Video search
Search your footage by
what is in the shot.
You know the shot exists. You remember the light, roughly where you were, what was happening. What you do not remember is which of four hundred files it lives in, or which minute. Filenames cannot help with that, and neither can folders.
SightRoll watches every clip on your Mac and indexes what it sees, so you can describe the moment and get it back — trimmed, at the right timestamp.
300 videos free · no time limit · no credit card
How the search actually works
A vision model runs over every clip on your Mac and writes down what is actually in frame — the subject, the action, the setting, the light. Not the filename, not the folder, not metadata somebody else typed.
A twenty-minute file is not one thing. It gets split at real cuts into timestamped scenes, each described and indexed on its own, so a search lands on the ten seconds you wanted instead of the file that contains them.
"Aerial over the coast at golden hour." "The interview where she laughs." You are describing a shot the way you would to another editor, and the match is semantic, so you do not have to guess the exact words.
The matches come back trimmed to the scene, ready to drag into Premiere, Resolve, or Final Cut. This is where a search tool stops and SightRoll keeps going.
Then it stops being a search box
Searching is the easy half. You still have to run a dozen queries, decide what is worth using, and put it in an order that works. Director does that part: describe the video you want and it writes a brief, breaks it into beats, and fills each one from your library.
What you get back is trimmed source clips in beat order — no music laid over them, nothing to get copyright-claimed, nothing rendered you cannot change. The cut is still yours to make. See Director.
The questions worth asking first
No, and we would rather tell you now than after you download it. SightRoll indexes what the camera saw, not the audio. If your work turns on finding a spoken line, a transcript-based tool will serve you better today.
Not in on-device mode — analysis runs on your Mac and nothing leaves it. If you turn on cloud processing, a handful of preview stills per scene go to a hosted model. Your master files never move from the drive they live on, in any mode.
Yes. Any camera, any file already on your drives — MP4, MOV, ProRes, H.265 and the rest. It is not tied to hardware we sell, because we do not sell hardware.
Roughly 30 to 90 minutes per hour of footage on an M2 running on-device, or under ten minutes in cloud mode. It runs in the background — most people point it at a drive and go to bed.
Point it at one folder you have been avoiding. 300 videos free, no time limit, no card — enough to find out whether it finds the shot you were thinking of.
Download free for Mac