iDive

don't like it. First of all, at first launch the window does not fit a 1024x768 screen. And about 1000 warning and dialogs pops up, boring... Then the interface is very confusing, so many buttons and drop areas... c'mon you can make it more "mac". Then I cannot drop the movie files on the app icon in the dock, nor on the main window. But I can drop em on the trash icon in the app... ??? Then it asks me wich file I'd like to import, but I dropped only one!! Why is it asking me then ? And there are too many settings for the importation. And when you abort the importation, the alert panel is not localized. This app doesn't deserve the "i" in its name, because it's not easy to use.

There appear to be three programs struggling to be the iPhoto of video: iDive, Foottrack, and iVideo. The latter's own site reveals a relatively feature-sparse (no compression), budget-type program, so I didn't spend any time comparing it with its more powerful competition; I'm going to be cataloging hundreds of tapes and need some power. Foottrack and iDive are both excellent programs. I compared both and dumped multiple tapes to both to see how they worked. For core features, they both do exactly what they say they will, and overall performance was good. So why did I choose to buy iDive instead of Foottrack despite a $20 price difference? 1) Design philosophy: I simply like iDive's interface better for the work at hand. both Foottrack and iVideo tout that they have an iPhoto-like interface and yes, that makes things easy-to-understand, but the iTunes/iPhoto style of interface isn't necessarily the end-all of software design. Video has its own needs. I like the way the people at Aquafadas were not afraid to "think different," which is in itself oh-so-Apple. 2) Stills: Only iDive has the ability to archive stills of the tapes you catalog; you can set the number of seconds in the intervals between them. This is a brilliant way to save disk space, but still let you catalog the contents of older or less important tapes in your collection. 3) Search controls: Foottrack has iPhoto-like keywords, and they work just great. Some people may like this system better than iDive's unique People/Places/Events system (either is fine for me, since people, places and events are pretty much all I need). But Foottrack's time/date search capabilities pale next to iDive. The latter has a unique time slider bar at the top of the screen which lets you effortlessly select any period in time and find all those clips with dates falling within the highlighted section. iDive also allows you to apply iTunes/iPhoto style ratings to your clips. 4) Display controls: iDive has more extensive options for choosing how to sort your clips in the viewer (such as by rating, or title) and more customizability of the the data shown for each clip. Other notes: Foottrack has an important feature that the current version of iDive lacks: the ability to play back multiple clips back-to-back. I asked about this in a mail to the Aquafadas' feature request mail address, and was told it's coming very shortly. Also, when I evaluated Foottrack (ver. 2.0.2), I experienced an important technical problem: The program appears to be dropping a few frames from the beginning of every clip. The first frame is there, but then there's a gap of 2-4 frames before the capture restarts. I confirmed this problem on two different Macs capturing with completely different hardware. This may of course be corrected in a future release, but that alone was a deal-breaker for me when considering which to purchase, as I want to be able to move the captured clips directly into Final Cut for editing. Conclusion: If you only shoot a few tapes a year and don't care about archiving stills or extensive display & search options, you may find Foottrack suits your needs just fine. But for someone like myself who wants a single program that has the flexibility to handle a variety of personal and professional needs, and the disk-saving stills function, blow the extra $20 and give your money to Aquafadas.