Movie Gallery (Software)
by Orlando Luna

If you are a fan of iPhoto and iTunes like I am you may have been frusturated by the lack of something similiar for your movies. Well the frusturation may be over. From Bitfield AB in Sweden comes Movie Gallery.

So what can you do with Movie Gallery? To begin with you can add your movies, but unlike iTunes the software is just creating references to where you dragged your movies from. Like iTunes you can create playlists of your selected movies. Like iPhoto you get a scaleable view of thumbnails of a frame of your video. The frame you see is chosen a few frames after the beginning of the clip (settable in preferences), but you can actually select the reference frame in the playback window. All this is cool, but the fun begins once you have your movies in playlist form.

Having a party, use the full screen playback mode to play your playlist. The software automatically scales your movie to fill your screen (this is where a projector would be handy). Similiar to Apple's DVD Software player a small playback interface appears for a few seconds. The interface allows you to scrub through the movie or move to the next or previous movies. Hitting the escape key pulls you back into the main interface.

The software also has a terrific export mode that allows you create a web gallery on the fly. This includes creating a look from scratch based on your playlists and templates or updating a previous export. As part of the export you can actually compress your movies or leave them in the form that you utilizes when you added them to your playlists. I liked the software so much I am using it for my own Luna Studio Media Gallery. If you are hand at XML program you can create your own templates. You can also alter the templates that are shipped with the product.

The only limitation with the software is the capability of drag and drop sorting within the playlist window and support for other media formats outside of quicktime and flash. For those of you with QuickTime and Flash movies wanting a great way of displaying them on your computer and the web this software is terrific.

The software is available as a download for $29.95. A downloadable demo is also available.

Bitfield AB http://moviegallery.bitfield.se