Video From Wherever

All my life, I've been a still image kind of guy. And even on digital cams that have the ability to shoot video clips, I've never taken advantage of them. Video has always seemed inconvenient to me. The thought of editing clips, doing background sound, and burning CD/DVD copies seemed somehow to be way too much work, particularly when cruising around in the camper. But I'm becoming a convert to video, now that several tools are in place that make it so much easier to manage the process.

In particular, I like Creative's new VADO video camera. It's a successor to the first of it's kind, the Flip, that was developed specifically to take video clips destined for youtube.com and other online presentation/storage facilities.

The VADO is eminently pocketable, and easy to use with one hand. I've become used to carrying it around in my pocket and pushing the on button whenever something looks to be interesting. I have it set to "HQ", or high quality video, which will let me record up to 1 hour of video. The lower quality setting allows 2 hours, but there is a definite difference in the quality, and 2 hours just seems like a lot of video to me.

There is a 2x digital zoom on the unit, which I've used a couple of times. Digital zoom on a video cam is more useful than for still images, because I assume that I'll eventually edit / crop a still, but not a video. I've also been happy with the sound recording of the VADO. Not that it's particularly great, but it's adequate, and I think that's really the point of the whole thing.

But the payoff for these kinds of videos is in the ease of publishing them. The process is dead simple:

Pull the USB connector from its slot in the bottom of the VADO and insert it into an open USB port on your PC.
Allow the VADO application to launch.
Select the video clip you want to publish.
Click either Youtube or Photobucket as your publishing destination.
Enter a title and some descriptive text.
Click the Upload button.

And your video is published.

The quality is more than adequate, and for $99 (either in pink or in silver), the VADO is great fun for catching those fun, awkward, embarassing, unusual, etc... moments, and sharing them with the world.