. Not only that, this system is able to produce video at 4k resolution at 30fps (4k is around 2X 1080P high definition). The tag line of this company is "making obsolescence obsolete". This is something they have taken to a whole new level with their two new product lines that have been announced only a few days ago. They unveiled the EPIC and SCARLET systems which they refer to as DSMC's which stands for Digital Stills and Motion Camera...yeah that's right, I said Digital Stills (hence why I'm blogging about it). RED has gone and made a modular DSLR. Stop the presses, roll out the red carpet (no pun intended) and alert the media! Now for the really cool stuff!

You buy a "brain" of whichever system you want to go with...then you get to decide what components to buy to do what you want to do! If you want a shoulder mount video camera that shoots at 3K at 120fps, you can do that, if you want a full blown cinema studio over-the-top monster camera...at 28k resolution at 24fps...yeah you can do that too! On the still photo side you get to choose your resolution from 4.6MP (megapixels) all to way to a mind-bottling (like it's so crazy your mind gets trapped in a bottle) 261MP!!!!!!! And the best part of all of this? You won't have to buy new lenses when you decide to move up into the big leagues, that's right you can strap on your best Nikon, Canon, PL and Mayima lenses on and start shooting both photos AND video!

Oh and one more thing...coming soon: 3D!!! Oh yeah...that's why I said GAME CHANGER!

Check out RED.com for more info. As much as I love my Nikons...this is a very good thing for the industry and I hope they sell LOTS and LOTS of cameras!

Fresh Coat of Paint...

I recently decided my main website was a little bland and I definitely hated not being able to display my images at sizes larger than 800X450 (a non-standard aspect ratio for photographs). I've decided to rebuild my site and it now supports resolutions of 1200X800 (I could set it higher, but right now most visits to the page are screen resolutions of 1280X800 and 1400X900, so most will be able to view at almost full screen!!!). The actual interface design changes a bit, but it's more of an evolution rather than a complete top-to-bottom redesign. A lot of the visual elements and color scheme stays the same, just the content and the resolution of the content changes. Also now when viewing a gallery you have the ability to view a 'thumbnails' view or email a link of any image to friends or family, which is really cool! So if you see a picture on the site you just HAVE to show someone, you can email them a link directly to the one you want them to see! (Tip of the day for Mac users: You can select a portion of the screen for a "screen shot by clicking "command-shift-4", I've been asked about that numerous times...just figured I'd fill in everyone who didn't already know)

Here I've posted a quick screenshot of the before and after, see how much empty space there was around the old one? Keep in mind these images were taken on a monitor with a resolution of 1920X1200, so your display will most likely show less empty space.

Look at all that empty space not being used...so bland!

Complete redesign, menu options on the bottom, larger display, no more boring white background!

Thumbnails view inside of a gallery...

Email pop-up window for emailing images to friends and family!

So what do you think? I hope to be finished getting everything the way I want it by the end of the day (Friday) so I can go ahead and make it live, until I do the old site will still be visible.

Feeling DROOBY...

I just received my Drobo 2.0 on Thursday, and let me tell you...I'm excited! I used to use a grand total of 15 external hard-drives (16 if you include both drives in my RAID 1 system...and this doesn't include internal drives I just have laying around) to store all my media on. Why the ridiculous number? Because I was afraid of data loss! So for every 1TB (1TB=1024GB or 1000GB depending on what system you go by) of storage I needed, I had 2TB to make sure if a drive died I'd have it backed up. Since quite a few of those drives were 500GB Western Digital My Books, this means I need 4(FOUR!!!) drives to store 1TB of needed space (2 for storage, 2 for backup). Some of my drives were larger, but I currently have about 8TB of storage total that I am using. So there's two questions that I'm going to answer that you probably would ask me if you were standing in front of me right now...

One of several shelves that hold my storage and battery backups...just in case...






8 internal drives, 2 external and a Dundee award (from "The Office" for the 2 people that don't watch the show)

1st: "You have how many drives? Why?"

The reason why I have so much storage is for keeping all the photos of all of your beautiful faces and the beautiful places I've been to backed up in triplicate, as well as organizing all of my digital media ranging from a huge iTunes music library to old family photos, to about ton of movies and TV episodes. Yes, all of my movies and TV shows on my drives are LEGALLY bought and I own all of them on DVD (some I bought on iTunes) and rip them to my computers so I can watch them over my network on my computers or sync with my iPhone, without having to track down the disc and waiting for it to load in a DVD player. Even with 8TB of storage, I barely have 800GB free across all of my drives. I am a pack-rat of digital media...I have an addiction...

Glossy...SUPERglossy!


Doesn't get much less complicated than this!


FW800 + USB2.0 = Awesome!

2nd: "What on Earth is a Drobo?"

A Drobo is an amazing piece of technology. It is very much like RAID 5 array, but it is self-healing and you can mix and match drives and upgrade your storage at any time. So what's RAID 5? RAID stands for redundant array of independent drives(or disks), which is used in computers and servers to either provide very fast data transfers OR very solid backups of you data. RAID 5 is designed to backup data across 3 or more drives in such a way that allows any one of the drives to completely fail without losing any data (meaning you can recover you data and then replace the drive. This allows for massive amounts of storage with very minimal risk of loss of important data. The downside of RAID 5 is that if one of the drives fail, you have to pull your data off, wipe the drives clean, buy a new drive and rebuild the RAID from scratch...BIG pain! Big waste of time! Not to mention RAID 5 systems are pretty pricey.

What makes the Drobo so unique is that if a drive fails, you can simply pop it out and throw in a different drive (ANY capacity, doesn't have to be the same) and the Drobo will automatically shift the data around to make sure that you data is again backed up across all drives in it and your data is protected. I've had a number of hard drive enclosures and hard drive power supplies die on me, and 1-2 drives fail on me too. Now if TWO drives fail simultaneously (which would be almost impossible...note that I said almost...like finding an unused lottery ticket on the ground that's the billion dollar winner...)that's when you'll lose data. That's why I still plan to use some of my existing externals just as a tertiary backup of really important stuff like my family and my client's photos.

Massive nest of mess...

Another big reason I got one is that I'm sick of having to dig through a GIGIANTIC rats nest of power cables, USB and Firewire cables just to figure out which of them kicked the bucket. With this guy, I have 1 power cable and 1 FireWire cable to worry about...down from 4 of each with my current setup! Drobo can store upto 4 SATA drives and depending on what drives you throw in there can give you up to 4.1TB (usable storage, not including space reserved for backups [as of this post 1.5TB drives were the largest available]) but with hard drive sizes ever increasing, you will eventually be able to throw four 4TB drives in there! I'm starting off with just the one Drobo 2.0 (with Firewire 800...yes Steve! IEEE1394 is still very much needed these days!) and will be dumping a couple of my drives in it to save on space, power outlets, cables and overall headache.


Snapshot of Drobostation software seeing my drives, but also...not seeing my drives?

Also I feel it is fair to say that I definitely had some problems with my unit initially, but I want to blame it on the drives I was using, not the Drobo itself. I found 4 250GB SATA drives I was using as a pair of RAID 0 systems I had in a desktop I built 3-4 years ago, that I was no longer using (back when I was a PC junkie, and 250GB's was HUGE!). I had some wierd formatting issues that I'm working out with Drobo Support, but I bought a couple of new SATA drives to throw into my Drobo to start from sratch and all seems to be functioning perfect...for now. I won't wipe my data off the old drives for a couple weeks just to be on the safe side for now though. If I'm thrilled with Drobo (and I expect to be) I'll order another one to hold another set of drives to further simplify my life! As Leo Laporte would say, "I'm feeling Droooooooby!"

My initial impressions (outside of the formatting/won't mount properly issue...which again I think was a problem with my drives) are extremely positive. I open up boxes of a TON of new electronic devices, and except for Apple products, the experience is very bland. Drobo was packed in a really nice foam enclosure and a "muslin" type wrap and even as unimportant as this may seem, the little extra touches go a loooonnnggg way to making you feel like you just invested in a high-quality product...not a piece of junk. Also very rarely are such high quality power cables and power supplies included. Usually hard drives, PCs, enclosures, ect. all come with cheapo $1 cables that feel like dental floss. I've never seen such a thick FW800 cable in my life! Again, this may seem trivial but it helps ease that buyers remorse syndrome when you've spent $500 on a box to hold hard drives. Build quality of the Drobo is top notch and feels like it could withstand a cannonball. My only complaint is the front cover is extremely glossy and seems to be a bit of a dust magnet, and glossy plastic is kinda hard to get dust off of (it tends to just slide around avoiding your attempts to remove it). I doubt this will become a major concern; after all, it will just be sitting on a shelf next to my computers...it isn't something that needs to be spotless at all times. Check back in a few weeks to this post for a followup on performance and reliability!


Also...I wanted to get this post up quick before I forgot I ever starting typing it, so I haven't gotten around to taking high-quality review photos for this like I did for the SB900/Sony a350 reviews...all these images are just quick snapshots with my iPhone, hopefully if I get time I'll swap out these images for better ones soon.

UPDATE: Well I've had my Drobo up and running for about 2.5 weeks or so, and the thing has been running like a champ. It hasn't dismounted on me even once, keeps up with streaming video over an Apple TV, while watching something else Macbook Pro over the network WHILE watching a yet another movie on the Mac Mini it is connected to. This empirical test was also done during a file transfer to the Drobo in excess of 25GB!!! The only strange thing I've encountered with it is a truly bizzare Scifi type noise when the drives start spinnning up after the computer put itself to sleep. That could be related to something with powerlines with my audio system or battery backup unit, but it's truly odd. The only way I could describe the noise is as what you would expect a ray-gun from a 1960's Scifi movie would sound like if it was charging up to fire, like a bwoooooppp!!! Imagine four separate drives spinning up in unison while a low RPM fan kicks in as well...there you go! I've swapped out drives several times since the inital setup and each time it was able to shift my data around without any problems, I even tried a disk swap while transferring files to the Drobo, although I would recommend avoiding that whenever possible.

To put it simply, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this product and definitely plan on getting at least 1 more in the next 6 months or so. Any photographer, videographer, or really anyone with something to lose (data I mean) should get one of these, even if you only put a couple 250GB drives in to hold you personal photos and videos from vacations and family events...NOTHING in the world is more important than your family and the images you have to remember them by, I learned this first hand about a month ago when my grandfather died and my family had virtually no good photos of him that weren't heavily faded or washed out from the passing of time. My only suggestion is that oyu make sure your drives WORK before you put them in, that was the cause of my frustration the first few days. Also keep in mind that it could easily take several hours for the Drobo to optimize itself again if you replace a small drive with a very large drive. When I replaced my 250GB with a 1TB drive it took about 10 hours since I had another two 500GB drive and a 1TB in it already.