Search documentary interviews and archival footage by what's in them

The paper edit bottleneck

Before the edit, a documentary team transcribes interviews, reads them, highlights bites and assembles a paper edit. Each time the story changes, someone goes back to the transcripts to look for a bite that fits the new structure.

Archive adds another layer: news clips, home movies, photos and b-roll that are hard to describe in a filename and need checking for logos and music before anything is cleared.

The longer a production runs, the worse this gets. Interviews shot in year one are half-forgotten by year three, and the one person who remembered where the good material was may have moved on.

How productions handle it

All three are sensible, and many teams use them together. What they share is that finding a bite still depends on someone reading or remembering the right transcript.

• Transcription services plus printed or shared transcripts. The standard. It works, and costs grow with every hour, and search stops at the text.
• Logging spreadsheets. Careful and portable, and slow to build and keep current.
• Cloud media platforms. Good for distributed teams, with uploads and per-seat costs, and not always acceptable for sensitive subjects or contributors.

Find bites by story beat, not by keyword

MediaFind transcribes every interview on your computer with speaker labels and word-level timestamps, then searches by meaning. That fits how a paper edit actually works: you look for “someone describing the night the factory closed,” not a keyword. Results come back across every interview, ranked, with the timestamp to play.

Name each contributor's voice once and the name follows that voice across interviews. People, places and organizations mentioned in transcripts are searchable directly. Ask, the on-device assistant, can answer “who talked about the union vote?” with citations to each file and moment.

A paper-edit session, step by step

When the story changes, and it will, you rerun searches instead of rereading transcripts. The interviews stay tied to their timestamps the whole way through.

1. Write the story beats you need, in plain language.
2. Search each beat across all interviews and play the top results in context.
3. Tag the bites you want by act or beat, and save the searches you will return to as the structure changes.
4. Search the archive for material that illustrates each beat, by description or with a sample frame.
5. Export the chosen moments as a timeline when the structure settles.

Archive and clearance checks

• Search archival footage and photos by what's in the frame: scenes, objects, actions, color and mood.
• Read on-screen text such as newspaper headlines, signs and lower thirds in old broadcasts.
• Find where music plays in a clip, useful when listing cues to clear.
• With Pro, logo detection finds where a brand appears, by name or with a sample logo image, and face search finds every appearance of a person.

From search to timeline

With Pro, send chosen results to Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro as an FCPXML or EDL timeline with frame-accurate in and out points. Compose storyboard (Pro) takes a narration script or a description and fills each beat with matching footage from your library, laying it on the timeline as a first assembly to react to.

Transcripts export as Word, PDF or text for the paper edit document itself.

Protecting contributors

Documentary subjects often share things on the understanding that raw interviews stay with the production. MediaFind keeps transcription, indexing and search on your own machine, with no account and no upload, so the rushes don't pass through another company's servers to become searchable.

Frequently asked questions

Can I search interviews by theme rather than exact words?

Yes. Semantic search finds moments by meaning, so you can search for the idea a story beat needs and get matching bites across all interviews.

Can it help with music and logo clearance?

It can help you find where music plays and, with Pro, where brand logos appear. Clearance decisions still need a person and the rights holders.

Can I build a first assembly from a script?

With Pro, Compose storyboard fills each beat of a script or description with matching footage and places it on the Create timeline.

How does the edit get to my editor?

With Pro, export results or a Create timeline as FCPXML or EDL for Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve or Final Cut Pro.