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I bought my husband a Flip Mino for Christmas. He loves it. And he's very un-techy, so if he can use it, YOU can, too!

I looked at all 3 Flip cameras on Amazon, and liked the Mino the best. The HD has a smaller screen, which isn't what we wanted.

BTW, the free accessory ad has a picture of a tripod, but the tripod isn't one of the accessories that is available for free. Go figure.

Okay, my Flip Mino arrived yesterday. It is truly as user-friendly as billed. Turn on the power, press the red dot, and you're recording. Plug it in your USB port and you've got it on your computer. (I fiddled with the supplied software as well as working with it through MovieMaker; either works fine.) It's easy to delete and play the files on Flip itself, too, which delights my son to no end, as he loves to act goofy on the camera and then immediately watch himself. (Which is something we can't do easily on our bulky camcorder with the minidiscs.) And the Flip has tiny speakers, too, so you can hear yourself directly on it as well as watch the video. And talk about portability--that thing is TINY and fits easily in a pocket. I can see already that we will use it a lot more than our old videocamera simply because it is so easy to cart around and use.

Those are all the positives, and they're major positives. The one big negative: The sound quality just isn't as good as I was hoping for, perhaps because I am spoiled by the Zoom. I experimented with a couple of placements of the tripod. In all cases I got a high level of background hiss; when I place the tripod closer to the piano I get distortion and clipping. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, as the hiss is worse than what I was hearing on AnotherSchmoe's recording. Did you process your recordings at all after the fact, Schmoe?

But at least I got video off the camera and in my computer, which is farther than I ever figured out with my other videocamera. I'm experimenting now with trying to record the piano with the Zoom AND the Flip simultaneously and then use the Zoom audio instead of the Flip audio through MovieMaker. I can import the Zoom audio track easily, but I haven't figured out how to move it around so it lines up exactly with the video. Can anybody out there walk me through the process in very easy to follow steps?

I'm still very happy with the Flip and think it well worth it, and if I can figure out how to use the Zoom in conjunction with it I will be ecstatic.

Thanks for posting this - I was about to order one of these as I get quite a bit of hiss on my current video music recordings and thought this might be an improvement. Maybe not.

Hi Agilita, I'm glad you've found a gadget you feel comfortable with and gets you recording and entering into recitals again!

Just a quick note - if you are able to get MIDI files of your playing, if you can send them to me I can use sample software to render them to mp3 if you wish.

Monica, I don't process the sound in any way, what you hear is what it records. Sometimes I do notice a hiss, sometimes I don't, I'm not really sure what the deal is.

With my recital submission there is considerable hissing though.

Well, I'm still slogging away on this. I figured out how to merge my Zoom file with the Flip video into Windows MovieMaker and save the whole movie. But whenever I try to upload it to YouTube, the darn thing cranks endlessly and never loads. I've tried it from two different computers, one on a direct DSL cable and my laptop that was on wireless.

How long does it take a 4-min movie to upload?

How big is the file? It depends on the file size and your internet connection, mileage may vary. :p

For me, most of my piano videos (after saving in Movie Maker) come out around 5mb-20mb, because Windows Movie Maker can compress then. These usually take me anywhere from 3-15 minutes to upload. I had one file that for some reason didn't compress well though and it ended up as 40mb and took around 30 minutes. Uncompressed the files on the Flip are pretty big, at least on mine. They usually come out at around 3-4 times the file size that I can have Movie Maker compress to (without really losing any quality).

Ah! That explains it. "Patient" is never the first adjective that comes to mind in describing me.

Okay, after much effort, I now have The Very First YouTube Video of Me. I'm not going to keep them up for long (because of my daughter's comment that wearing my hair back made my neck look fat...), but I thought I would post them so others can compare the audio.

This first link here is the Mino Flip version, easy peasy, just plug it into the computer, clip off the parts from the start and end showing my big butt walking to and from the bench. Audio's pretty hissy though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPxwBsKh-9s

This second video shows my (very meager) editing efforts to splice my Zoom audio onto the Flip video through MovieMaker. [Edit: I figured out how to edit the merged file better.]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d54GAfwYa5Y

Without a doubt, the audio's better with the splicing. And I think I've finally figured out how to edit it adequately in MovieMaker, so this is what I'll do from now on.

Nice videos Monica, great playing, I hope you make some more! Honestly, you'd be surprised how many people go onto YouTube to watch / listen to amateurs like us playing our instruments at home (though you are a very, very good 'amateur'). A lot of people enjoy listening, so I hope you don't remove them all!

I put up a recording of myself playing a Chopin Nocturne a year and a half ago (it was audio only before I bought my camera) and it's up to around 6,600 views right now. Crazy! Who would want to hear me play? You'd be great. YouTube can be a good source of outside encouragement. :p

Of course that's all up to you, but for now you've got your first subscriber.

Thanks, Schmoe. You are very sweet. I do indeed intend to make and post more videos; my reluctance for these two particular videos is simply my dissatisfaction with the sloppy editing (and, okay, the fat neck... ). With any luck the learning curve for MovieMaker will go quickly.

6600 views for your Chopin Nocturne?! The internet is just amazing.

Yeah, I was actually quite surprised. I had just put it up (back before I was regularly putting up videos like I am now) to see if anyone would actually listen to it, figuring the worst that could happen is I've added one useless video to all of the billions already on YouTube, and now it's up to 6,600, and I've got around 16,000 total views on my videos now, and it's climbing faster than I'd ever imagine! Obviously I don't gain anything in a physical sense from this, but it encourages me to continue playing and gives me something to look forward to (nice comments from people who happened to enjoy my playing). There are a few YouTube pianists (amateurs like us, albeit very talented) with thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of views on their videos, and loads of positive comments.

At risk of getting a little off-topic, here are 2 of my personal favorites:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Arkton
http://www.youtube.com/user/CalikoKat

And this is way off-topic but I just love this guy's videos (classical guitar, I don't play but would like to in the future), he plays mostly Final Fantasy music (I love those games, and the music is all fantastic):
http://www.youtube.com/user/lonlonjp


Could it get more off-topic than this one? Guy in Japan who makes instruments out of vegetables and then plays on them. Silly, but cool:
http://www.youtube.com/user/heita3

Okay, I'll stop with the spam now. I just love all the neat things you can find on YouTube.

I'm just wondering how people feeling about the, um, how shall I say, less than complimentary, comments I sometimes see on youtube videos.

It's kind of the wild west compared to ABF, isn't it? I don't know if my fragile ego could stand that.

Monica, it's funny, but when I saw the first video, I thought the audio sounded great.

Until I saw the second one. What a difference!

And there's nothing wrong with your neck. What I noticed was your graceful, slender arms.... Why do we always zoom in on our own (perceived) faults?

Euan, thanks! I remember you were so generous with advice and help before! I am working on learning to do these things.

Monica: Thanks for asking the question about upload time. One scene I recorded from my granddaughter's play took over an hour.

Rustyfingers: You can select to not allow comments. And that's probably best. I did allow comments on my granddaughter's because her other grandma and out of town relatives left comments. I had warned her that there are idiots out there but so far nothing negative has been posted.

It is, but so far I've gotten zero negative comments on my playing, and I'm a pretty crummy pianist. The worst that's been said to me is along the lines of "get a new piano", and "tune that thing". I have gotten a lot of positive comments and even some private messages encouraging me forward though, which is always nice. Worst case scenario is someone says something rude, and then you have the option of removing their comment from your page. Just keep in mind that a good majority of people who do go around just spamming rude messages on amateur YouTube pages don't play the instrument at all, and are just trolling. There are exceptions but most I've noticed don't have a single recording of their own. Of course it's all up to you whether to start a YouTube page or not, it's really throwing yourself out to the public though, and as Agilita said you can always choose to disallow comments completely if you want to. If you do start one though let me know, I'd love to listen.