Note: All the good stuff coming out this week is for members. If you're not a member yet, lifetime membership is only $14.95.  Click here to sign up.

Great Free Tip This Week: The Great Camera/Camcorder Tripods You Already Have

If you haven't signed up for Free Weekly Tips, you're missing out.  (Sign up for Free Weekly Tips here.) You can turn them off if/when you don't find them to be useful.  This week's tip will tell you about the fantastic tripods that almost all of you already have in your homes.  In some situations, they work better than anything you'll find in the camera section at Amazon.

DVD Making

A recent video in our "Secrets of the Flip HD Camcorders" workshop, Flip's DVD-Making Service, shows a way to make DVD's from your Flip videos that requires very little time, and no skills whatsoever, but at $19.99 plus shipping for one video, you pay for that simplicity, and the resulting product is relatively mundane in appearance. I wanted to see if I could do anything similar -- a nicely reproduced DVD in a clamshell case -- that cost less.  Such a thing would be great for chronicling your child's basketball season, or your grandchild's infant years.  If you could make enough of them for the whole team, or the whole family, even better.

Well, it turns out you can.  Thus, the latest chapter in our "Secrets..." saga: Make Great DVD's and Copies Inexpensively.  In this video we show how to use the remarkably capable Windows DVD Maker to create a master, and the Kunaki duplication service to create cover art, duplicate, and distribute your finished product for $5.75, including shipping.

Realtime Video

Following on my last article, which talked about how the role of video has changed from archiving our lives to visually communicating our life stories, this week's article, Realtime Video with Twitter, Facebook, and Flip Channels, gets down to brass tacks about three different ways to quickly and easily send videos to any/all of your relatives and acquaintances.

... and a word about Forums

Some of you may not have noticed that, beneath the player on the home page, there are a series of forum topics.  Each topic at the top of the list corresponds to one of the videos in the Secrets workshop.  If you are a member, you can raise any questions or give us the benefit of your own ideas on the subject of that video.  If the subject you want to talk about isn't there, there is a button to create your own Flip-related topic.

Want to talk about video hardware or software or techniques that don't relate to the Flip?  Click the "Forums" button at the top of the page and pick a forum that suits your interests.