Flip Ultra Camcorder for amateur style shooting?

[The Invader]

I won't bother boring you with the details of my project, so I'll cut to my question. Do you think it's possible to get away with using something like a Flip Ultra Camcorder to capture short vid content for website-only streaming/download?

The website will have an amateur feel about it and I wouldn't really want to do much editing of the vids, as I would rather the vids represented more of a fly on the wall of how events actually occurred (I won't have any music overlaid either).

Another reason for getting something like a Flip is it would allow me to kill 2 birds with one stone as I also film footage at music festivals and the Flip is ideal for sneaking past security.

cheers

[Mr Mark]

The quick answer is 'yes'.

If you purposely want an amateur feel then the Flip will do the job well. Just try and avoid camera wobble, as the Flip can get quite jerky.

[SpannerProductions]

Hi Invader,

a good "flip" cam corder if you havent already got one is JVC HDD Everio, has about 30gb hard drive and about 37 hours record time / 35x Zoom - so you can get plenty of good footage - the inbuilt mic is pretty good and downloading direct to pc/disc is a peice of piss with the software supplied . -the amatuer shot movie is becoming more and more popular , but might be an idea to get a decent tripod to avoid the afortementioned wobble, also i defy any guy to hold a cam corder steady by hand whilst filming .lol hope all goes well

[The Invader]

I've had a go at filming models using my Samsung mobile cam on a couple of photo shoots, and the footage was remarkably 'jerk free' lol! But the vid quality was strictly of the youtube-only variety.

Thanks to both responses. Will ponder over this for a week or so.

[The Invader]

Well...

I wasn't so keen on the Flip Ultra once I realised it didn't have an expansion card slot, and the JVC tip set me off on a search for alternatives.

As is so often the case when setting out to buy something, I ended up a bit higher up the scale and went for a Panasonic HDC SD20. Originally liked the sound of the SD10 then realised the spec of the SD20 was more or less identical, but it's a slightly larger/heavier cam (but still compact). So there were better deals going on the SD20, of which PC World (of all places) had by far the cheapest price.

Thanks for the advice anyway. Looking forward to doing a combination of photos and vids now in shoots