FrameVault is the first prosumer software solution for managing your digital video assets on Mac OS X. That’s what it said on the Einstein’s Legacy web site, so we took FrameVault for a ride.

“Whether you are a media services professional developing a training presentation, a business owner showcasing your products on a kiosk or a home video enthusiast who needs to organize and present your digital media collection, FrameVault is an excellent tool to help you with your needs.” Well, that’s what it says on the web site. In my experience, FrameVault is a strange application to say the least.

Let’s start with the marketing babble of FrameVault. It’s confusing to say the least. For example, there’s no way to import clips from your DV camera. On the other hand, if you’re a Final Cut Studio user, you can import clips in Final Cut format, as these can be played with QuickTime. You might say FrameVault depends on other applications to manage the import of clips on a camera.

That’s fine, of course. But it doesn’t solve the problem of having very large clips (e.g. in Final Cut) which contain parts that are useless --which is why you want to edit them in the first place. So, what can you do with FrameVault then that you can’t already do with Final Cut Pro?

The answer to that question lies in the second quote from the web site. Suppose you have a lot of QuickTime clips on your hard disk, imported and converted using iMovie, Final Cut or downloaded from the web. Suppose you want these to be managed and perhaps even welded together into one huge movie.

That’s where FrameVault comes in. FrameVault allows you to create what it calls a Digital Portfolio, which is a bunch of selected clips welded together to form one large QuickTime clip. In FrameVault, clips can be played, and every detail of their playback characteristics changed, but that’s all FrameVault will allow you to do.

Using FrameVault is straightforward. There are a plethora of buttons and drop-down menus so you can spare several trips to menus. There is a search field, allowing you to search for clips, and the usual play, scan forward and scan backward buttons. The scan backward button didn’t work on my system, but that may be a minor bug.

You can organise your clips in FrameVault libraries and playlists, and export those to a playlist document that will open the same playlist the next time you open FrameVault.

Conclusion

FrameVault is a nice application with very limited functionality. It is a first version, so we should give the program a fair chance. However, I do find the marketing babble on the developer’s web site confusing, and indeed misleading.

If you’re after a management application for QuickTime clips, FrameVault does everything you need.

If on the other hand, you want to manage your tapes and digital video recordings instead and import clips from the camera so you can later identify a video tape more easily --which is what I understand a Digital Video Asset Manager to be-- you should take a thorough look at iDive.