How To Organize Your Movies With FootTrack.

I’ve officially jumped on the “file organization” bandwagon. Despite the good things iTunes and iPhoto do with music and photo files, respectively, files are still a mess on the Mac and there’s no solution in sight.

Step by step, we’ll get there. The next step is organizing your movie clips. FootTrack does it best.

Whether you use iMovie, FinalCut Express, or FinalCut Pro, or whatever, keeping track of all those movie and video clips is painful. If you’re like me, you probably have files all over your Mac anyway.

Apple makes it somewhat easier for us by segregating certain file types. Music files go in the Music folder, digital photos go in the Pictures folder, and there’s two excellent applications to help organize those files—iTunes and iPhotos.

What about movie clips from your video camera? FootTrack to the rescue. Think of FootTrack as a professional’s iTunes or iPhoto for movie clips.

Whether you’re using iMovie or FCX/FCP, you’re making movie clips. For iMovie users, they’re stored in a project folder, probably buried deep in your Movie folder, right?

If you have a couple dozen iMovie Projects then you have hundreds and hundreds of movie clips.

Unlike iTunes or iPhoto, iMovie does NOT help you with movie clip organization. To find a specific movie clip you have to open an iMovie Project, check the Shelf, find the file in the Movies folder, then do with it whatever.

Enter FootTrack 2.3.x. I almost purchased the 1.x version of FootTrack a couple of years ago but didn’t, and waited for version 2.x.

Foottrack is the movie clip organizer you’ve always dreamed of; a Universal Binary, so it runs on PPC Macs and Intel Macs. It’s worth it. Try it.

FootTrack is immediately recognizable and comfortable as a Mac application. There’s the familiar brushed aluminum look of Safari, and older versions of iTunes, iPhoto.

FootTrack it does much more than store clips (yes, iPhoto will store movie clips, as will iTunes; don’t go there). Neither is adept at storing movie clips.

First, you’re greeted with an iTunes/iPhoto-like window. To the left is a single vertical column which will display Tapes and Groups (think of them as the Playlists and Albums of iTunes, iPhoto respectively). In the same column, below Tapes, is a list of Keywords which can be assigned to movie clips.

The right side of the screen, again similar to iPhoto, is where you’ll see all the movie clips. So, click on a specific Tape, and all the clips from that tape show up in the large right-side column. Just like iPhoto.

So, at first, FootTrack is simple to navigate and simple to use. That simplicity is elegant and deceiving at the same time. Without reading the PDF Guide or the built-in Help screens, you’ll figure out how to import and/or capture movie clips.

Yep. FootTrack will do both. If you have movie clips already in the Movies folder on your Mac, FootTrack can, just like iTunes, bring them all together, categorize them appropriately, let you assign Keywords, make the clips searchable.

Just like iPhoto, FootTrack has a lightning fast scrollbar which lets you scan and scroll through the movie clips, in video clip mode, or simple list mode. Wait. There’s more. FootTrack also has an iPhoto-like “re-size” zooming tool which lets you change the size of all the clips in a tape.

Zoom out and see up to 100 movie clips at a time (10 x 10 on my Mac screen), or zoom in to just a few, all larger sized. Again, like iPhoto.

The FootTrack toolbar at the top of the screen will also look familiar.

There’s buttons for Capture, Import Video, Compress Clips (very handy if you’re short of hard drive space), Export, Add Keywords, Print, Burn Disc. There’s even a Search field similar to iTunes. I told you FootTrack would be familiar.

There’s also a floatable Inspector which, when you select a specific movie clip, will display information about the clip—the Tape, the clip’s Name, Duration, Time Code in and out points, the DV video size in megabytes, the Date Recorded and the Date Imported, a place for a full description of the movie clip, and the file path to where the clip is stored.

Double click on a movie clip and the clip opens up in the right hand column. New tools are present below the movie clip. Sound. Stop, Start. Rewind.

Below that are additional tools to move to Next movie clip in the Tape, Split Clip (very handy) and Set Clip Image (the frame or image that shows up at the beginning of the movie clip in FootTrack). One click takes you back to the zoom mode.

Whether you’re using iMovie or FCX or FCP or whatever for your movie projects, keeping track of movie clips is cumbersome at best, messy at worst. FootTrack is an excellent solution to handle your movie clip requirements.

Wait. There’s more. MUCH more. FootTrack is great up to this point but is much more than just an iPhoto knock off for movie clips.

For screen shots and more detail on importing video, Click Here for Page 2…