What is Flip video? According to Wikipedia, Flip video is a simple camcorder for digital video created by Pure Digital Technologies, a company bought by Cisco systems in March 2009. There are four variants of Flip video camcorder, including Flip Ultra, Flip Ultra HD, Flip Video Mino and Flip Video Mino HD.
Flip video camcorders can capture video in both standard definition in 640*480 resolution at 30 frames per second, using the MPEG-4 ASP video compression and high definition at 1280*720 resolution using H.264 video compression, AAC audio compression and the MP4 file format.
Features of newly released FlipShare 5.0
FlipShare is a software pre-loaded with every Flip video camcorder that allow its users to organize, edit and share videos in a simple way.
On December 2, 2009, Flip Video released FlipShare 5.0, its new FlipShare software which promised to have greatly expanded the video sharing options available to FlipShare users that makes sharing personal videos from Flip video camcorder more easier than ever.
With it, you can upload Flip videos to Facebook, YouTube and Myspace directly, share the videos to mobile phones using the Flipshare Mobile App or to any TV using FlipShare TV instantly, email video privately through Flip video's hosted video email service and create custom Flip Channels to share with group of family and friends.
Problems importing Flip video to iMovie
Although easy and powerful, the editing function of FlipShare is more or less for the Flip users which can only edit videos captured by Flip video camcorders. But what if you need to put on other applications, you will not be promised to put on them directly for Flip video camcorder usually produces files in MP4, sometimes in AVI format which may not be recognized by some applications like iMovie, FCE or FCP etc natively.
Detailed analysis about Flip video editing in iMovie
Due to the variant of iMovie versions, not all Flip videos can be accepted by iMovie or not all types of iMovie are Flip video compatible, Flip videos captures in MP4 are said to be in the right format iMovie accepts, but may still encounters importing failures from now and then when you put the MP4 files to iMovie, the most frequently ones I observed could probably like this "I am trying to import videos from my Flip camcorder to iMovie, only the audio gets imported with a blank screen". Let alone AVI files which are refuse-to-meet guests by iMovie.
And different version of iMovie may have different requirements for all models of Flip video camcorders or partial camcorders. We will see it one by one.
For iMovie HD, it can import AVI files from Flip Video Ultra series camcorder with the 3ivx codec installed
For iMovie 08, it works with many tapeless camcorders that record to flash memory, a hard disk drive (HDD), or DVD media. And the Flip camcorders in its supporting list are as follows:
Flip Mino in MPEG-4 format (requires iMovie 7.1.2 or later and Pure Digital's "Flip Video for Mac"
Flip Mino HD in MPEG-4 format (requires iMovie 7.1.2 or later)
For iMovie 09, the same case with 08, it works with many tapeless camcorders that record to flash memory, a hard disk drive (HDD) or DVD media. Again, its supported Flip camcorders:
Flip Mino in MPEG-4 format (requires Pure Digital's "Flip Video for Mac" and usually with video stabilization limitations)
Flip Mino HD in MPEG-4 format (requires iMovie 7.1.2 or later with video stabilization limitations)
Flip Ultra SD in MPEG-4 format (with video stabilization limitations)
Flip Ultra HD in MPEG-4 format (requires iMovie 8.0.3 or later with video stabilization limitations)
Possible solutions:
Solution 1: More than one time I noticed people talking about a free application called iSquint which can convert Flip videos to iMovie compatible MPEG-4 or MOV format, however it will result in quality loss during conversion.
Solution 2: Believe it or not, the safer and fastest way to do this is to use this Movie Converter for Mac, it is 100% clean and powerful which can convert all popular file formats to iMovie supported MPEG-4 (MP4, M4V), MPEG-2, DV, HDV and MOV without any difficulty.
Best Movie Converter for Mac for easy importing Flip video into iMovie
Movie converter for Mac is the best Flip video to iMovie converter that allows you to convert Flip videos taken by all models of Flip camcorders including Flip Ultra, Flip Ultra HD, Flip Video Mino, Flip Video Mino HD to iMovie compatible MPEG-4 (MP4, M4V), MPEG-2, DV, HDV, MOV files with the astounding conversion speed and hard to believe output quality.
Mac movie converter is a versatile application that packs DVD ripper and video converter into a single interface, not only it can rip and convert DVD content to other file formats, but also it can convert between almost all popular file formats like AVI, WMV, MPG, MKV, VOB, MOV, 3GP, SWF, MP4, DV but HD videos as well so as to put on different portable devices or applications.
Movie converter for Mac can also be an excellent video editing tool. For example, you can trim, crop your Flip videos, apply special effect to the videos or set the output parameters for video and audio. Besides, you can also merge the several Flip videos into a big, split one Flip video into several ones, and the batch process mode also allows you to import more than one files for converting. And more can be expected if you afford a minute or two to have a try.
