Guide · Pillar
How to Search Video Footage: Seven Ways to Find the Shot in Your Head
You already know something about the shot you want. This guide turns whatever you remember, a line of dialogue, a face, a colour, a feeling, into a query that finds it.
Every search starts with something you already know. A line somebody said. A face. A colour you remember. The fact that it was the wide one, shot on the second day, before lunch.
The mistake is trying to convert that into a filename. You end up guessing at the shorthand your past self used at 2am, and that shorthand was never a description of the shot in the first place.
FrameQuery lets you search from whatever fragment you actually kept. This guide covers seven ways in, when each is the right tool, and what to type.
| What you remember | What to do | Example |
|---|---|---|
| The exact words somebody said | Quote them | "we should push the launch" |
| Roughly what was said, not the words | Describe it in plain language | talking about delaying the launch |
| Who is in it | Name them | @sarah |
| What is physically in shot | Name the thing | whiteboard |
| What the shot feels like | Describe the mood and light | quiet empty office at dusk |
| How it was framed or shot | Use a filter | shot:wide angle:eye-level |
| Only the file name | Type it as-is | A001_C012 |
| Nothing, but you have one good shot | Open it and use Find Similar | no typing at all |
Search what was said
Every indexed clip has a transcript with sentence-level timestamps, so a dialogue search does not just tell you which file. Each result carries the timecode of the line that matched, and clicking it takes you there.
Type the words plainly and you get clips containing all of them, anywhere in the clip, in any order. Put quotes around them and you only get clips where those words appear together, in that order.
You want
The bit where the CEO said the launch was slipping
Type
"push the launch"
Without quotes you also get every clip that mentions a launch and separately mentions pushing. With quotes you get the sentence.
You want
Any discussion of the budget, no matter how it was phrased
Type
budget
Unquoted single words are the right tool when you want breadth. Start here, then narrow.
You want
The soundbite, but only from the interview, not the panel
Type
"we had to start over" -panel
The exclusion strips the coverage you already know you do not want.
The rule of thumb: quote when you are sure of the wording, do not quote when you are sure of the topic. Most wasted searching comes from quoting a half-remembered phrase. If you are not certain of the exact words, the next section is what you want instead.
Search what was meant
You remember the gist of what someone said, not the sentence. Quoting will fail here, and so will keywords, because people rarely use the word you are thinking of.
Describe it instead. talking about leaving her job finds a clip where someone said "I handed in my notice in March", even though the words do not overlap at all. Meaning is matched, not spelling.
You want
Someone explaining why the project nearly failed
Type
explaining what went wrong with the project
Matches the sense of a passage. The speaker never has to use the word "failed".
You want
The moment somebody thanks their family
Type
thanking their parents
Works on "I owe all of this to my mum and dad" with no shared vocabulary at all.
You want
Anything where a person sounds unsure about a decision
Type
hesitant about making a decision
Tone and stance, not keywords. This is the search that keyword tools cannot do.
A useful habit
Write the query as if you were describing the clip to an assistant editor over the phone. Full sentences work better than keyword soup, because you are matching meaning and a longer phrase carries more of it.
Search who is in it
Name a person once and they become searchable everywhere. Type @ and the name, and you get every clip where they appear on screen or speak.
That second half matters more than it sounds. A search for @sarah returns the clip where Sarah is talking off camera while someone else is in frame. Face-only tools miss those, and they are frequently the ones you need.
You want
Everything with Sarah in it
Type
@sarah
On screen or on mic. Use quotes for a full name: @"Sarah Chen".
You want
Sarah talking about the merger specifically
Type
@sarah "the merger"
A person plus a phrase is the highest-yield combination in the whole grammar.
You want
The two of them in the same shot
Type
@sarah @james
Two-hander coverage, found in one query instead of scrubbing for it.
You want
James, but not the town hall footage
Type
@james -town-hall
Recurring events dominate a person's results. Subtract the one you are not after.
Naming happens in the People tab of the manager, not in the search results. Turn on biometric analysis, add a person, and assign the detected faces and voices to them. You can also right-click a speaker tag in a clip's transcript panel to name whoever is talking. It takes a couple of minutes per project and every @ search afterwards depends on it.
The deep dive on finding people across your footage walks through that setup and what to do when somebody's results look thin.
Search what is on screen
Objects are detected per scene, so you can search for a thing rather than a description of a thing. whiteboard, bicycle, laptop, dog. This is what covers footage with no dialogue at all: drone plates, B-roll, timelapses, cutaways.
It is also the fastest way to answer a producer's question. "Do we have anything with a coffee cup in it" is a five second search rather than an afternoon.
You want
Cutaways to use over a voiceover about the office
Type
laptop keyboard desk
Several object terms broaden the net. Any of them appearing is a hit.
You want
Product shots without anyone holding it
Type
bottle -hands
Excluding an object is an underused way to control the composition of your results.
You want
Every shot with a vehicle in it, from a mixed library
Type
car van truck
Objects work on footage that has no transcript, which is where filename search dies.
Search the feel of a shot
This is the one people do not expect to work. You can search the frame itself, with a description of what it looks and feels like, and get matches even where no description or transcript exists.
empty street at dawn. harsh fluorescent office lighting. crowd shot, hands in the air. quiet and cold. You are describing an image, and images are matched directly against your words.
You want
An establisher that feels lonely
Type
empty landscape under grey sky
Light, space and weather are all things the frame carries and nobody writes down.
You want
Something warm to cut to after a hard scene
Type
golden hour, backlit, people laughing
Combining colour temperature with an action gets you much closer than either alone.
You want
The claustrophobic interview setup, not the airy one
Type
tight framing against a dark wall
Framing plus environment. This is the search that replaces scrubbing through dailies.
Short for browsing, long for finding
A single feeling word works. Type peaceful and you get the calmer end of your library, which is exactly right when you are looking for something rather than for one thing. When you need a specific shot, lengthen it instead of rephrasing: still water at sunrise, no people. Both are valid, they just answer different questions.
The deep dive on searching by look, mood and framing goes through colour, shot type and camera angle properly.
Search how it was shot
Sometimes the content is irrelevant and the specification is everything. You need the 4K material, or the ProRes, or everything from the second camera, or only the slow motion.
Filters use field:value and stack freely with everything else.
| Field | Values | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| codec: | prores, braw, r3d, h264, hevc, dnxhr | Pull only the format you can cut natively today. |
| res:or resolution: | 4k, 1080p, 8k | Find the deliverable-grade material in a mixed library. |
| camera: | any make or model in the file metadata | Separate A-cam from the crash cam or the drone. |
| fps: | 24, 25, 50, 120 | The fastest way to isolate slow-motion coverage. |
| container: | mov, mp4, mxf | Useful when the same shot exists as both original and proxy. |
| lens: | any lens recorded by the camera | Match coverage shot on the same glass. |
| iso: | 800, 3200 | Track down the shots that will be noisy before you grade them. |
| date: | a shoot date | Scope to a single day of a multi-day shoot. |
| tc:or timecode: | a timecode value | Jump to a logged moment from a paper edit. |
| shot:or shot_type: | wide, medium-wide, close-up, extreme-close-up | Ask for framing rather than content. Hyphenated, though spaces and underscores are accepted. |
| angle:or shot_angle: | eye-level and other hyphenated angles | Find the cutaway that matches your master's eyeline. |
You want
Only the slow-motion coverage from the A camera
Type
fps:120 camera:FX9
Two filters, no search terms at all. A perfectly valid query.
You want
Wide shots to open the sequence, in a cuttable format
Type
shot:wide codec:prores
Framing plus format. This is a shot-selection query, not a content query.
You want
The low-angle hero shots of the building
Type
building shot:wide angle:eye-level
Filters narrow, the plain term supplies the subject. Mix them freely.
You want
Deliverable-grade material only, from one shoot day
Type
res:4k date:2026-05-14
Turns a mixed archive into just the material you are allowed to use.
Combine, then subtract
Every one of the above composes. The queries that actually save you time are almost never a single term.
A useful pattern is to go wide, look at what you got, then subtract. Adding terms narrows on content. Subtracting terms removes the specific category of result that keeps showing up and wasting your attention.
"exact phrase"
Exact phrase
Only matches when those words appear together, in that order.
"final cut"
@name
Person
Narrows to a person you have named, whether they are on screen or speaking.
@sarah or @"Sarah Chen"
-word
Exclude
Removes results containing that word. Works on phrases too.
-rehearsal or -"work in progress"
field:value
Filter
Restricts by a technical or shot property. Combine as many as you like.
codec:prores shot:wide
plain words
Meaning
No operator at all. Describe what you are after and every layer is searched at once.
someone looking nervous before going on stage
Worked example. You want the moment your founder talks about the early days, from an interview, not from a conference stage, in wide framing so it cuts against the close-ups you already have:
@maya "when we started" shot:wide -conference -stage
That is a person, an exact phrase, a framing filter and two exclusions in one line. Typing it takes fifteen seconds. Finding that clip by scrubbing takes the rest of the morning.
Read the badge to learn what your library knows
Every result carries a badge saying which layer matched it. It is easy to ignore, and it is the fastest way to get better at searching.
The words in the spoken audio, timestamped to the moment they were said.
e.g. we should push the launch to Q3
A written description of each scene, so you can search editorial context rather than keywords.
e.g. two people shaking hands in a lobby
The image itself, matched against your words directly. No description has to exist first.
e.g. moody neon alleyway at night
Individual things detected in the frame, listed per scene.
e.g. whiteboard
Camera, codec, resolution, frame rate, lens, ISO, timecode and date, read from the file.
e.g. camera:FX9 res:4k
The literal file name, for when a DIT hands you a card number and nothing else.
e.g. A001_C012
If your results are all filename, your query is only matching file names, which means the description you typed is not landing. If they are all transcript when you wanted visuals, you are describing what people say instead of what the camera sees. The badge tells you which knob to turn.
When a search comes back wrong
Almost every empty or useless result set has one of a small number of causes.
Nothing at all, for a phrase you are certain about
Quotes demand an exact, in-order match, and transcripts vary on filler words and contractions. Drop the quotes and let the meaning match do the work.
Trypush the launch
Nothing at all, for footage you know you have
You are probably scoped to one project. The toggle beside the search bar switches between This project and All projects whenever a project is selected.
Trysame query, set to All projects
A person returns far fewer clips than expected
Their faces or voices are sitting in more than one identity. Open the People tab, assign the leftover identities to them, or use Merge With to fold a duplicate person in.
Try@sarah, after merging
Results are technically right but all from one shoot
One dominant event is crowding everything else out. Subtract it and see what is underneath.
Tryinterview -"town hall"
Every result is a filename match
Your terms are not matching content. Rewrite the query as a description of what happens in the shot rather than a label for it.
Trytwo people talking across a desk
A mood search is in the right mood but too broad
A single feeling word is a browsing query and it is doing its job. To narrow it, add what the shot physically contains rather than swapping the word.
Tryperson alone at a window, low light
A filter silently kills the query
Filter values must exist in the footage. If no clip is tagged close-up, shot:close-up returns nothing. Remove the filter and check the results carry that property at all.
Tryclose on hands
When you cannot describe it at all
Sometimes you know the shot when you see it and cannot get within a mile of it in words. There is a way around that. Find one result that is close and use Find similar scenes on it.
Instead of matching your words, it matches the shot. You get scenes that share its content and its look. There is a Find similar lines alongside it for transcripts, so you can take one good soundbite and pull every other moment where somebody said something like it.
Use it when a search gets you to roughly the right place. The second hop from a near-miss is usually shorter than any amount of rephrasing.
Build the habit
Three things separate people who find footage quickly from people who scrub.
Name your people early. A few minutes in the People tab on a new project turns @ into the most valuable operator in the grammar for the entire life of that footage.
Search descriptions, not labels. The instinct from twenty years of file browsers is to type the shorthand you would have written on a folder. Type what a stranger would see instead.
Subtract more than you add. When the results are wrong rather than empty, exclusion nearly always fixes it faster than another search term.
Once you have those, the rest is knowing which of the seven doors to walk through, and the table at the top of this guide covers that at a glance.
Common questions
- What is the best way to search video footage when you only half remember the shot?
- Describe it in plain language rather than guessing at keywords. FrameQuery searches spoken words, scene descriptions, detected objects and the frames themselves at the same time, so a sentence like 'someone laughing at a kitchen table' can match footage that was never tagged or transcribed with any of those words.
- Can you search video by what someone said?
- Yes. Every indexed clip is transcribed with sentence-level timestamps, so each result carries the timecode of the line that matched and you land on the moment the phrase was spoken rather than the top of the file. Put the words in quotes for an exact phrase, or describe the gist without quotes to match the meaning instead.
- How do you find every clip a particular person appears in?
- Add the person once in the People tab and assign their detected faces and voices to them, then search @theirname. FrameQuery matches both faces on screen and voices in the audio, so the results include clips where they speak off camera as well as clips where they are visible.
- Why does a video search return no results?
- Usually one of four reasons: the footage has not finished indexing, the query is in quotes and the exact phrase never occurs, an excluded term is removing more than you expect, or you are scoped to one project instead of the whole library. Widen the scope first, then drop the quotes.
- Can you search video without an internet connection?
- Yes. Indexing needs a connection, but once a clip is indexed its search data lives on your machine. Searching runs locally with no network round trip and no per-query cost.
Try it on your own footage
Index a folder and search it the way this guide describes. Searching your library is free and works offline once indexing is done.