Product Reviews

iDive is a cleanly designed asset manager for video data, allowing you to catalogue old video tapes, movie files and iMovie projects. Tags and other metadata can be applied to all clips, and you have control over where your libraries are saved, allowing them to reside on an external hard disk or wherever you choose.

Launch the application and you'll find a list of sources displayed on the left of its window. It's here that you can create libraries and tape groups to organise collections of videos and movie files. Import of iMovie projects and clips is supported. The main Clip panel in the centre shows content in the selected source or search results, while the right of the window relates to tagging and searching.

You can use iDive rather than iMovie or Final Cut to capture DV. For every clip, you can store any or all of the following: the original DV data, a compressed version of the file, or a series of sample frames - taken every 1, 2, 5, 10 or 20 seconds - optionally recompressed as Jpegs.

Happily, scene-break detection is supported, provided your camera records a date and time stamp. This allows video recorded at various times to be automatically broken into separate clips, each of which can be individually annotated and rated for fine control when searching.

When you select a clip in the Clip panel, sample frames from it are displayed below. This forgoes scrubbing through videos in favour of more rapid scrolling

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through evenly spaced stills.

iDive's tagging and deceptively simple search features are its core strength. Pressing the Tag button switches to the right panel, where you can apply tags to selected clips. The accompanying Tags panel maintains lists of people, places and events, along with details such as nicknames and start and end dates for events. Tag lists often grow quite long, but that's been taken into account with a search feature and checkboxes next to each tag, which add them to a shorter list of favourites.

The Find button switches to searching for clips, with the results constrained by the source and the timeline indicated at the top of the window. This allows you to search for, say, clips of a particular person at a family wedding last summer.

Another way to perform a search is with the aid of the boxes in the right panel, which show all tags applied within the selected source. As tags are selected, the main clip list filters out non-matching clips. Other tags applied within the results are highlighted in blue to help you refine the search - a neat and helpful touch.

iDive's effectiveness is limited by its treatment of DV. iMovie users importing HD projects will notice this, because clips are interpreted wrongly, making it clear that iDive doesn't recognise the format. iDive really should cater for other modern camcorder formats - for example, it wouldn't detect our HDV camera.

Final Cut users can also make use of iDive, because it now supports recording to QuickTime DV files to save time rendering audio tracks. Clip lists - akin to iTunes playlists - allow you to export an XML Interchange Format file and the referenced media for import into Final Cut Pro 4 or later.

A neat feature for cataloguing tapes is the printing of covers for your tapes. However, we found no way to make optimal use of large paper sizes when printing smaller covers such as MiniDV inlay cards.

iDive works well for entirely DV workflows, but it really needs tweaking to handle other formats.