Gear Talk - Narrative Clip 2

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, hey, good morning there. This is Joe Van Cleave, and today I want to bring you a video. It's not a real product review like a lot of people do camera reviews, but it is kind of a review in a sense. So this is the Narrative Clip 2. It's a little square piece of plastic with rounded corners and a

[00:00:25] Speaker A: little clip, and it's intended to clip onto your clothes or your hat or hang You can hang it from your, you know, with a, like a necklace or something. But so what this is, this is a lifelogging camera. I got in on the, I don't know if it was an actual Kickstarter campaign, but basically last July, July of 2015, I got in on this and I was able to get a quote discounted

[00:00:50] Speaker A: price on it. Well, it took them almost 10 months to get it shipped to me. In the process, they redesigned the app and the hardware itself to shoot video and sound, not just still photos. And they had to get it approved for import into the US in terms of regulatory FCC or whatever, because this is a Swedish company. The clip itself is made in Taiwan, but it's

[00:01:15] Speaker A: a Swedish company that designed it. So we're going to talk a little bit about what this is and what I intend on doing with it. So the Narrative Clip was designed to be a lifelogging camera, and the idea is you put the camera on your body and it's intended to automatically take still photos every 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 seconds, however you configure it. It's

[00:01:41] Speaker A: intended by the manufacturers to operate through a mobile app and to automatically upload your images to a cloud-based service on their website. website that you have an account with. Now, my original interest in the Narrative Clip was as a street photography camera because of its unobtrusive nature and the fact that you could go through a crowd of people and just be taking photos surreptitiously. But I'm also interested in the fact

[00:02:06] Speaker A: that it shoots video. But the problem is I'm not really interested in uploading files to their server. I want to keep them local. I want to keep my photos local and my videos local. Right. And I've had some problems with that. First of all, I don't have a smartphone that I'm using, and the Narrative app does not upload to the iPad or to the Android tablets. So

[00:02:31] Speaker A: I have 2 of those tablets, but I can't use it. So I have to use their app on a PC. They have a PC version of the app. Okay, fine. And so I had to configure their app so that it saves all the footage to my local hard drive. The problem I've had is that the app wants to change its setting to upload to their cloud. I have a number of

[00:02:56] Speaker A: pictures and videos that got uploaded to their cloud that I didn't want uploaded to their cloud. And I'm not sure if the app resets itself or if they're doing it, but it kind of makes me suspicious from a privacy standpoint. But enough said. The technical parts of this camera, let's talk about that next. So when you first configure the camera through the app, it's going to be set for shooting still photos on a periodic

[00:03:21] Speaker A: basis, every like 15 or 20 seconds. But you can trigger it manually, and you can also change those settings. So right now I have it configured to not take any still photos. I had to turn that off. And the way I have it configured is a double tap on the Narrative will start it recording video, and I have it set for 15-second-long clips of video. The thing to keep in mind is that

[00:03:47] Speaker A: if you have this thing set to take still photos on a timed basis, as soon as you move it or the camera sees light, it's gonna start lifelogging. So this represents kind of a considerable privacy issue. And because of that, I had me a little cigar lighter box, and I— you notice the little label, do not open— and I lined it with some black felt, and

[00:04:12] Speaker A: I put the Narrative Clip in the box and I cover— I close it up when I don't want it to be used because I don't know at times if this thing is on or not. So it's kind of a weird little privacy issue, but I basically keep it in the box. I take it out and then the way I have it configured is theoretically it's not taking any still photos until I double tap it. Now I can hold it at arm's length and I can get a pretty good

[00:04:37] Speaker A: little kind of a selfie kind of a shot, but What I did with it is I had some scrap, like this is an old handle to an old tripod, and I had some brass. And so I call this the selfie shank, the selfie shank, because it kind of looks like something you would make in prison. I don't know. But anyways, my selfie shank, the little brass thing just slips on the clip, and now I can hold it out

[00:05:02] Speaker A: away from me and I can do little selfie clips. And so I did a number of selfie clips this morning. Morning and I was able to download them to my hard drive. And they're 15 seconds, right, but you don't have any cues. You have a little beep beep when it starts recording and a little beep beep at the end, but unless you're really good at counting 15, counting to 15, you'll find that you're in mid-sentence or mid-word and it gets cut off. So you kind of

[00:05:27] Speaker A: have to maybe talk for 10 seconds and give it a little bit of leeway. But anyways, I shot a few short little clips around my house and backyard just to see how it would work. So this is kind of an initial experiment with using the Narrative Clip 2 as a selfie vlogging camera. Keep in mind also, it's totally auto exposure, auto white balance. You don't have any control

[00:05:52] Speaker A: over that. It's 1080p, 30 frames per second, and it's MP4 format. There's a little hole here on the side, that's the microphone. There's 4 little white LEDs that are the charging status and also they kind of blink when it's uploading files. The camera lens is here. There's a little door that you have to pry off with your finger. If you're a man and don't have sharp fingernails, it's kind of hard to do, but that's

[00:06:18] Speaker A: the mini USB connector. And then the clip, they give you an extra clip for attachments. But that's basically it. It's a lifelogging camera, so let's see here. So we are recording the 15-second clip on the lifelogging camera and with the selfie shank. So this is it. Let's see, there it is. There's the little beep, right? So that

[00:06:43] Speaker A: was 15 seconds. So there it is, and we'll put all these things together. I should also mention that getting these files into my iPad— I use iMovie on the iPad for my videos. Getting these files into that is really a workaround because you have to first make sure that you get the files on your hard drive instead of up on their cloud. If the files go to their cloud, you can't get it back. So let me describe for

[00:07:08] Speaker A: you one of the problems I had this morning with using the Narrative Clip 2. I had shot 2 clips and I wanted to transfer them to my hard drive. I connected the camera to the computer and waited for it to transfer, and it writes a log file to the same folder where the images are going to be. It creates

[00:07:33] Speaker A: a new folder for every date. So the log file was there, but the videos weren't. And I also noted that the power was almost at zero, which was very strange because when I last used it last week and put it in its little metal box, it had plenty of charge. So anyways, it turned out that it had uploaded those 2 clips to the Narrative App cloud instead of on my

[00:07:58] Speaker A: hard drive, and I found out that the setting in the Narrative App on my computer had been changed where the box was checked to upload it to the cloud instead of to my hard drive, which I don't remember changing that. Also, my So the Narrative Clip 2 has Wi-Fi, but I have not configured a Wi-Fi router for it, and my router is all password protected. But it is possible that even

[00:08:23] Speaker A: in its storage box, perhaps it saw an unsecured Wi-Fi signal from a neighboring house, and maybe it's programmed to automatically dial home to mama, and maybe it did so, and maybe it uploaded, or maybe it constantly periodically checks. Yeah. Like Android tablets do. You have to put them in airplane mode if you want their batteries to be conserved, for

[00:08:48] Speaker A: instance. So there may be some kind of hidden communication thing going on, and maybe that's why it changed it. But keep in mind it does have Wi-Fi capability, but I find that I transfer, even with a USB 2 cable, transferring these MP4 videos to my computer are pretty slow. Compared to this GH3 camera, for instance. So it is a slower transfer speed even with a wired

[00:09:13] Speaker A: connection, but it is okay. And again, I'm not really totally sure how I'm gonna like it, but we're gonna play with it and have fun. Okay, I should mention regarding getting your files from your Clip 2 into your iPad involves as I've described earlier, first getting the files from the clip into the clip folders on your PC

[00:09:40] Speaker A: using the Clip app. Then managing iTunes is even worse than the Clip app. I'm surprised Apple, all the billions of dollars they make, they've never made iTunes better. But you have to import all these clips into iTunes and then you have to sync your iPad to iTunes, and then they don't show up on the

[00:10:05] Speaker A: camera roll. And then you have to go into iMovie in the iPad and select video to import videos, and then you have to import the clips from iTunes. And that only shows up once. If you add more video files later through iTunes, they won't show up. You'll have to delete everything and start over. So it's a real kludge. It took me an hour or 2

[00:10:30] Speaker A: to figure this out this morning. Anyways, so once you figure it out, hopefully it'll be reliable for you. But the iPad with iMovie is a good editing platform for simple videos, but it's just iTunes is a terrible piece of software. Apple should be ashamed. So let's take a look now at some of this footage that I've shot with the Narrative Clip 2. This is one of them,

[00:10:56] Speaker A: by the way. So we are recording the 15-second clip on the lifelogging camera and with the selfie shank. So this is it. Yeah, so I recorded 2 short videos this morning on the Narrative Clip 2, and the app on my PC automatically changed itself to upload them to their cloud instead of save to my hard drive. So they're doing— The problem I

[00:11:21] Speaker A: had was the Narrative app on my PC I had set last week to automatically download the clips to my PC locally, and somehow the setting got changed to upload to the cloud. So anyways, my goal here is to be able to shoot a series of short 15-second clips and then import them via my PC to my iPad and make videos. So we'll see. So I made this homemade selfie stick out of an old

[00:11:46] Speaker A: handle and a piece of brass. I'll show you in a little bit. But basically I want to be able to carry this thing around and just do do vlogging, kind of as a vlogging camera. So we'll see. So you activate the video mode the way I have it programmed with 2 taps on the Clip, and I can tap onto the selfie stick twice and it'll activate it pretty reliably. So that's cool. So you have to do some

[00:12:11] Speaker A: roundabout things to get the clips into iMovie and then from iMovie or into iTunes. on the PC and then from iTunes into the iPad. And then from the iPad, it's kind of tricky to get it into iMovie. So I was thinking that a video is really, or a film is really, a series of short clips that are edited together. So I'm doing 15-second clips here and I should be able to just stick them together like sound bites and make them into a continuous kind of a

[00:12:36] Speaker A: production, I hope. Anyways, this is Joe Van Cleave with a very brief initial introduction of the Narrative Clip 2. You have a good day.