How to Search Footage by Look, Mood and Framing

Dialogue search needs somebody to have said something. Filename search needs somebody to have named something. Visual search matches your description against the frames.

That covers the half of most libraries nobody logged: drone plates, timelapses, cutaways, establishers, silent coverage, the second camera.

Short queries browse, long queries find

A single feeling word works. Type peaceful and you get the calmer end of your library. Type sad and the results lean that way. That is the browsing case, where you want something in a mood rather than one shot, and it covers most B-roll selection.

A short query cannot be precise. When you need a particular shot, lengthen it.

To browse

To narrow

sad

person sitting alone looking down, low light

corporate

glass office building, people in meeting rooms

energetic

crowd with hands in the air, bright stage lights

peaceful

still water at sunrise, no people

tense

two people facing each other across a table

Both columns are valid queries. The left browses a feeling. The right asks for a shot.

You want

An opener that feels isolated

Type

empty landscape under grey overcast sky

Space, weather and light are all in the image and in no transcript.

You want

Something warm to cut to after a hard beat

Type

golden hour backlit, people laughing outdoors

Colour temperature plus an action narrows further than either alone.

You want

The claustrophobic version of the interview setup

Type

tight framing against a dark wall

Framing plus environment.

You want

Night exteriors with a bit of atmosphere

Type

wet street at night reflecting neon signs

Surfaces and light sources are strong visual anchors.

Objects

Objects are detected per scene, so whiteboard, bicycle, coffee cup and dog are searchable directly. Use objects when the requirement is a physical thing, and descriptions when the requirement is about the whole frame.

laptop finds shots containing a laptop. someone working late alone at a laptop finds a mood, and ranks a lonely shot above a bright open-plan one.

Objects also work by subtraction. bottle -hands gets product shots without a presenter in them.

Filter by how it was shot

When the specification matters more than the content, use filters. Shot type and angle turn a content library into a shot library.

You want

Wides to open a sequence

Type

shot:wide

A filter with no search term is a valid query.

You want

Hero shots of the building

Type

building shot:wide angle:eye-level

The filters set the grammar of the shot and the plain term supplies the subject.

You want

Cutaways that will cut against your master

Type

shot:close-up angle:eye-level

Framing and eyeline have to match the master before a cutaway is usable.

You want

Slow motion only, from the deliverable camera

Type

fps:120 res:4k

Two technical filters remove every phone clip and proxy.

The filter panel beside the search bar covers the things that are awkward to type: dominant colour, video duration and a date range. Colour pulls footage that cuts together tonally, such as the warm material for a sequence or every shot with the grey-blue of your office location.

Use the panel when steering by feel and the query syntax when you know what you want.

When you cannot put it into words

Some shots resist description. Every query comes back with something adjacent.

Get close, then stop typing. Find one result in the right neighbourhood and use Find similar scenes on it. That matches the shot itself and returns scenes sharing its content and its look.

Find one good establisher, pull everything like it, and the options are in front of you in two moves.

A feeling word gets the right mood but too many clips

That is a browsing query. Keep the word and add what such a shot physically contains.

Trypeaceful still water at sunrise, no people

Results are the right subject with the wrong feel

You described the content and not the treatment. Add light, time of day and framing.

Tryoffice at night, single desk lamp, empty

A shot filter returns nothing

Filter values only match footage that carries that property. If nothing is tagged close-up, the filter empties the result set. Remove it and describe the framing instead.

Trytight on hands

Everything comes back as a filename match

Your terms are being read as labels. Rewrite as a sentence about what is visible.

Trywide shot of a harbour at sunset

You keep getting the same handful of clips

The query is too narrow for the library. Broaden the description and use exclusions to steer.

Tryharbour boats water -timelapse

Workflows

A B-roll shortlist. Run three or four mood searches for the sequence, take the best from each, and you have a selects bin.

Matching coverage across shoots. Find the shot you are cutting to, run Find similar scenes, and pull equivalents from other shoots in the same library.

An archive nobody logged. Old footage with no notes has no metadata to fall back on. Visual search is the only search that reaches it.

A client question in a meeting. "Do we have anything with the old branding on it" is one query.

Where to go next

The main search guide covers all seven ways in, including dialogue and people. If the footage is mostly interviews, finding a line of dialogue is the more useful page.