9 Tools to Help Manage Your Video Clips

Kris asks: I shoot tons of video making it tough to get all of it organized.  Is there a single program that could organize all of these clips into groups or playlists, populate with tags and keywords and figure out metadata like video length and file size automatically?

I tried iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie to get organized but they’re not made to get the job done – none of these actually manage clips. Any suggestions?

Answer: There is no holy grail of software that would do all of the above but here are 9 of them that come pretty close: (and some are even free)

iVideo makes it easy to find and organize your movies, even when they are in different folders, across multiple hard drives, on endless stacks of CDs, or on the Internet.

MovieGallery takes care of all your movies in a powerful and easy way. Just drag and drop to organize. Create playlists and watch movies in full-screen. Publish and share your movies on the web and on mobile phones with playlists, preview thumbnails, information and everything intact, in just a few simple steps. You can even work with multiple galleries simultaneously. In contradiction to almost all other shoe-box applications MovieGallery is designed as a document-based application.

Usher can manage the videos you keep on your hard drive, and it will do so even if you don’t want to move your videos and movies into Usher’s library—it’s your choice as to whether or not Usher moves things into its library, or just helps you manage your collection in place.

Together has unparalleled features for organizing your items. Items can be tagged, color-coded with labels, stored in folders and collected together in groups, which work like iTunes playlists. Together also has smart groups that can do all the work of staying organized for you. Together’s tag browser goes beyond mere management with system tags, automatically created from the labels, ratings and groups in your library, providing an alternate view of your library.

Qpict offers an attractive and inexpensive way to view, organize, search and batch process all your media files. Our media database engine supports common standards such as IPTC, XML and EXIF and supports many different media file formats including images, movie clips, fonts, RAW images and sounds. QPict is equally well suited for both professional and home usage. In fact many are switching from more expensive solutions to QPict due to the flexibility, speed and ease of use you just cannot find anywhere else.

EnterMedia is the most powerful, open source, digital asset management tool available. It’s the one chosen by top industry professionals to manage and maintain their entire video collection. Now you too, can share the inflamed sense of ego that accompanies using top notch solutions for high level challenges. Manage all of your video needs from your own secure server. What’s more? Entermedia VideoStorm has a customed themed GUI (graphical user interface) that really is simple to use. So from managing your wedding photos to running your own online television station, VideoStorm is one of the most effective tools available to help you manage your growing collection.

Phraseanet is a complete answer to all kind of organizations that need to manage and distribute digital assets (photos, videos, sounds, Pdf documents,…). It was born in 2005 and is being used by many companies & administrations of all sizes, for whom digital media needed a powerful management solution with rich functions, easy to set up, evolutive, with a great working ergonomy and affordable.

Phraseanet can be used whether as a departemental or as transversal solution for multiple services and of course also as an inter company solution for major groups.

It is only built with standard open source components and uses among others Mysql, Php and Apache.

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

And last but not least:

Cinematica lets you manage your video library in great detail, keeping track of dozens of properties for each and every file. Sort and search by multiple criteria simultaneously, such as genre, studio, program, season and episode, as well as by technical properties including resolution, aspect ratio, frame rate, and video codec. Cinematica even has a unique secondary filter that lets you further refine your search based on a selected property.

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