Field notes

Notes on finding footage

Everything here is written to be useful without buying anything. Where Reelary is the answer we say so and say what it costs; every article also states plainly where it is the wrong tool.

Workflow and concepts

• How do you find a clip you shot six months ago?
  Sep 10, 2026 · The four retrieval methods for a clip you cannot name - date, metadata, transcript, visual - and where each one breaks down.
• How do you organize raw footage without losing your mind?
  Sep 10, 2026 · Date-first ingest, immutable camera originals, and the two metadata fields worth typing by hand - a structure that holds up across years of shoots.
• How do you manage and search through TBs of B-roll?
  Sep 10, 2026 · Upload maths for multi-terabyte libraries, what a local vector index costs in disk, and searching archives while the drive is offline.
• Does searching my footage upload it anywhere?
  Sep 10, 2026 · The three architectures behind "AI video search", how to verify which one a tool uses, and what NDA and client work actually require.
• What's the difference between searching your footage and transcribing it?
  Sep 10, 2026 · Why transcript search and visual search solve different halves of the problem, and which one your library actually needs.
• The folder structure that stops working at about 500 clips
  Sep 10, 2026 · Why folder trees break down as libraries grow, the three workarounds people reach for, and what each one costs.
• Naming conventions for footage: what actually survives three years
  Sep 10, 2026 · A naming scheme built only from machine-generated fields, why descriptive names decay, and how to rename safely without breaking links.
• Why your Premiere bins don't help you next year
  Sep 10, 2026 · Why NLE logging does not carry across projects, what a project-independent layer has to store, and which parts of your logging are worth exporting.
• How do you find every clip of one person in your footage?
  Sep 29, 2026 · Why visual search cannot find a specific person, how face grouping and naming work, and the limits of doing it locally across a whole library.
• How do you search what was said across all your footage?
  Sep 29, 2026 · Library-wide dialogue search: keyword versus meaning, finding a line in another language, and the limits of on-device transcription.

Can it do this?

Straight answers about tools you may already own, each with the version it was checked against and the date we checked.

• Can DaVinci Resolve search your footage by what's in the shot?
  Checked Sep 29, 2026 · DaVinci Resolve 21 AI IntelliSearch: what it searches, the Studio-only and prior-analysis conditions, and what it is not built to do.
• Can Premiere Pro find a clip if you don't remember the filename?
  Checked Sep 10, 2026 · Premiere Pro Media Intelligence: on-device visual and spoken-word search, its project-only scope, and where a library-wide index is needed instead.
• Can ChatGPT search your own video files?
  Checked Sep 10, 2026 · Why a chat assistant cannot search a local footage library - access, persistence and upload maths - and what it is genuinely useful for instead.

Comparisons

Head-to-head pages for 6 tools in this category, with vendor pricing as read on the capture date shown on each page: Reelary versus… and local alternatives to….