I downloaded a copy of iDive from the company website, and opened the disk image. iDive 1.0.2 is a wonderful video “shoebox” with which you can catalog and search all of your video footage. Aimed at the semi-professional market, or pro-sumer, iDive allows the user to put all of that amazing footage that typically was sitting in a box on a shelf on mini dv tapes.
Personally, I have a lot of both home movies and video shot for clients. My organizational skills are only evolved to the point where I label tapes twice with a date: the date I put the tape in the camera, and the date I take it out. This leaves me with a huge box full of mini dv tapes, labeled with dates. It’s not too easy to find specific footage, however.
Enter iDive. This little application allows me to pop in a tape to my camcorder, click a button marked “DV Capture,” and allow the program to do the rest. I did this with a couple of home movie tapes. I started the capture process, and walked away for the 90 minutes it took to import the video clips to iDive.
Now you might be wondering, “how much MORE disk space do I need to buy to put all this video on my hard drive?” iDive solves this dilemma simply and elegantly. The captured video isn’t actually imported to your hard drive, like in iMovie or Final Cut. iDive takes little snapshots of of the video, and places these photo-like clips into the iDive interface. These are stored on your hard drive, at a fraction of the disk space typical dv importing uses. Idive requires about 120 megabytes of space for an hour of video. DV usually uses up about 1 gigabyte for 5 minutes of video. You do the math.
iDive has a nice PDF manual, downloadable from the website. It was essential for me to figure out how all the features of iDive worked together. It’s clear, easy to rad, and answered all my questions.
The best feature of iDive, by far, is the many ways information can be viewed and searched. There are several ways to view your imported clip data, including tabbed, icon and timeline views. Each of these views can be customized to fit your own way of working and previewing.
One cool feature I used is the People, Places and Events tagging. I created a list of different people, places, and events, and then dragged different tags to my stored clip files. In other words, if you have three clips, each of a different person in a different place, iDive allows you to just drag and drop the appropriate person and place tag from a list you create directly onto the clip being logged. This way, I avoided hours of typing the same thing over and over again. It’s a vast improvement over manual logging and tagging clips, as in Final Cut.
The one nagging feature I wanted was a way to import digital clips that I’ve already imported onto my hard drive. iDive currently only allows direct importing of clips from a video camera, but they promise this feature in future releases.
Bottom line, this application is worth it’s low price tag of $49.95, a discount from their regular $69.95 price. If you’re serious about organizing your video footage, whether for personal or professional use, iDive is the way to go.
