In our family visit to Louisville this weekend, I got to see my friend Rick Kelley, who had taken my recommendation to get a Flip. He chose the Mino instead of the Ultra, though, because he has a house full of boys. The Ultra’s AA batteries likely would have been regularly cannibalized for use in a GameBoy; with the Mino’s rechargeable battery, that’s not a concern.
So here’s some video I shot of Rick’s Mino, using my Ultra.
Here, for comparison, is some video of me handling an Ultra. I shot it using my webcam and did a direct upload to YouTube, so it was optimized for speed instead of quality. But you can get the idea of the relative size and design aesthetics of the two models.
In the 100-level podcasting courses, we used the built-in MacBook Pro microphone and Audacity as the source for audio files. (See Podcasting 103).
Here’s an example of one of those files, from Podcasting 109. You’ll note some hum and a bunch of background noise.
This course, Podcasting 201, is about a MacGyveresque hack that enables you to get much better sound quality.
One of the limitations of the Flip as a video camera is that it doesn’t have an audio input jack, so you’re stuck with its built-in microphone. That means that in a noisy environment, such as I experienced at the U.S. Transplant Games, background noise can be bothersome.
But if you’re not concerned about the video you’re getting, the Flip can actually be a pretty nifty audio recording device.
Here, for example is the audio from Podcasting 110, which I recorded using a Flip Ultra.
So how do you do that?
First, because you aren’t concerned about the picture, you can hold the Flip right next to your mouth to get maximum pick-up of your voice. Here is a frame grab from when I recorded Podcasting 110.
Using the Flip for close-range audio recording
Nice angle, huh?
At any rate, once you’ve captured the audio by holding the camera nice and close to your mouth, all you need to do is open the .AVI file from the Flip in QuickTime Pro (for Mac) or a similar Windows program, and export the audio as a .WAV file.
Then you can open the file in Audacity and edit in the same way as you would in Podcasting 103, saving your edited file as an mp3.
If you have another kind of video camera, such as a mini-DV, that also could be used to capture audio, but the steps involved would be much more complicated. With the Flip, it’s just about as easy as using the built-in computer microphone, but with much better quality.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m still going to be mostly putting the Flip to its intended use. But until I get another source for audio in my personal podcasts, it will be my digital audio recorder too.
My son-in-law’s brother is getting married today in Lafayette, Indiana, and I’m producing a wedding video as our gift to the couple, so we turned it into a five-day partial family getaway.
It seems my youngest daughter, Ruth, is “in a relationship” (to use the Facebook lingo), with a young man from Louisville, Kentucky whom she has known through her Bible Bowl competitions. The Kelley family lives 676 miles from Old Main, as we learned on our long but uneventful Thursday drive. And they’re “only” 180 miles from Lafayette, so we left our three youngest children with the Kelleys while we drove up for the rehearsal and Groom’s Dinner yesterday and wedding today. We’ll head back to Louisville early tomorrow morning for church and to spend the day, before returning to Minnesota on Monday.
Note to potential Old Main burglars: Even through we’re away from Austin, you should be aware that our next-door neighbor, Mark May, is a deputy sheriff. He has a gun, and he knows how to use it.
Rick Kelley took Friday morning off so he and April could take Lisa and me out for brunch at Lynn’s Paradise Cafe, a well-known Louisville hangout. We saw a picture of Hillary Clinton inside as one of the high-profile visitors, and there’s a huge wall map near the restrooms on which patrons can place a sticky dot representing their hometown. The whole U.S. is pretty well plastered with dots.
We had a wonderful time with Rick and April, but as we came out to our cars afterward, we saw the damage from a hit-and-run driver:
Apparently someone had pulled out of the alley you see behind that nice police officer, clipped our rear bumper and shoved our Grand Caravan into the Kelleys’ Camry. Thankfully their car wasn’t damaged.
And thanks also to the power of duct tape from a nearby Home Depot, we were able to get back on the road with at least a temporary fix.
I received notice yesterday that my listing of Chancellor Conversations in the iTunes Store Podcast Directory, which I submitted as part of the Podcasting 110 course, was approved.
I had always wondered how those links worked, in which podcasters put little “Subscribe in iTunes” icons on their pages. Now I know. Apple sends the code, and you just hyperlink from your page.
Here’s what the Chancellor Conversations page looks like in the iTunes directory (click the image to enlarge):
I hope you’ll subscribe in iTunes and continue to learn about social media with me.
