Flip-ping out

Any reader who knows John would not be surprised if I said he "flipped out" at a regional CIO meeting. :) On a few occasions recently, he's mentioned the Flip video recorders, their popularity with teachers and why CIOs should be aware and prepared for their entry into the educational environment. FLIPping out about it, if you will...

From a user's perspective, what's not to like? These recorders are very portable, relatively affordable and can easily capture some very good video. It doesn't take long to imagine educational uses for evaluation of instruction, introduction of video clips to teach a concept or engage discussion, student use as part of an assignment, etc. When finished, you 'flip' the USB connector out and attach to your computer, where automated uploads to sites like YouTube can occur.

There are other brands and products out there, but I'll focus on the Flip brand for now. The Flip product line as of today consists of the Ultra and the Mino, both of which come in a 'standard' and 'HD' version. They retail anywhere from $150 to $230, but you can probably find a better deal and the prices seem to drop regularly as new versions and features are introduced. The Ultra model holds about two hours of video and the Mino holds one hour.

What's the problem, then? From a CIOs perspective, it's the data storage requirements. I feel like the typical user sees all files as equal in terms of size. It's only one spreadsheet or one picture or one slideshow or, in this case, one video. How large is a one-page document, simply text with no special add-ons? Maybe 2 or 3KB. Save hundreds of them and your network staff probably won't say a word. The pictures of the grandchildren and the hundreds of MP3 files cause some heartburn. A single picture can be about 1MB in size, and that number may be (or become) dated with the increasingly detailed digital cameras. Maybe a standard song is 3-4MB in size. Hundreds of these can cause grief from a storage perspective.

Now, mix in the constant audio with 30 frames-per-second (or pictures per second, if you want to think of it that way) and you see why John and others might be very concerned. Check the specs on the Flip family for further evidence. The standard Flip Mino advertises 60 minutes of video on its 2GB of internal memory. The Flip Ultra has twice the capacity and twice the video storage. Let's assume, then, that we can get about 30 minutes of 'standard' video on 1GB (roughly 1,000MB or 1,000,000KB) of storage. High-definition video cuts this in half, with the MinoHD holding 60 minutes on 4GB of storage and the UltraHD holding 120 minutes on 8GB of storage. That's 15 minutes of HD video weighing in at 1 gigabyte! Just for a frame of reference, a CD-ROM typically holds 650-700MB and a DVD is somewhere around 4.7GB.

I could go on about the battery life of the Flip series, etc but it's all in the spec page linked above and I was really focused on the disk storage aspect of all of this. None of this is meant to disparage the Flip or discourage its use - this is strictly meant to point out why CIOs and network admins will have to really do some planning if users intend to store large amounts of video on the local network.