Personal movie assistant
Wouldn't it be great if there were a tool that could manage your videos and movies as well as Apple's iTunes and iPhoto manage your music and your photographs? Now there is. Meet Usher, your personal movie assistant
Find and Manage Everything
Usher is the ultimate movie and video assistant because it can see and manage pretty much everything:
Usher can manage the videos you keep on your hard drive, and it will do so even if you don't want to move your videos and movies into Usher's library—it's your choice as to whether or not Usher moves things into its library, or just helps you manage your collection in place
Usher can see videos stored in iTunes, iPhoto, and Aperture, providing easy management for these collections. You can add details to these videos, and then use Smart Playlists (as in iTunes) to quickly filter your collection on those details
Usher also includes search-and-download capabilities for both YouTube and Vimeo1. Downloading your favorite video is now as simple as running a search (or entering its URL), and then letting Usher do all the heavy lifting—Usher can even auto-convert these downloads for use with the iPhone, iPod, and Apple TV, and copy them to iTunes
Features
Watch
Usher uses Apple's QuickTime technology, so it can play back any movie that you can watch in QuickTime Player. (Install Perian and Flip4Mac to further extend QuickTime's playback powers.). Usher allows you to watch videos directly in its window, in a separate window, or in full-screen mode. In the first two modes, you can choose between the QuickTime X-style 'hovering' controls, or fixed controls outside the playback area
Identify
Once your collection has reached a certain size, watching becomes difficult without some way of identifying individual videos…and this task is one of Usher's strengths. You can use Tags to help categorize movies, much like you use keywords in iPhoto to organize photos. Beyond Tags, Usher's Properties are multi-value fields that can, for instance, store the entire cast for a movie in one Property.Usher makes it super easy to create Property entries for your commercial movies, too—an Auto-Properties button grabs the relevant data from Amazon, and populates the Properties fields for you
New!
Usher also includes a free-form auto-expanding Notes field, so if you like to keep notes about your movies, you can now store a near-limitless amount of text about each one. This text is fully searchable, too, meaning you can use the Notes field in Smart Playlists
Organize
For the ultimate in organization, you can sort your movies and videos into Folders, and use Playlists and Smart Playlists to create filtered lists based on Tags, Properties, and other fields (such as Date Added). Playlists and Smart Playlists in Usher work just like they do in iTunes and iPhoto, so if you're comfortable there, you'll be right at home in Usher. With the power of Smart Playlists, your movie collection can be as organized as you want it to be. One organization task that many people dread is renaming their recorded movies; there's just not much relevant information in a video clip titled MVI1023.MOV, but renaming tens or hundreds of similarly-named clips is tedium defined. Typically, you'd have to resort to an independent app, such as our own Name Mangler, to rename all your badly-named videos. But Usher's got you covered there, too—it's got a built-in renaming tool that provides quite a few options for batch renaming
