Flip Video Flip UltraHD

Miscellaneous Controls (0.00)

Nothing else to write about, really. The Flip UltraHD is a nightmare for manual control enthusiasts… and a dream come true if you want everything handled automatically.

Audio Controls (1.00)

The Flip UltraHD features a built-in stereo microphone—an upgrade over the mono mic featured on the Flip MinoHD. The mic is located on the front of the camcorder, to the left and right of the fixed lens. The stereo audio is compressed using the AAC codec. Even with stereo audio, the quality is about what you’d expect from a camcorder of its size and price—which is to say it’s not very good.In windy conditions the mic picks up a lot of rustling, and even in ideal settings voices often sound muffled and crackly.

The Flip UltraHD has no audio connectivity options, nor do any of the other camcorder’s we used as comparison models.

Editing (8.50)

Since the core Flip demographic is looking for a seamless video experience from start to finish, Pure Digital has focused heavily on the built-in editing software. As with the previous generation Flip camcorders, the UltraHD comes with the software built right into the camcorder. Just plug the UltraHD into your PC or Mac via USB and the software will immediately launch.

The Flip will be detected and thumbnails of all your video clips will appear in the main interface. From here, you can watch your clips, copy files to your computer, share videos online, or do some simple editing. You can also capture still photos from your video or prepare a folder of clips to burn onto a DVD. There isn’t a lot offered in terms of advanced editing, but what is offered is incredibly simple to use.

You can’t make any image adjustments inside the FlipShare software, so you’ll need to tweak contrast, add digital effects, and adjust color in a more advanced software package. FlipShare does let you trim videos, so you can cut out the beginning or end of your video if you captured unnecessary footage. And since the Flip doesn’t offer any still photo capabilities, the software lets you choose any single frame and save it as a still photo.

If you want to splice together more than one clip and add some basic text to the front and back of your ‘movie,’ you can do that with the Create a Movie feature. There really aren’t a lot of options here, but you can add a basic title screen, credits, and some music. Flip supplies you with some preloaded Flip Video music choices, or you can use an mp3 from your computer.

Finally, there’s the most important feature in the software: the ability to share your videos electronically. There’s an email option that will send an email to the designated recipient, which includes a link to your video, hosted on the Flip site. And there’s the usual, unsurprising e-card option, which is as silly and generic as it sounds.

The option that will get the most use is probably the YouTube upload feature, which provides you with just a couple of easy steps that will get your videos up on YouTube in no time. Not all options are visible (i.e. giving the video a description or keywords), but you can get the video up quickly and easily. If you want to make any edits to the way the video appears on the site, you’ll have to log in to YouTube. For an overview of the software that ships with this and other camcorders, see our article: Video Editing Software For Your Camcorder Digital-Included-Software.htm.