ITUNES MOVIE PLAYLISTS -NEW!

Creating iTunes Movie Playlists
By Steve Martin

Ken Stone recently called me with a suggestion for a quicktip. He was playing around with iTunes one day and discovered he could create iTunes playlists for his growing library of QuickTime movies. The full impact of what he discovered was not lost on me. You can use iTunes as a way to aggregate, organize , search and burn your movie content in the same way you are currently doing this for your music content.

One of the ways I though this could be useful if you are a frequent downloader of my tutorials, you could create tutorial playlists of your favorite Final Cut, Motion or DVD Studio Pro tutorials so you have them all in one place.

In this QuickTip, I’ll walk you through how to do this using the steps Ken shared with me over the phone.

1. Below is an image of the iTunes interface. In order to create video playlists you need to be using iTunes 4.8 or above.

2. Create a Playlist by clicking the “plus” button in the lower left hand corner of the window.

3. Double-click on the playlist and give it a name. Next, drag any movie (or movies) from your hard drive directly on the playlist. You will see a little green “plus” symbol indicating you are adding items to the playlist

In the iTunes song pane on the right, you will see a list of all your imported movies. There is a tiny camera icon next to each item indicating the file is a movie file.

If you click on an item in the list, a thumbnail of your movie will show up in the lower left pane of the iTunes window. Now here’s the cool part. If you double-click any movie item in the playlist, the movie will begin playing. If you click once on the thumbnail while its playing, a window will open up and play your movie full size. If there are chapter markers set for your movie, they will show up lower right corner of the movie window.

4. And just so you don’t think iTunes is only creating a reference link and not an actual movie, right or control click on any movie in the list and choose “show song file” from the menu.

5. iTunes takes you right out to the Finder and highlights the file. Notice the movie file is placed in the iTunes library on your system drive. So all your movies end up in the same place.

6. The best part of using iTunes is how easy it is to manage your content. Just as you would manage your music files, assigning album, artist, and genre status (including any ratings), you can also do this with your movie content. Just select a movie from your playlist and press Command-I to bring up the iTunes info window.

The information you enter here will help iTunes better sort your movie content. As you can see iTunes is not only the perfect place to organize your music files, it now is the pefect place to organize your movie files. I wonder if iPod support for movies is the next logical step…