How to Build a Searchable Stock Footage Library Without Paying for Cloud Storage

Every production company has the same problem. Years of footage across dozens of drives, and nobody can find anything.

You know the shot exists. The sunset timelapse from that 2021 shoot. The drone flyover of the factory. The interview B-roll with the product on the table. It is somewhere on a drive. Maybe the LaCie. Maybe the Synology. Good luck.

Stock footage subscriptions cost thousands a year, and half the time you already own a better version of the clip you are licensing. The real problem is not a lack of footage. It is that your footage is not searchable.

The typical "solution" that does not work

Most teams try some version of the same approach:

Manual logging. Someone scrubs every clip and types descriptions into a spreadsheet. This works until that person leaves, the spreadsheet gets stale, or nobody has time to log new projects.
Folder naming conventions. 2024/ClientName/ShootDate/CamA/ gets you to the right project, but not to the right shot within 400 clips.
Cloud platforms. Upload everything to a cloud DAM, pay per terabyte per month, and wait days for uploads to finish. Then pay again next month.

None of these scale. Manual logging does not survive turnover. Folder structures do not describe content. Cloud storage bills grow forever.

The FrameQuery approach

FrameQuery takes a different path. Instead of uploading your footage, you point it at your drives and it builds a searchable index locally.

Here is the workflow:

Step 1: Add your source folders

Point FrameQuery at the drives or folders where your footage lives. External drives, NAS volumes, RAID arrays, whatever you use. FrameQuery scans the folder structure and catalogues every video file it finds.

Step 2: Process your footage

FrameQuery generates lightweight proxies and sends them to our processing servers. Your original footage never leaves your machine. The processing pipeline runs transcription, object detection, face recognition, and scene description on each clip.

The results come back as a compact index file, typically a few megabytes per hour of video. That index lives on your local disk.

Step 3: Search

This is where it gets useful. Your entire library is now searchable by:

Spoken words. Search the transcript across all your footage. "Budget" pulls up every interview where someone discussed budgets.
Objects on screen. Search for "laptop" or "car" or "coffee cup" and find every clip where that object appears.
Scene descriptions. Search for "aerial shot of coastline" or "close-up of hands" and the AI-generated scene descriptions match your query.
Specific people. Face recognition clusters appearances, so once you identify someone, you can find every clip they appear in across your entire archive.

Search is instant. It runs against the local index with no network requests and no per-query fees. You can search on a plane with no Wi-Fi.

Step 4: Export and use

Found the shots you need? Export your selects as FCPXML and import them directly into Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or your NLE of choice. The clips land on your timeline ready to edit.

Making it work for teams

A searchable archive is even more valuable when it is shared. FrameQuery lets you share index files with teammates. Your editor, producer, and colourist can all search the same library without re-processing any footage.

The shared index is lightweight. Your team downloads just the index file, not terabytes of video. As long as they have access to the source footage (same NAS, same shared drive), they can search and preview clips instantly.

What about new footage?

The archive grows as you shoot. After each project wraps, process the new footage and it merges into your searchable library. Over time, you build an ever-expanding private stock library that actually reflects the kind of work you do.

No more licensing generic stock footage when you already own something better. No more losing shots because they are buried on a drive nobody remembers.

The math

A typical cloud DAM charges $50 to $150 per month per terabyte of storage. A production company with 20 TB of archived footage is paying $1,000 to $3,000 per month just to store what they already own on their own drives.

With FrameQuery, you pay once to process the footage. Search is free forever. Your footage stays on your existing storage. The index files are tiny.

Over a year, the difference adds up to tens of thousands of dollars, and you keep full control of your media.

Your footage is already an asset. You just cannot search it yet. Join the waitlist to turn your drives into a private stock library.