Lamenting a Loss…a Little

Several SMUGgles anticipated my devastation at today’s news that Cisco is shutting down its Flip camera business.

Or at least they thought I would be interested, since I have written so frequently about the Flip, starting with this review in 2008. I had posts on:

You get the idea. It’s no secret I love the straightforward simplicity of the Flip. Others have cited the external microphone jack on the Kodak. I don’t hate the Kodak, but the flippy thing feels flimsier, and you need to buy a flash memory card. The Flip just comes ready to go.

Or at least it used to.

So what do I think?

First, this is a classic case of the disruptive technology being disrupted by others, in line with what Clayton Christensen writes about in his Innovator’s Dilemma series. The Flip “wasn’t good enough” for the best customers of Sony, and so Sony ceded the low end of the market. Eventually Pure Digital (which Cisco bought for over $500 million) kept improving the Flip until it became, for most people, more than good enough, including HD video. And certainly a better value than the old tape-based cameras.

Now the Flip has all sorts of competitors to provide video on the go, including various smart phones for which the “not good enough” stage is quickly passing.

I’m not going to get into the business decisions of Cisco, and whether it could have spun the business off or sold it to someone. I’ve got to believe that if Cisco management thought they could gain something by selling the business instead of laying off 500 employees, they would have done it.

One upshot is the Flip is going to become the generic term for this type of camera. Instead of a Flip camera that’s a brand, we will refer to flip cameras.

What will I do?

First, I might buy another Flip Ultra HD while I still can. It’s not like they wear out or will magically quit working because production is shutting down. Batteries are rechargeable, and you can also use standard AAs.

I also might consider upgrading my iPhone. I’m on a 3G. I didn’t get the 3GS and haven’t taken the plunge for the iPhone 4. My phone doesn’t take video, and since my AT&T contract expired almost a year ago, I’m free to explore options. I might just wait for the next version, since they seem to come out in the Summer.

But mainly, I’ll probably get a little nostalgic. The Flip made a huge difference for me. I’ve recorded a lot of my kids’ basketball games, first in SD and then HD. I’ve had a great experience with the Flip, and it has made turnaround on video shoots almost instantaneous. It seems odd that the most popular video camera in the world isn’t going to be made anymore.

One thing I know for certain, though, is that the demise of the Flip isn’t going to make flip video any less prevalent. Low-cost consumer-grade video is going to continue improving in quality and getting cheaper. It will just be done under a different brand name. And flip will become the generic term.

What’s your favorite Flip story?

Web Video 105: Why you should always use a tripod with a Flip

SMUG doesn’t have a formal curriculum in Web video (come to think of it, none of our curriculum is really formal in the accreditation sense.) I guess what I should say is SMUG doesn’t have a curriculum series in Web video.

That may change, but for now here is the first post in what might become a series.

I didn’t start with 101 for the course number, because I can think of some lessons that would be more introductory or basic than this one. But this is something you should learn early and take to heart:

Always use a tripod when shooting video with a consumer-grade video camera.

The videos below show the difference a tripod makes. The first is a compilation of highlights from my son Joe and nephew Tom, in their first few games of the high school basketball season. I’m using a WordPress.com blog as the team booster site. I used a Facebook group a couple of years ago to do the same for my daughter’s team. All of the video from these first games was shot using a tripod:

Last night, however, when the Austin boys played John Marshall High School in Rochester, I realized upon arriving at the game that I had left the camera base that connects to my tripod attached to my other camera. So I had to shoot the whole game holding the camera in my hand.

And while I haven’t yet edited the highlight video for the whole game (which Austin won by the palindromic score of 74-47), here’s one snippet that was particularly fun for me as a dad:

I really wish you could tell that was my son, Joe, but because I had a hand-held camera, it’s considerably more blurry than the earlier games. So please just take my word for it.

I think the other factor is that I was a little closer to the court than usual, and therefore had to move the camera more quickly to keep up with the action, which increased blurriness.

So, to summarize the lesson:

  1. Always bring a tripod.
  2. If you goof up and forget to bring a tripod and are shooting action footage, get some distance away to avoid introducing extra movement.
  3. If you are shooting an interview or something at close range, find some other surface (a box, a stack of books, etc.) upon which you can set the camera.
  4. Don’t mess with the Austin Packers. 😉

Seriously, it was pretty cool to get to see and capture my son’s first dunk in a high school basketball game. And I always try to turn these moments into teaching opportunities.

It’s the life of a Chancellor.

‘Tis the gift to be simple…

[ratings]

I had the delightful experience yesterday of meeting Dr. Carl May (@CarlRMay), a British collaborator of Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Victor Montori (@vmontori) on the concept of minimally disruptive medicine. I was honored that he wanted to meet with me during his visit to Mayo, and based on something he said during coffee I asked (or rather compelled) him to share his perspective on what makes social media valuable and successful in health care, and what he appreciates about our Mayo Clinic approach.

Here is some of what he had to say (shot in front of the famous bronze doors of the Plummer building):

Dr. May had earlier said that what he appreciates about our Mayo Clinic YouTube videos is that they are what the Quakers might call “plain” (although I’m not certain members of the Society of Friends would go for using video at all. But maybe I’m over-interpreting.”) Still, one of the famous Quaker (check that…Shaker) ditties extols the virtues of simplicity:

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

I appreciated Dr. May’s compliments and wanted to share and react to them to illustrate a few points.

  1. It’s always good to have a video camera with you. If I hadn’t had my Flip camera, I would not have been able to capture this video. I almost always carry a camera in my coat pocket or laptop bag. That enables me to take advantage (in the best sense of the word) of opportunities.
  2. We do our best to make the quality of video the best it can be, given the circumstances. I would have like to have had a tripod to keep the camera completely steady, but it’s most important to get the video. It also would have been better to perhaps be a step back from him, but we were in front of a door through which people were entering and exiting, and it was slightly drizzling. We needed to be closer. And I also wanted to be sure viewers could hear him. Thus, being closer was the right solution for the situation.
  3. Unadorned video does appear more genuine and authentic, but we don’t pursue that for its own sake. The point is to be nimble and cost-effective, making valuable information and stories available. Some of the videos we put on our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel are from TV news segments our team produces, and others may be extended sound bites from those same broadcast-quality interviews, like this one on deep brain stimulation. Having those in the mix is great for YouTube, and the point is to make good information available in a nimble, resourceful way. If you have some video shot for TV with a broadcast-quality camera and lighting, by all means use that on YouTube too. But if the only video you put up is highly polished you will have some problems, which I will discuss in a future post.

Finally, here is a video of Dr. Montori discussing minimally disruptive medicine, which is among the videos Dr. May appreciated:

A New Van for Bekah and Ruthie

This evening as I traveled to Winona for the #WSUPRSSA presentation on social media, I got to meet my youngest daughters and swap vehicles with them, so they would have reliable college transportation. Here’s the video I shot when they saw it for the first time. Having video also enables Lisa to get in on the fun, even though she wasn’t able to be there.

This also gives me a chance to show the WSUPRSSA group how easy it is to write a blog post.

Proving Moore’s Law

I’m fascinated by hard drives.

I have been ever since the mid ’80s, when my brother-in-law, Lane, and I both had Apple IIe computers with 128K floppy disks, and he blew me away by getting a 5 megabyte hard drive to store data for his farm bookkeeping program.

The cost: $1,800. And it seemed unfathomable he would ever fill it.

Moore’s Law (from a paper Intel co-founder Gordon Moore published in 1965) suggests that computing power (or data storage) that can be purchased for a given price doubles every 18 months.

In this post, based on my recently acquired custom of Black Friday hard drive shopping, I want to prove Moore’s Law for you.

I usually get up early on the Friday after Thanksgiving to take advantage of the electronics sales, and one place I typically go is Staples. Two years ago, I bought a 500 gigabyte hard drive there for about $70 (after rebate.) That was 100,o00 times the storage Lane bought in 1986 for about $3,700 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Last year, I bought a 600 gigabyte drive, again for about $70. Especially with my use of the Flip video camera, my “need” for storage has increased.

This year, I bought a terabyte drive (1,000 gigabytes) for $70. So in essence I got 200,000 times the storage Lane bought 23 years ago, for less than 2 percent of the price.

Granted, this was a door-buster sale. But even at full price for one of these drives, it’s mind-boggling.

And actually, I didn’t just get one drive; I bought two. In addition to the terabyte drive, I got another 500 GB drive that is powered by the USB connection. That makes it extremely lightweight, so I can carry it with me at all times in my laptop bag. As you can see in the photo below, it’s not much bigger than a classic iPod.

500 GB Hard Drive with iPod

And just to put it in further perspective, here are the two drives I bought on Black Friday, with a total of 1.5 terabytes for $140:

375 Hours of Flip HD Video Storage

But here’s the main takeaway/action point from this post, and how it applies to you:

Mark your calendar now for 11/26/2010 at 6 a.m. If Moore’s Law holds (as it has for 44 years), you should be able to get a 1.5 terabyte hard drive at Staples for about $70.

With HD video consuming about 4 GB per hour, you can never have too much hard drive space.