Flip Camersa: Technical aspects

Our computers erase and recreate student profiles with each log in. Our computer image currently doesn't have the FLIP software on it, and anything downloaded during the day is erased and the original profile is reset each night. The student's personal drives are not huge, so with all of this, what would be the best, recommended way to download FLIP movies in a manner that alllows students to edit and play with the raw material? We would like to get the video off of the cameras quickly so that other students can use the cameras, but we don't want to lose the ability to edit the projects once the students walk away from the computer.

On my personal computer, I can play with the videos and continue to work on them. What would you recommend for students?

One idea was to encourage students to save it to a large flash drive, but I can not seem to find a way to direct FLIP to save to the flash drive vs. where IT wants to save the project.

Thanks for any help!!!

Tags: cameras, computers, editing, files, flip, saving, student

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Permalink Reply by Steve Lee on April 23, 2009 at 8:30am

The flip camera stores video and data like a flash drive. Meaning you could go to"my computer" find the flip drive under "removable storage" and then copy and paste the folder and or files to another location of your choice.

Flip uses a highly compressed video format, depending upon how large the files get, you may be able to find the room on the kid's personal drives.

You could take your own computer or a computer with ample space, share out a folder, put sub folders under it like "room 01, room 02, room 03...... etc. Then you teach the kids how to save to a shared folder on the network.

On your machine, say the name of your computer was "teachercomp" and the shared folder was "kidsvids", the kids would type in the address bar of explorer \\teacherscomp\kidsvids\ then all of the sub folders would show up on their computers for them to save to.

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Permalink Reply by Stephanie Williams on April 23, 2009 at 11:02am

I use both the flash drive and a shared folder, but have to add another step. I have community flash drives, so I don't like to keep anything on them for long, in case a student would accidentally or purposefully erase someone else's work. So, after they save their work to their flash drive, I plug it into my computer and save it to a student shared folder ( set up by the IT guy) the kids can access. So, it is now in a safe place because students cannot save to student shared themselves, so they can't get rid of anyone's work, but they can get to their own. So, when they work on it again, I have to repeat the process since they can't save to student shared folder, so its time consuming, but it opens the technology opportunities I want the kids to have.

Also, the easiest way to get files to the flash drive is to close the FLIP box when it comes up and just go to My Computer, open the FLIP removable storage from there, open the DCIM folder, right click on the file, copy, open up the folder you want to save it to and then paste it in there.