Manage Video Clips On Your Mac With iDive.

Organizing movie clips on your Mac is not iPhoto’s job. iPhoto is for digital photos. iMovie is for editing movies and clips.

What about your movie clips? How do you organize that mess on your Mac? Dive in to iDive.

Last week we rant a review of a new Mac application called PulpMotion. As you’ll see from reading the review and comments, it’s slick, fun, easy.

PulpMotion is published by Aquafadas, the same folks who develop iDive, a movie clip organizer for your Mac.

Thinking different is what good Mac developers do best, and iDive is a different yet familiar way to manage your home movie clips on your Mac.

If you’re like Jack and me, you’ve got videos. We’ve been shooting home videos for years, starting with Hi-8, then digital, then miniDV, some DVCam, and Jack’s ready for High Definition (as soon as we secure a second mortgage on the house).

That means a couple of boxes filled with video tapes in various formats that run and ran on various movie cameras.

Hard drives are less expensive and offer more storage but it’s still next to impossible to get all your home videos stored on a Mac. It’s a digital hub, but not the truck center at Wal-Mart in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Think of iDive as a central hub for your video movie clips—a way to catalog your shots, scenes, tapes that keeps track of everything, regardless of where you keep the video—your Mac or a big shoebox.

iDive is different than iPhoto and iTunes, but functions in a similar manner. You can annotate movie clips as people, places, event in a drag and drop manner, rating clips and then viewing them.

What’s really handy about iDive is the organizational capability.

You manage each tape separately, but everything goes into a central hub database so searches for specific clips, scenes, whatever, are instant.

It’s unusual to find a highly capable application that’s perfect for the newbie movie maker, and the so-called prosumer videographer.

iDive caters to both and does so with ease and a gentle learning curve.

For example, the basic concept of importing movie clips into iDive is mastered in minutes. That makes it easy to find clips.

iDive then provides for export of clips and clip lists for Final Cut Pro, Express, Avid iMovie, making it a good application for those with more of a professional need.

Ease of use is the hallmark of Aquafada’s major Mac applications. iDive is simple. Set up a catalog, capture or import your movie clips, create the annotation database, create the notes and then find anything. Then export as needed.

Those are the basics. iDive includes a special feature called Mosaic, which is a built-in animation and slideshow module—a basic version of what you find in PulpMotion.

Select a theme, a click. Your video and slide show animation begins. You’ll be impressed with the professional look and layout of each theme. Export the finished product as an open or close to a video you’ve created in iMovie or for iDVD.

iDive is a very good way to catalog your movie clips but it does more and works very well with any of the Mac’s iLife applications, and with PulpMotion.

As always, iDive is highly recommended and solves a tough movie clip organization problem. How do you manage your home move video collection and clips?