Flip Cameras... making life easy and hard!

Kerry and I have been implementing our multicultural games unit which involves students presenting games from their own culture, being filmed doing so, creating a blog post about this and then uploading a video of their game to their school blog (I will blog more about this later).

This has been a fantastic unit and has provided an opportunity for me to fine tune some basics about using flip cameras and dealing with the other hardware to ensure that the images to students.

Here are a bunch of hints...

1. If you want good footage, film it yourself, or spend time teaching the students how to video and give them a chance to practice (not the greatest for ensuring lots of activity time in PE)
   
2. Once you film a child get the footage off the camera ASAP, label it and keep the video files in separate folders which you can pass on to the students. Don't import into iphoto... it isn't easy to work with iphoto with the movie files
   
3. When you download the files from onto your laptop don't delete them via your computer. You need to delete from the camera itself. If you delete via the computer you end up sending the files to a 'hidden file' on the camera itself, which doesn't free up space for more videos on the flip camera. Delete on the camera.
   
4. Once you have footage downloaded from the computer, encourage students to get it ASAP, or write it to a DVD/CD (watch the size). Ideally encourage kids to buy a 4gb or larger flash drive so that they can get the footage (flip cameras film in HD so the files can be huge)
   
5. Ensure you always have spare batteries for any flip cameras.
6. Back up

The flip camera a fantastic technology which is really easy to use and fantastic for quick filming with good resolution and frame capture speed. It allows kids to have instant feedback on their performance and has multitudes of uses in PE