Find every key moment across a wedding or conference shoot

The logging bottleneck

Event shooters rarely have time to log on the day. You come home with cards from two or three cameras, a lapel recorder on the officiant, a feed from the venue sound desk, and a list of must-have moments from the client. Finding the best man's joke or the line the keynote speaker will want in their sizzle reel means scrubbing.

Turnaround is tight, and if you hand footage to a second editor, they need to know where things are without watching everything.

Conferences add their own version of the problem. Each session is long, speakers run over, and the organizer wants a recap, speaker clips and sometimes captions for every talk. Knowing which session a particular idea came from, when all you have is a camera card per room, is exactly the kind of question search answers faster than scrubbing.

How shooters handle it now

• Markers on the day. The best habit, when there is a free hand to press the button.
• Scrubbing thumbnails in the editor. Fine for visuals, slow for dialogue.
• Transcription in the editing app or a cloud service. Makes dialogue searchable, one project at a time, and cloud options mean uploading a client's private day.

Search the whole shoot

Copy the cards into a folder MediaFind watches. It indexes each file once it finishes copying, while the app is open, transcribing speech on your computer and indexing what is on screen.

Then search the way you think about the day. Dialogue: “the part of the toast about the road trip.” Visuals: “first dance under string lights” or “wide shot of the full ballroom.” Text on screen: a sponsor banner, a slide title or a name on a lower third. Each result jumps to the exact frame.

• Speaker labels separate the officiant, couple and toasts, or each panelist at a conference.
• Color and mood search helps find shots that match a grade or a look.
• Phonetic sounds-like search helps when a name was misheard in the transcript.

People and sponsors (Pro)

With Pro, People and Faces builds an on-device face library, so you can click the couple's grandmother once and see every shot she appears in. It can be switched off, and all face data deleted, in one click. For conferences, brand-logo detection finds where a sponsor appears, by name or from a sample logo image, which helps when a sponsor wants proof of placement.

Faces of guests and attendees are personal data. Keep face indexing for projects where your contract and the client allow it, and turn it off otherwise.

Hand selects to the edit

Multi-camera shoots also produce a lot of near-identical clips. Exact duplicates are found for free; Pro adds near-duplicates and blurry or low-quality files, with every candidate going to a reversible quarantine before anything is deleted.

1. Search for each must-have moment and collect the results.
2. With Pro, export them as an FCPXML or EDL timeline that opens in Premiere, Resolve or Final Cut with frame-accurate in and out points. See the selects export guide.
3. For a fast social teaser, assemble it in Create, the built-in editor: reframe for vertical, burn in captions and render MP4.
4. With Pro, Auto-Reel can suggest highlights from a long ceremony or keynote as a starting point.

Client footage stays on your drives

A wedding is someone's private day, and many event contracts limit where footage can go. MediaFind indexes and searches on your computer with no account and no upload. When a project moves to archive storage, relink the library instead of reindexing.

After the one-time model download it works offline, which also helps on location or at a venue with unreliable internet.

Frequently asked questions

Can I search wedding footage for the vows or a toast?

Yes. Speech is transcribed on your computer and searchable by meaning, so a phrase you half remember finds the right moment across every camera and recorder.

Can I find every shot of one guest?

With Pro, People and Faces lets you click a face and see every appearance. It runs on-device and can be switched off, with all face data deleted, in one click.

Will my selects open in Premiere or Resolve?

With Pro, search results export as an FCPXML or EDL timeline for Premiere, Resolve or Final Cut, with frame-accurate in and out points.

Which video formats does it read?

MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV and WebM, plus common audio formats from separate recorders. Convert other camera formats to one of these first.