So Cisco bought Flip back in March (makers of our awesome little video camera) and recently decided to completely fuck up the bundled editing software. In short, FlipShare 5.0 strongly encourages forces users to use their editing software exclusively and hides any videos you the user have edited—from what I can tell, they’re probably just writing some kind of XML file to indicate where you’ve made edits, and don’t actually save a new file anywhere that I can find, which is unacceptable to me. How do I back up those edited files? They pretty much force users to use their software to upload edited files to a list of popular sharing sites—what happens if I use a different service? Worse, there’s no way to step the software backwards to a previous version once you’ve “upgraded” the original software. Cisco, you lose.

Jen’s recently gotten some fantastic footage of Finn beginning to walk, and wanted to post it to her Vimeo account. After struggling to understand the new FlipShare software, I did some sleuthing to find a better way of encoding video out of Quicktime and found this tutorial called Flip Video: Codecs and you!. I followed the instructions there (using the H264 codec) and exported a beautiful edit to her hard drive, and she uploaded it to Vimeo with no loss in quality. Score!