Search your own stock and b-roll collection by what's in the shot
Anyone who shoots for long enough ends up with a private stock library: drone passes, city timelapses, hands on keyboards, sunsets from four continents. It is only useful if you can find a shot faster than you could go out and film it again.
Why a personal stock library goes unused
Stock sites work because every clip is keyworded. Your own drives are not. Clips are filed by trip or client, the camera named them C0042.MP4, and the one person who knows where the foggy harbor shot lives is you, on a good day.
Small studios feel this more. Several shooters contribute, each with their own folder habits, and the editor who needs a shot of a busy crosswalk at night has no way to ask the archive for one.
Keywording, asset managers and memory
Automatic visual search does not replace careful keywording for clips you sell, but it covers the far larger pile you will never get around to tagging.
- Manual keywording. The most precise option and the one that never gets finished. Tagging one clip well takes longer than shooting it.
- A media asset management system. Good for teams with shared storage and an admin. Many are priced and built for organizations, and cloud ones mean uploading the whole archive. See media asset management.
- Thumbnails in the file browser. Free and fast for a few hundred clips, hopeless for a few thousand.
Search by description, color or example
Add the archive's folders to MediaFind and it indexes keyframes on your computer. You can then search the way an editor asks for a shot:
- By description: “aerial of a winding road through pine forest” or “rain on a window at night.”
- By color and mood: find clips that sit in a teal-and-orange look or a warm golden palette, handy when a shot has to match a grade. See searching video by color or mood.
- By a sample image: drop in a frame or a reference still and get visually similar clips. See reverse image search for your library.
- By text in the shot: street signs, shop fronts, a license plate or a scoreboard, through on-screen text search.
- By sound: clips with music, or sound events such as applause, for the rare stock clip where the audio matters.
Keeping the collection tidy
Related clips helps find the other takes of a setup once you have found one good take. Exact duplicates, which pile up from copying cards twice, are found for free. With Pro, smart cleanup adds near-duplicates, similar videos and blurry or low-quality files, and every candidate goes to a reversible quarantine before anything is deleted.
Free tags and categories can mark clips as cleared, client-owned or personal, and saved searches keep common requests one click away. Pro collections group clips into nested folders of your own, such as one per location. Photos (JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, GIF, TIFF, BMP) are searched in the same index, so stills and motion come back together.
Getting shots into the edit
Once you have picked your shots, with Pro you can export the search results as an FCPXML or EDL timeline that opens in Premiere, Resolve or Final Cut with frame-accurate in and out points. Without Pro, cut the clip out in MediaFind or open the file at the timestamp in your editor. Our b-roll search guide walks through a full pass.
Rights travel with the clip
Search makes it easy to reuse a shot, which makes it worth knowing whether you can. Clips shot for a client may belong to the client, and recognizable people or private property may need a release before commercial use. A free tag per clip for its rights status costs little and saves an awkward email later.
The index lives on your computer next to the footage, so an archive of client work is never uploaded to be searchable. If the drives move, export the library as a portable ZIP and relink the media instead of reindexing.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to keyword my clips before I can search them?
No. MediaFind indexes what is in each shot on your computer, so you can search by description, color, on-screen text or a sample image without tagging anything first.
Can I find clips that look like a reference frame?
Yes. Reverse image search takes a sample image and returns visually similar clips and photos from your library.
Will it write keywords for uploading to stock sites?
No. It makes your own collection searchable. Keywords and metadata for stock agencies still come from your usual submission workflow.
Which footage formats does it read?
Video in MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV and WebM, plus photos in JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, GIF, TIFF and BMP. Convert other camera formats to one of these first.
Search your whole library on your own computer.
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How to find b-roll by describing the shotType "aerial of a coastline at sunset" and get the clips, even though nobody logged them and nobody speaks in them. What is B-roll?
The supporting shots that cover cuts and show what's being talked about, and the real problem: finding them later. Find soundbites and b-roll in your footage without logging bins
Describe the shot or the line you need, get timestamped hits across every drive, and send the selects to Premiere, Resolve or Final Cut. How to reverse image search your own photos and videos
Start from a picture and find the matching photos and video frames in your own library, without uploading anything. How to find duplicate videos
Clear out the copies, exports and re-encodes eating your drive, without deleting the one version you actually need.