Video Blogging
As mentioned, I got a wp:Flip Video camera. Here then are some notes about video blogging with the camera.
Downloading Video
Simply plugging the camera's USB connector into your computer's USB port will mount the internal storage of the camera, and you can copy the files to any disk space you have. Since the camera supports the USB2 interface, file transfers go at a rate of about 5MB/second in my case.
Watching Video
The Flip Video gives you .avi files. You can watch or upload and share these with almost no effort. The ffmpeg project provides decoding capabilities because essentially, no matter what the encoding algorithm is, the decoding of an MPEG-4 file is standard. What this means in practice is that you can use KMPlayer, Totem, Xine or any media player you want to watch the videos you recorded.
Video Editors
When you want to edit these files, you can use an editing tool like Kino (consumer oriented) or Kdenlive (pro-sumer oriented). These tools are similar in function to Adobe Premier, but without the $800 pricetag. If you already have files in DV format, then Kino is probably the best choice (and relatively easy to use). However, Kino will not edit .avi directly, and so it will offer to convert any .avi file to .dv -- which not only takes time, but will also increase the filesize by almost a factor of 10. So, for direct editting of .avi files, you are best off getting familiar with the more advanced interface of the Kdenlive tool.
I should mention that Windows users can use the simple (as in plain, very limited) video editing tools provided with the Flip Video camera. It looks like the only thing it does is "clip" the video (allowing you to choose a later start and an earlier end). The software also interacts with a web service to combine videos but with no control over titling, effects, and sound tracks.
Kdenlive
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Note that Kdenlive has been ported to KDE4, and so you will probably want to use that version if you are setup to run the KDE4 desktop. |
To get started, see the wiki book
Watch the short example video
Visit the website
Video Sharing
Add notes about using YouTube, Google Video, AOL Video or other services like vimeo