Review: Clipstart for Mac organizes video sans flashy features

As small digital video camcorders like Pure Technology’s Flip and Kodak’s Zi6 become more popular, people find themselves collecting more and more short video clips. With the advent of these pocketable cameras, short videos are becoming more and more akin to photographs. An application such as iMovie is somewhat overkill for organization, and, frankly, a bit slow when you are cataloging hundreds or even thousands of videos. 

Similarly, searching for a single video can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack at a spinning beach-ball festival. While the companies that sell these camcorders often include their own software to organize and edit, the solutions can be clunky. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t dislike Flipshare—I just hate to imagine its performance once the number of videos increases into the hundreds and thousands.

It’s easy to overlook applications that lack bells and whistles. Whether it’s smoke rising from an app’s UI or a realistic faux wooden book case interface, these apps get the most attention. Clipstart from Riverfold Software is not flashy and isn’t full of features—it organizes video clips, uploads them to Vimeo or Flickr, and has virtually no editing functionality. The application is fast, however, and allows efficient tagging. Plus, it sports a short list of additional options. You won’t spend lots of time in this app, but that seems to be the point.

There are three ways the user can import movies into Clipstart. The first is by simply connecting a camera and hitting the “Import” button at the top of the primary application window. A window will pop up showing thumbnails of videos on the device, an area for applying tags, and the option to delete movies after they are downloaded. The movies are imported into ~user/Movies/Clipstart and organized by the date they were taken. So, for example, videos taken on May 2, 2009 are stored in ~user/Movies/Clipstart/2009/5/2/. Additional movies taken in the month of May end up in the same 2009/5 hierarchy but in a new folder with the new date. If more then one set of movies is filmed and imported on the same day, the application adds a folder with a capital letter to the equation to prevent deletion of like-named files. 

The second way to import movies is to simply drag a file or folder from the Finder onto the application. If you told the application during first run not to move the files, the movie you just dragged won’t be moved; if you have your own filing system, this may be for you. The final way to import movies is to simply import a Folder from the application. Just as with importing from a camera, this method also lets you add tags to all files being imported, but it does not allow the user to pick and chose which movies the tags apply to.

Once your videos are in the application, Clipstart begins to shine. I only have around 50 movies in my library, but the software was very responsive and fast. Riverfold Software’s Manton Reece told Ars that he had one library with upwards of 2,500 movies in it, and while performance did slow down, it was certainly usable. 

You can view your videos as a list or as “small” thumbnails, and the movies’ titles and tags are listed. You can also view them in “detail” view, which shows you the video’s name, date taken, duration, and tags. Files can be sorted by duration, title, and date taken. Individual movies can be viewed in any of the three views by simply hitting the space bar key and, if you want to view them in their native resolution, you can just double click to view. This brings up the video in the main window, along with a visual timeline of the movie.

Adding tags is simple; they can be clicked once and then edited with comma-delineated single words or phrases for multiple terms. If you regularly add the same group of tags to more than one movie, you can chose to “copy tags,” select multiple movies, and then “paste tags” to apply them to all the movies you selected. If you have a lot of tags, you can search for certain key terms that will give you a list of tags that are shared with the term you searched for.