TechCOW - The Geek Within

Networking giant Cisco has sent 550 pink slips this weekend to employees of FLIP Video, the most popular hand held video camera in the US. I own a couple of these and I am also shocked about this decision by John Chambers and his men but this is apparently the only thing they can do in this situation. The Flip hasn't been selling well in the US Market since a lot of competitors also ventured into the same gadget. The price difference is huge with Flip pegged at under 200 dollars and the profit from it wasn't as it was expected to be. Though I have been a huge Flip Ultra user these past few years, I thought they were stable and can provide after sales support. They didn't concentrate on providing so and the technical issues of each unit were piling up. The forum was their only channel and things like these can't be manually fixed. They usually throw it out if it is broken. Not a good investment even for a cheap camera.

As for where those employees will go, no one knows but since it did perform poorly this year I hope their decision to move the UMI into enterprise would bear something good. A lot of UMI users already know how expensive the unit is and with that bundled with Verizon or whatnot for connections it'll be hard to recuperate from the losses the already incurred. If money from this project would not increase this year. UMI might be the next one to say goodbye.

In the meantime.. here's John Chambers calling ducks inside the office... LOL

I am planning to get a Flip Ultra HD that would be able to get me 2 hours of recording. I also wanted to swap my Flip since I think I saw that it had no HD capability. I am going for HD since I am gunning for the clearer picture. I plan to use it for video coverage too so if I would be editing something like a wedding perhaps I would get crisp images on it like what I was thinking when I got one in the first place. Someone just gave it to me and making this on on HD via a short swap (because they prefer a MINO) is indeed going to be great!

The 8 GB storage would definitely matter and since it is dedicated it will regulate itself as far as battery life is concerned. If I use regular rechargeable batteries it would have 2.5 hours worth of recording but if I use Energizer we would have 6.5 hours instead. Now isn't that lovely! Hehehe.

Today I edited something on the FLIPSHARE Software that came with my Flip Video Recorder. It is performing quite well and doesn't hog that much resources on my computer. I plan to have this together with the Windows Movie Maker software on my computer when editing videos. The Flipshare software has some small problems particularly branding the video itself, the start and end credit function on it is too big and you cannot put that much content on it aside from that default text. The flip logo at the end was good though and you can choose to and not to use it. I have the option to add audio to it but since youtube and facebook detects problems with audio properties, they ask you to either remove it or replace it with whatever they have on stock. Without taking credit on the audio that is just one big drawback!

I want to do video editing professionally and will try to do it on this one first. Let's see what this would perform once I get to see events on it too. Low light performed okay but it is not like infrared that can see in the dark. It is pretty much just like the naked eye and for that, it seems okay.