The Search For a Video Clip Manager

It’s the app that Apple forgot: the video clip manager. We’ve got iTunes and iPhoto, but neither one is really made for the task. What can we use to organize all those stray video clip files sitting around on our hard disks–the short movies from our digital camera or video camera, those clips we’ve downloaded from blogs or groups or YouTube, all those miscellaneous 5-minute or 30-minute little movies we’ve got floating around? I have hundreds of clips I’d like to organize, so I can remove duplicates, delete lower-res copies, and just be able to FIND stuff. Where’s the “iPhoto for video clips?”

I’m not talking about full-length movies, VIDEO_TS folders, or a way to manage a DVD library. There are great tools out there for that, including my favorite, DVDpedia, and Delicious Library. What I’m looking for is a similar app that just deals with clips, populated with tags and categories that I provide (and figuring out metadata like video length and file size automatically) rather than pulling down movie information from IMDB or Amazon.

What features should be in an app like this? It should:

• Refer to your files in their existing locations without sucking copies of them all into a special library. That way, big files aren’t hogging twice the space.
• Work with any type of video file that your Mac can play, including WMV’s with Flip4Mac and Quicktime, and even FLVs from YouTube with TubeSock. You should be able to double-click on any file listing or thumbnail and open it up its associated player. A built-in player using Quicktime would be nice, too.
• Understand video files. For anything playable in Quicktime, it should automatically fill in the length (minutes, seconds) of each file.
• Have an iTunes/iPhoto-like interface:
  • Groups, folders, or playlists that you can create manually, and smart groups automatically updated based on date, length, or any other metadata.
  • User-defined keywords, categories, tags, ratings, or at least a free-form text field for notes.
  • A spotlight-like search in the upper right corner that immediately narrows down the list based on name, keywords, tags, or other metadata.
  • A thumbnail view, with the option to set how far into the video the thumbnail frame should come from (preferably adjustable for each file). There should be options to show the file name, clip length, and file size below each thumbnail.
  • A list view showing all the data for a clip in columns, just like iTunes.
• Have a reasonable price, say under $40. There are some professional-level applications such as iDive that can do all these things, but they can get expensive.

There’s got to be an app out there that does all this, right? Well, not exactly. There are lots of video players, browsers, and converters out there. But not many managers. A few come close, a few others are in the ballpark. You may find one of these works for you.

Let’s start with the biggest disappointment: the program that can do almost everything we’re looking for, but isn’t a viable choice. iVideo from Waterfall Software ($19.95) even bills itself as the “iPhoto or iTunes for video files.” It does nearly everything on the list, except support FLV files. It even has a cool icon. So what’s the problem? The most recent version, 3.02, was released a lifetime ago, in October 2005. And it’s buggy–it crashed on me within the first 10 minutes of using it. It’s also not Universal, and its creators don’t seem interested in maintaining or updating it. In fact, Waterfall last updated its company blog in April 2006, nearly a year ago. E-mails to the development team go unanswered. So this doesn’t look like an app with a future. I’m not spending hours of my time cataloging my clips in a nearly-orphaned program with a tendency to crash unexpectedly.

MovieGallery from Bitfield AB ($29.95) is a pretty good candidate. It handles a variety of movie file types (but not FLV Flash files), has a great list view and thumbnail view, and a good Spotlight-type search. It’s Universal, requires OS X 10.3 or higher, and was last updated in December 2006. It has smart playlists, ratings, and even a system for allowing you to share your galleries on a web site. It’s completely lacking in Help or documentation, outside of the features on the web site and a short list of questions and answers. It has no tagging or categories, but there is a Copyright field that takes any text, and an Info box for text notes. Both are searchable, along with file names and video type.

yFlicks from ManyTricks (about $20) is a new app, from January 2007. It’s Universal, but does require OS X 10.4. It’s a nice video browser that is specially designed to download and even convert YouTube FLV movies, along with the other common formats. It’s an excellent player, with optional fullscreen playback and controls. It has very little for organizing files, though—just Artist and Rating fields, and no smart group capability. It has a Search box, which is limited to file names and artists. It’s a very slick video player that definitely has potential, but isn’t much of a manager yet.

Keep It Together from Reinvented Software ($24.95) is more of an information manager, but I saw in the recent MacApper post about it that it handles movies, so I gave it a look. It’s Universal, and was last updated in March 2007. It has great tagging capabilities. It shows individual thumbnails and can play back movies, but has no thumbnail view of a group of files. Larger movie clips seem to slow it down drastically (anything over 20-30 MB). It also can’t determine clip lengths, and there’s no field for it. KIT looks like a great app for organizing things, but it needs some more movie-specific features to be a contender as a video clip manager.

I found a few other programs in the neighborhood, although none was promising enough to test personally. FootTrack ($49.95) is designed to manage DV files, has extensive keyword/smart group capabilities, and seems to be aimed more at the digital video professional (which explains the higher price). It captures all video into its own library, has compression capabilities, and doesn’t officially support non-DV Quicktime files. Qpict ($35) and Stimulus ($19.95) are “media browsers” that handle both images and video. Both appeared to have limited management and organizational features (tagging, smart groups, etc.) for video clips.

So where is the ultimate video manager? iVideo’s an orphan and doesn’t support FLV files. MediaGallery also has no FLV support, and limited keyword/tagging options. yFlicks has great FLV support, but offers little for managing files.

Is there something better out there? Is someone currently writing the perfect “iPhoto for video”? Speak up in the comments.

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