Product Reviews

Think of Clipstart as 'iTunes for video clips' and you're halfway there. It makes video clips fun again, putting them in easy reach and letting you upload them to the Internet in an instant. It's not a video editor, but that's not the idea. That's not the kind of video it was designed for. Clipstart is for the kind of short snippet you'd record on your phone or pocket camcorder, and upload to a video sharing website.

Like iPhoto or iTunes, it acts as an electronic librarian for all your stuff. Unlike those applications, it doesn't care where your video files are kept, and when first launched will scour your hard disk looking for them.

That done, everything is automatically grouped by year of

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recording, so that you have a certain amount of navigational structure before you've even started using the application. And it's lovely to use. If you like to work fast, you can do everything with keyboard shortcuts. The central organising feature is text tags, which you can add very quickly to groups of clips using the Copy/Paste Tags feature.

You can search through your collection, flag clips, remove them from Clipstart, or delete them entirely using the Mark for Deletion shortcut. Quick Look is supported, which makes it even quicker to scan through a collection to find exactly the clip you need.

Uploading to the Internet is similarly easy. The application supports uploads to Vimeo and Flickr; the lack of support for YouTube is Clipstart's only glaring omission.

There is one editor-like feature: instead of uploading an entire clip, it's possible to select a portion of one and upload that on its own. Clipstart won't save that portion as a new file, but will remember which segment it was.

Some might consider the £19 price tag a little too high, but Clipstart is very good at what it does, and having tried it, you'll wonder why no-one else thought of it years ago. If you frequently shoot video snippets and want to share them on the web, it's worth every penny.