• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, August 10, 2011

How do you find that guy who starred in the movie about the thing at the place in the other country? You know the scene, right? The hunt for just the right film scene can start with such vagaries, as we all know. Memory being what it is, a film search can hang on small shards of information. And yet we recall movies from their great scenes. Do a search on YouTube for this sort of thing and you likely will turn up a mess of crudely ripped scenes at a range of resolutions. Understanding how movies really work in our memories, MovieClips.com has been compiling licensed scenes from Hollywood past and present, until it has secured rights to 20,000 high-def clips. Indexing all of this material to make it accessible and fun is the job of the "Genome Project" at the site that seeks to meta-tag scenes so that they are accessible to all kinds of oddball searches. Following much the same principles as the Pandora music tagging approach, MovieClips is attaching up to 1,000 attributes to a clip.

Now the company is bringing some of this knowledge and licensed material to YouTube. In a partnership announced yesterday, the clips database will share with the Google video hub. According to PC Magazine, the plan is to replace on YouTube many of the ragged clips already available there with high quality and fully licensed versions from MovieClips.com. In addition to sheer quality, MovieClips versions tend to be longer than the ones now available on YouTube.

MovieClips.com is about film discovery and sharing. The company's site on YouTube offers a great interactive route into the database.

Click on one of the interactive videos in the right column to drill into the clips trove by genre, theme, actor, or mood. The search box in the site lets you plug in great movie quotes like "Say hello to my little friend," "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," and "I'll be Back." Don't expect stellar results all the time, however. In fact, the signature Terminator film line renders Schwarzenegger goofing on himself in the movie Twins from 1988.

While not quite complete, the MovieClips.com interface is brilliant. At the end of the clip, the video window offers thumbnails of other clips from the same films, suggestions for drilling into the database from other angles, and countless other paths that invite the user to get lost in a treasure chest of scenes. Clearly these are guys who have thinking longer and harder about how people search for certain kinds of video than anyone at Google has.