If you’ve ever tried to find your favorite movie scenes on YouTube or other video networks, you’ve probably noticed it’s not always the easiest thing to find the direct quotes you’re looking for. Not only are these classic scenes hard to hunt down, but more often than not, when you do finally come across them they’re low quality – with questionable video resolution and rough sounding audio.

While there are plenty of places online to find the full movie downloads, going through the process of getting the whole film and editing the scene you want down into a short clip is a time-consuming process. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place online that already did that for you? Enter MovieClips (a service only available in the US & Canada).

When you visit the site, it has a minimalistic UI that puts the search, front and center. The ability to search for just about any of your favorite movie scenes in an instant is nice, but the myriad ways that you can focus your search is nothing short of a movie miracle.

Want an actor? Type it in. How about a line of dialogue? No problem. Genres, actions, moods, characters, themes, settings, props ““ there’s simply nothing left behind when it comes to finding the exact scene you want from a multitude of angles. What you get as your result is a well-designed grid of thumbnails of each matching clip that can instantly be previewed with a simple mouseover ““ a great way to quickly find the scene you want.

Not only can you search and view these select movie moments, but you can also save any clip as a favorite, buy related stuff for each movie the clips belong to, grab an embed code to drop any clip onto your own website, or hook into your social network to share around on Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, or email it to a friend.

Another fun element to the clips’ pages are short trivia games associated with each clip ““ often pulling from a related actor, the movie itself, or some other related metadata that accompanies it.

The only drawback of the site thus far is that all of the clips are from only 6 movie studios – 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros – but these six represent the largest studios in Hollywood. With 12,000 clips and the promise of thousands more, it seems that MovieClips is cementing itself as the premiere place online to find those hard-to-find movie moments ““ that is unless their upcoming competitor, AnyClip, has anything to say about it.

If you’re looking for more ways to find favorite movie scenes and information about movies online, check out these related articles here on MakeUseOf:

• ScreenTunes: Find Out a Name of a Movie Song by Words or Movie Title
• Top 5 Websites To Watch Old Movie Trailers You Forgot About

Does this sound like a better way to find your favorite film scenes online? Let us know what you think about MovieClips with your comments!