Clipstart, for all your video-organizing needs
Today's Best Tech Deals
Picked by Macworld's Editors
Top Deals On Great Products
Picked by Techconnect's Editors
-
Riverfold Software Clipstart 1.0.1
GemFest 2009
- GemFest 2009 begins
- AirRadar surveys your wireless signals
- Application Wizard makes program...
- AppShelf tracks software licenses
- Add an OS 9-like app menu to OS X with...
These days, we’re used to managing our media on our Macs: We keep track of our music with iTunes and our photos with iPhoto. But what about our videos? Both iTunes and iPhoto can accommodate videos, but neither of them is adept at movie management. Yet the market for digital-video cameras, digital cameras with video-recording capabilities, and ultra-compact camcorders such as those from Kodak and Flip is rapidly growing—many consumers find themselves inundated with short snippets of video of their kids, their pets, and more.
That’s the opening that Riverfold Software’s Clipstart is aiming to exploit. Clipstart does for video what iTunes and iPhoto do for music and photos, respectively. It provides a central library for storing video clips, letting you name and tag them, play them back, trim them, and even upload them to video-sharing sites.
When you open the program for the first time, Clipstart offers to import your existing clips—from your hard drive or directly from your camera—giving you the option to copy them into a central library folder or leave them where they are. Unfortunately, this is an all or nothing proposition: If there are videos in that source you don't want to import, you have to import everything and then delete the unwanted clips from Clipstart.
Clipstart is a new program, and its young age is reflected in its thus-far spartan viewing options: you can choose from three different views (list, small, and detailed), and sort each view by date, name, or duration. The program automatically organizes your clips by year; a pop-up menu in the toolbar lets you restrict the view to clips from a particular year. For any clip, you can edit the name and date, as well as add tags to help identify or group clips.
Clipstart's search mode lets you type in a string to find matching videos. This features works fine for matching name and tags, but I got strange results when searching for date: a search for 2009 yielded clips from this year but also one from last year; a search for 2007 (a year for which I have five clips) returned no results.
You can play clips within Clipstart in one of three ways: double-click to open a video in the main pane; select a clip and press the space bar to view the video in its thumbnail; or press Command-Y to view the video using Leopard’s Quick Look feature. Yes, it's confusing that Quick Look doesn't use the space bar; given that the thumbnail view isn't very useful, I'd prefer to lose that option and have the space bar activate Quick Look as it does across the OS.
If you want to share a video, Clipstart allows you to upload clips to Flickr or Vimeo; unfortunately, YouTube isn't currently supported. When uploading, you can specify who can view a video (everybody, family, friends, family and friends, or nobody) and add a description. Tags and titles are pulled directly from the metadata you’ve entered in Clipstart. If you want to trim a clip before uploading, it's easy to do within Clipstart: you just double-click on the video to reveal a timeline along the bottom of the window; click and drag to select the portion of the clip you want to keep. If you mess up, just click and drag again. The editing is non-destructive, so you never accidentally delete footage.
The first time I tried to upload a video to Flickr, Clipstart wouldn’t accept Flickr’s authorization, and eventually crashed; after that, it worked perfectly. Vimeo worked fine, as well, although the upload process was slower.
Clipstart’s History window gives you a convenient list of videos you’ve uploaded; clicking on the arrow next to one of them opens the Web page for that video in your browser.
Overall, Clipstart is a program that serves a much-needed purpose, but there are still a few rough edges waiting to be polished.
GemFest 2009
GemFest 2009 features great free and low-cost software for your Mac.
Increasingly, the airwaves around us are a jungle of competing wireless signals. Koingo Software’s...
Application Wizard--which operates as an OS X System Preferences pane--displays four colored...
If you need to track licenses and registration information for a large number of applications,...
If you who miss the OS 8/9-style application menu, two programs, ASM and multiXFinder, aim to fill...
If you’d prefer a simpler way to work with disk images, Click Archive is one such solution.
This program aim taps into iPhoto's Faces feature so you can attach images to Address Book entries.
GlimmerBlocker is an ad blocker that is safe to install because it doesn’t hack Safari.
If you find yourself inundated with a huge assortment of documents that are difficult to track, a...
FileBrowse is a beautiful, well-made media browser program, though how useful you find it will...
Zipeg is a free utility that’s useful to keep around as a complement to OS X’s built-in archiving...
If you juggle work all day and find yourself switching from one set of apps to another, you can...
Wx is a meteorological program that is for anyone who’s serious about the weather.
If you regularly receive winmail.dat files from business associates, Letter Opener is well worth...
Riverfold Software's Clipstart is to video clips what iTunes is to music, or iPhoto is to digital...
Do you find the standard OS X Address Book too limiting? If so, BdContacts might be just the...
Typically, while using your Mac’s iSight camera with one program, you can’t use it with another....
Have you ever wondered what a non-Apple software installer actually installs? Or what files a...
If you work extensively at cooking or event planning, or you’re just intensely organized and...
Digital Sentry is an aptly named program that monitors your computer for any of a number of events.
This simple program aims to fix the problem of lost or forgotten warranties by providing you with...
Full-featured accounting programs like QuickBooks can seem overwhelming and complicated. For...
Monitor is a small and lightweight freeware application that seeks to put these regularly visited...
Precipitate is a System Preference pane that lets Spotlight search your Google Docs, Google...
Tweetube is a complementary app to the third-party service of the same name that allows you share a...
Yum 3.0.7 is a solid, no-frills recipe manager, but its lack of some key features may have you...
If you want to use the same custom location several times in iMovie '09, you can use...
If you tend to put all your events, appointments, and client meetings in iCal, TimeTable can help...
DeskCover is a free program that adds a customizable background behind the icons on your desktop.
Instead of logging in and out of different user accounts on your Mac, rooSwitch lets you switch...
Whether you’ve deleted photos, reformatted your media card, or had a card go bad, Klix recovers...
Photo Wrangler makes it easy to quickly scan through a folder of photos and sort them into separate...
Rife as Mac OS X already is with slide-show capabilities, PhotoPresenter builds onto those and puts...
For image editing, Sumo Paint offers many Photoshop standbys. And best of all, this Web-based...
With ViewIt, you can simply drop your camera’s photos onto the ViewIt window, view and mark what’s...
You’ve probably heard about the Faces feature in iPhoto ‘09 that makes it quick and easy to find...
As great as video sharing Web sites like YouTube are, they often don’t allow you to directly...
Shape Collage turns a collection of photos into a collage of practically any shape, whether you’re...
Aquafadas’s PulpMotion produces professional multimedia presentations that are anything but...
When you want to create iTunes playlists based on tempo or need to find the BPM of your songs,...
VideoDrive aims to make video conversions easy.
Cooliris is a super-handy browser plug-in that lets you scope out images and video content in a...
SousChef is a recipe organizer with an iTunes-RSS feed sensibility that can help you get your meal...
If you have an even moderately large media library and like the idea of having everything neatly...
As a grand finale to GemFest 2009, here’s a list of some of our all-time favorite Mac Gems.