Importing a large collection of home movie videos
I want to import into iTunes a collection of around 1300 video clips I've made with my own camera, all saved in QuickTime-compatible video formats. Currently I'm using an outdated program running under Windows XP (requiring me to use Parallels on my Mac) that thankfully is able to export all the contained information to an Excel spreadsheet. The individual video clips are carefully named files that incorporate the recording date and sequence of recording on that date. Additionally, there are around 50 folders corresponding to the subject matter of the video clips, and so each folder may contain a number of individual videos of that subject from different dates. The spreadsheet includes columns for subject (i.e., the folder), the individual clip name, several more columns for brief category descriptions of the individual clips, and then a column where I have free descriptive text of essentially unlimited length. I think that the latest versions of iTunes do have more than enough categories of video information handling to accommodate what I have in the Excel spreadsheet. But HOW DO I DO THE IMPORT IN AN EFFICIENT MANNER? I see this breaking down into two challenges:
1) What steps need to be taken to transfer information from 1300 rows in Excel into 1300 "videos" in iTunes--i.e., how do I systematically move information for a given row's multiple entries, organized by standardized columns in Excel into corresponding data fields in iTunes? I'm willing to use an intermediary program between Excel and iTunes if this would provide the solution.
2) How do I arrange that iTunes finds the clips in their correct folders? If necessary, I'm willing to retire the folder organization and just put all the clips into a single folder--since they all have unique file names, this shouldn't create an identification problem, and if this allows iTunes to work more efficiently, it's fine by me.
Thanks!
