Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Thank You, Flip, for Your Software Update

For everything that I love about the Flip Mino HD, one thing has been lacking in the FlipShare software. Everything with Flip seems to be so simple and intuitive, but sometimes that gets in the way.

The original FlipShare software that my Flip came with downloaded your HD videos into your My Documents/My Flip Video Library folder. (Why not just the My Documents/My Videos folder that Windows already has by default? Who knows?) This was okay, but not great when I had the SD version of the Flip, but when I got the HD version, my video files became noticably larger. Up to 6 times larger, in fact. (30s SD video = ~5 meg, 30s HD video = ~30 meg)

The problem with the version of the software I had originally was that FlipShare had no option to change the default folder where these videos were placed. Needless to say, with a new son, the hard drive was filling up fast.

Don't get me wrong. I have plenty of hard drive space, but the partition that has my default My Documents folder is on the primary partition, which is for the programs I use all the time and I keep it pretty clean. I also have a 100 gig media partition and a 500 gig external hard drive which holds my entire iTunes library including almost every video TED has ever released on their podcast.

The only work-around I found was to manually copy the files from the Flip or the default folder onto my external drive and then delete the original files from the camera or the default folder.

But Flip heard the cries of their people and had mercy upon us!

Now you can set a target directory for your Flip videos and utilize the much-improved FlipShare software to manage your ever-growing video library.

Here's how to do it.

1. Click Edit and choose Preferences.



2. Then select the Library tab and click Change Location.



3. Pick your desired folder and click OK.



4. It will take a few minutes to move all of your videos to the proper folder, but when you're done, you can use FlipShare and not fill up your primary hard drive!

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