| Review of Reel Celebs:
You know how it is when you are outside with the family having a picnic and the damn bees won't leave you alone, well I kinda felt like that with the webmaster of this site. I don't mean it in a bad way really, the guy is excited about the site he has created and honestly I don't blame him. When it comes to celebrity movie sites this one is in the absolute elite and one of the best I have seen.
Like so many other movie sites this one has chosen to charge it's members through what you might call pay-per-clip. I guess you can't actually call it that since you pay per megabyte and here is how it works. You buy the amount of megabytes you expect to use (you can actually calculate it before you pay for anything) and the prices are as follows:
100mb - $4
1000mb - $25
5000mb - $100
I can't really say these prices are anything but fair, for example 100mb easily gets you 10 great quality video clips and $25 for 1GB is just plain old cheap. I don't know how many of you will go all out and buy 5GB but that is a SHITLOAD of space so you should not start out by buying so much (just a friendly tip!).
I must admit when I first entered the site I felt like I was alone in a big ass room because it felt very empty. You will know what I mean the minute you click the "sign in" link, lots of space for you there ;) At first I was confused with the whole navigation, but I picked it up pretty fast and once I did I was downloading constantly. There is a search function of course which is very easy to use, but if you want to do some more advanced searching you can do so too where you set a loft of how big the file size can be, how it lists the results, which clips to exclude and many other options. I'll be honest I didn't really use it because I found the simple search sufficient for my needs.
I also used the "View All Records" a lot, I liked to just see the listings and then just picking stuff out. When browsing this way you can choose to browse by actors first name, last name, or by movie titles. This was very easy and I could tell that there are about 8000 clips online and ready to be downloaded but you can also see all that info on the front page of the site. Here you can also get a quick overview of how many actors they have and what clips are the most popular.
Something I think is very much worth mentioning is the abundance of information you are presented with about a clip before downloading. You have the obligatory thumbnail sample to look at, you see the file size, comments by the webmaster, which codec you need (I'll get back to this) comments, notes about quality and aaaargh. All the info you need and then some I guess.
Now getting back to the codecs because it CAN turn out to be a problem for a lot of in-experienced users. It would be easy to say that all the clips are in DivX so just get that and you are in the clear, but the world isn't as perfect as that I guess. You can encounter virtually any kind of codec like Indeo, .mov, different DivX version and others I suspect so be prepared. Luckily the webmaster has foreseen this problem and so you will find a "Codec" link below every thumbnail which takes you to a page where you can find links to codecs (.mov is played with QuickTime). I found this very nice but I must admit I didn't see the codec link right away.
Conclusions:
Well I already mentioned the prices are cheap, you get a lot of content and it ranges from tv soaps to blockbuster movie to low down dirty porn (yeah baby!). The archive is already impressive and overall you get good quality. I know the webmasters are working hard on this site and you can kinda tell that they ain't done with the site yet and as I understand it, more features will be available in the near future. This is a great celeb video site which all celeb fans should check out so I highly recommend it. I suspect I will also be giving this site 5 stars in the near future, especially once the upload function is available and maybe navigating becomes just a tad easier. Recommended!
2003-01-09
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