Search your footage without Premiere Pro

Premiere details from Adobe's Media Intelligence help pages and FAQ (pages last updated June–August 2026) and Adobe's Premiere pricing page, checked September 2026; vendors change terms and ship features fast — check Adobe's site before buying. Adobe also notes that visual search currently supports English-language queries only. Premiere labels speakers in Text-Based Editing, but the Search panel has no speaker facet. "—" means not advertised as a search modality, not that it's impossible.

Which one is for you

Pick Media Intelligence if the footage you need is already in the project you're cutting. Nothing beats finding a shot and dragging it onto the timeline without leaving the app, and if you pay for Premiere you already own this.

Pick MediaFind if the footage you need is somewhere in a library — last year's interviews, an archive drive, b-roll from four projects ago — or if you need to find a person, a line of on-screen text, a logo or a song. It runs on Mac, Windows or Linux, it doesn't need an Adobe plan, and you can verify the privacy claim yourself.

Project scope is the real difference

Media Intelligence analyses media as you import it, and Adobe stores the visual index in a .prin file next to the project — an index of the clips in that project. That's the right design for an editor: your search results are the clips you can actually cut with. It's the wrong shape for the question "which of my last three years of footage has this in it?", because answering it means importing that footage into a project first.

MediaFind inverts that. You add folders once, it indexes them in the background, and the library stays searchable whether or not any editor is running. You can share Premiere's analysis between machines as .prmi sidecar files, which is handy on a team, but Adobe is explicit that the results can't be used outside Premiere.

Where MediaFind goes further

Adobe's FAQ is refreshingly direct about the boundaries: visual search "doesn't identify or label people", and it "does not use optical character recognition" — a search for "stop" may surface a stop sign because the model understands the concept, not because it read the word. MediaFind indexes faces and people, runs OCR over frames so you can find a slide, a lower third or a URL by its text, and recognises logos and brands and songs. Dialogue search is semantic rather than literal, so a paraphrase still finds the line. Premiere added description-based audio search in August 2026, so sound-effect search is now common ground.

Pricing and platforms

MediaFind has a free tier and a 7-day Pro trial; Pro is $24.99/mo or $107.88/yr, and it runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. Media Intelligence isn't sold separately — it comes with Premiere, which Adobe lists at US$22.99/mo for the single app on the annual, billed monthly plan, or US$69.99/mo for Creative Cloud Pro. Premiere runs on macOS and Windows. If you already edit in Premiere, Media Intelligence costs you nothing extra; if you want archive search without an Adobe plan, that's the gap MediaFind fills.