Find B-Roll Fast: Search Your Footage by What's Said
PostSlate transcribes your footage automatically and lets you search across every clip’s transcript at once. Type what was said, get the exact timestamp. No scrubbing required.
You remember the shot. Someone on the rooftop, golden hour, talking about the whole idea being handheld. You just don’t remember which of forty clips it’s in, or what timecode it starts at. So you scrub. And scrub. And eventually find it, twelve minutes into a clip you’d already checked once.
That search shouldn’t take longer than the shot itself.
The problem with timecodes and memory
You don’t remember footage by timecode. You remember it by what was said, or what it looked like, or roughly when in the shoot it happened. None of that maps cleanly onto a scrubber. Folder and bin names help a little, but only if you filed things perfectly in the moment, which nobody does on a real shoot day.
The result is the same story on every project: you know the shot exists, you just can’t find it fast enough to actually use it.
Transcript search in practice
PostSlate transcribes your footage automatically, then lets you search across every clip’s transcript at once. Type “rooftop golden hour” and it surfaces every clip where that phrase, or something close to it, was actually said, with the exact timestamp. No scrubbing, no folder archaeology. Search once, jump straight to the line.
This works as well for a single throwaway phrase in an hour-long interview as it does for a specific line you’re trying to match across takes. If it was said on camera, it’s searchable.
Pairing search with Arrangement
Search gets you to the clip. From there, PostSlate’s Arrangement view lets you pull that moment straight into a sequence using the transcript itself, without re-listening to confirm it’s the right take. Find the line, arrange it, and export to your NLE to keep cutting.
Related reads:
- How to Find Every Shot of a Person in Your Footage: when you need to search by who’s on screen, not just what was said.
- What is PostSlate?: the full picture of what we’re building and why.