Missing from iLife: Video Clip Manager

I love Apple’s iLife suite of apps and how they allow people to make some fun things. I regularly use iPhoto to store and organize all my pictures, iMovie HD to make movies and slideshows, and iTunes, while not a formal component of iLife, stores all my music. I use iDVD once in a while when I do make DVD discs. I cooled off on using iWeb since Pulpconnection is my main web presence, and I never did use GarageBand (unless I start podcasting).

But after this video-taking holiday season, I now realize that there’s a hole in iLife’s offerings. There is no application to store and organize video clips. iTunes can store television shows, movies, and finished homemade movies (formatted for the iPod), and iPhoto can store video clips taken with digital cameras, but how do I store and organize all my video footage taken with my DV camcorder? If you import them into iMovie, you’ll have one gigantic movie project to work with, and iMovie isn’t built for that job.

Right now I have a stack of miniDV tapes sitting on my desk just to store my footage, but I really don’t know what’s on each tape. It would be great if iLife has an app that can import my footage, allow me to organize and catalog/tag the videos, then be a media source for iMovie when I want to make a movie.

Yeah, yeah, this app will eat up hard drive space like the Tabasco Man at a sashimi buffet, but at least I have my video clips in a more usable and accessible format. Besides that 500 GB Western Digital My Book external hard drive is looking better and better.

MacWorld Expo 2007 is right around the corner, so I’m hoping iLife ’07 has some new offerings in store.

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