Driving to/from Patzcuaro

There are numerous options for driving routes to or from Patzcuaro and I think we have driven most all of them. If it is a matter of time and we don't wish to go elsewhere, then we drive the following route that allows us to make the drive in under four hours:
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This is the route we took on 8/22 when returning from Patzcuaro with a small side trip to Atotonilco El Alto in the Tequila Highlands area. These videos start right outside of Quiroga, Michoacan where one climbs up through the hills towards Zacapu, Michoacan:



While a portion of this drive isn't on cuotas, you will see it can be a pleasant drive.

This was a day when we counted 479 topes - the daily high for our trip!

Neil,

Did you use a stabilzer plug-in? Personally, i have never had much luck with them.

Axixic:

Don't you believe that the roads in Mexico are that smooth? HA! Actually the arm with extension on the window mount magnified the vibrations or bounce. When I watched a few of the full length videos on full screen, I found myself getting a bit queasy and was concerned. As it turned out YouTube has an image stabilizer in their edit software and it works quite well even though it takes a bit of time.

I have run into a new problem over the past couple of days. While on our trip, I found that the raw Flip video was consuming a great deal of my laptop's hard drive capacity. So I was moving the videos to my portable external hard drive. Now I am finding that some files got corrupted and Flip won't deal with them. It all doesn't make much sense. An example: I recorded our drive up to Monte Alban (one segment) and then the drive back down (two segments) but all downloaded in one pass directly from the camera. The one segment shows as being corrupted but the following two segments work fine?

Hmmm - video can be so fersnickety. The only thing I can think to suggest is that you convert the files to avi immediately after importing them and before deleting them off your camera so you don't risk the footage.

As to the existing (corrupted) files - maybe see if some conversion software can still salvage what is there.

Admittedly, I am an amateur when it comes to video! Just about 24 hours ago, I downloaded: http://stellar-phoenix-photo-recovery.en.softonic.com/
I started it scanning my external hard drive and now 24 hours later, it has completed 25%.

The Flip Cam records in MP4 and it appears that their movie creating software only recognizes MP4? It is very basic but one can take one or more clips and create a "magic movie" that will generally create a movie of less than 10 minutes (the YouTube limit).

Yes but conversion from avi to mp4 is pretty basic and there are lots of (free) programs that can handle it easily.

The problem with mp4 is that the compression, though adequate, is extreme for the sake of filesize.

Personally, i prefer to work in avi with the XviD codec at some relatively high value (say, 2000 kbs) then convert to mp4 as the very last step. Just to preserve fidelity as much as possible.

The problem with compression is that you lose fidelity with every pass.

I really appreciate you taking the time to make comment and provide recommendations but at this point, they are way above my pay grade!