Question came up on Twittter today about how the Flip Ultra compares to high definition cameras. It came up in context to all the buzz today about the Flip Mini HD. Yeah, I drooled. It’s a bad ass camera.
I will watch the reviews for the Flip Mini HD but I keep thinking about Kirk Masten and how his video convinced me several months ago to buy a Flip Ultra. He showed how the quality compares between a Canon XH-A1 and the Flip. It’s pretty damn close.
I don’t think I really need the Flip Mino HD. The Flip Ultra’s quality is superb. I shoot video, edit in iMovie and upload to Vimeo, which delivers HD quality. It suits me very well. In the end, do I even need a fancier Flip?
The Flip Ultra cost $120 off Amazon. The Flip Mini HD is about $230. My guess is there are a lot of people out there who live on budgets where $110 means a lot of groceries. Paying the extra money for a Flip Mini HD just does not work. The Flip Ultra works just fine and arguably already has near HD quality. And as Masten points out, how important is the equipment in the first place? It’s just a matter of how you work with constraints:
…And just like the constraints that Lars von Trier created in 1995 with ‘Dogme 95’ to make film more creative and real, I am finding the constraints of the Flip Video camera have made me a better film maker.
Because I have limited technical choices I am forced to concentrate on using what I already have in a the most creative way possible. Yesterday I set out to film the exact same mini-film using a Canon XH-A1 and a Flip Video camera. I actually taped the Flip Video to the side of the Canon XH A1 to ensure that each shot was exactly the same. Both sets of identical footage were editied exactly the same way: down to the frame! I wanted no bias in this test. Both cameras were set to auto everything (Flip Video is always this way) and only minimal color correction was applied in Final Cut Pro to make them both roughly the same tone. I even cropped out about 30% of the Flip Video footage to make it have a 16:9 aspect ratio like the Canon XH A1. 16 hours later I have answered in part my eternal equipment question. I have to say my results surprised even me.
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