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Editing the Flip MinoHD Video Files

As some of you may know, I'm beginning to venture into the HD video world. I have the Flip MinoHD and it is one of the neatest camera's out there. For a little less than $200, you can have a HD video camera that fits in your pocket. The video that this thing puts out, is quite remarkable for what it is. It's not the absolutely best quality video, but it is HD and it does a fine job for what I need it to do.

Now, I've always been interested in video production ever since I was younger. My friends and I would make skate video's on our parents old Sony Camcorders, the ones that sat upon the shoulder! We never had any means of editing the video but we had a blast.

Fast forward to my time in College - My roommate and I made a short film for a video contest/show that the school was putting on. That was my first time with HD video. Shot with some Canon HD camera's and edited in Final Cut Pro.

Fast forward to the preset! Alright, so now I got this nifty lil' camcorder....time to search for some video editing software. In the past, I would just use Windows Movie Maker to make the 2 BTS videos that I have. That was nice, easy and simple...but now we're dealing with a much higher video quality. Knowing that the Flip's video files are MPEG4, I figured that they would need to be converted first, before being edited. So, thanks to the blog post made by the one and only, Zach Arias. He recommended using the Squared5 MPEG Converter. I'm quite happy with it and i'm sure that you will be too. They offer a whole slew of options that you can convert the Flip's files into.

Since Zach uses a Mac and I'm still on a window's OS, the settings were a bit different on the converter. If you use a mac, you can most definitely use his settings.

Here's the settings I use for the Converter:

I went to "Export to Quicktime" then chose what you see there above. Originally, I went with "Apple Motion Jpeg A" (Or something like that) and that would cause my minute and a half long video file...to be 2.3GB! If you choose H.264, file size will be smaller (455mb compared to the t-rex of 2.3GB) and you'll have the same quality!

Now, once the converter is done doing it's thing..you can now import that file into Adobe Premiere and edit the content to your heart's content. Once you're done, you'll have to export the video! Here's the part that some people get confused on. Do not pick "Export > Movie". Use Export > Adobe Media Encoder instead. It'll be at the end of the list of options when you go to export. It does a much better job.. Here are the settings I use...so that my video comes out in HD:

That's about it. Let premiere do it's thing and then you'll have a finished video! Let me know if you have any further questions. Leave a comment here or catch me on Twitter: @peteyphoto and I'll answer to the best of my ability.

Petey