So, my parents were using a Flip Ultra HD to record sermons. This camera has a serious flaw which the company has acknowledged and failed to fix. First, the camera has 8GB of memory which it formats into a FAT-32 filesystem. This filesystem has a well known limitation where it cannot have a file which exceeds 4GB in size. The Flip camera, when recoding in HD, will hit this limitation in about an hour (depending on the motion in the video). The simple solution to this is to simply split the recording into multiple files so as to not cause any issues. Pure Digital Technologies, Inc, unlike their competitors, doesn’t seem to have figured out this simple solution but instead elected to have the camera beep and turn itself off. This completely violates what a consumer would expect out of a camera in that it will continually record until it is out of power or out of memory, or in the old days, tape.
I talked with their live support to confirm this flaw, and amid a bastardized, CPU-hogging chat client, I managed to get confirmation that this flaw is known, and no explanation as to why it has not been fixed aside from “I’m sorry, that’s what the camcorder can handle.”
I later found out that the company is owned by Cisco, and considering my history with their lousy products in the past, I should have already known.
Legacy Comments:
- Apr 15, 2011
Just buy the “other” camera and done! Cisco makes great products, stable, and run great if you know how to work on them. Stop talking trash!
Graham Booker - Apr 15, 2011
>Just buy the “other” camera and done! Isn’t that the entire point of this post, don’t buy a Flip camera? Although, it’s not as much of a point now because they are no longer being made. > Cisco makes great products, stable, and run great if you know how to work on them. That’s a laugh as I haven’t encountered one yet. Everything stated here against Cisco’s products is well deserved. If “[knowing] how to work on them” includes writing a kernel module to work around Cisco incorrect implementation, as I have had to do in the past, that still constitutes a lousy product.
Alan Kleymeyer - Oct 5, 2010
Do yourself a favor and get in the habit of starting and stopping shooting. The best editing you can do is when you shoot. Trying to manage and edit large files (4g+) is a pain in the butt. Even the semi-professional cameras such as Panasonic HVX cameras use a new file format (MXF) that by definition limits clips to 4G. Now if the Flip camera doesn’t automatically cut off the clip at 4g and continue on to a second clip, that WOULD be a bad design.
Graham Booker - Oct 5, 2010
Alan, did you even read the post? > Do yourself a favor and get in the habit of starting and stopping shooting Not a valid solution for recording a lecture, talks, or as I stated in the post, a sermon. > Now if the Flip camera doesn’t automatically cut off the clip at 4g and continue on to a second clip, that WOULD be a bad design. It doesn’t, as I mentioned in the post, but other cameras do.