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.

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 10, 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 5 tools in this category, with vendor pricing as read on the capture date shown on each page: Reelary versus… and local alternatives to….