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.
macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon for on-device AI · 16 GB recommended
300 videos free · no time limit · no credit card
How the search actually works
Choose V1 for the established visual analysis, or experimental V2 to index video and audio with EmbeddingGemma 2 on your Mac. V2 then describes selected frames. Both keep clip and scene descriptions in your catalog.
Long clips get a timestamped scene breakdown. Experimental V2 combines visual changes with embedding cues, then observes selected frames for each scene. Review the suggested boundaries before exporting a cut.
"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
The experimental V2 pipeline indexes audio cues alongside video and text, so you can try searching for a sound or atmosphere. It does not transcribe speech or provide exact spoken-line search. V1 uses visual content and descriptions.
Local AI analyzes footage on your Mac. Cloud analysis sends preview stills; cloud Director and your own agent receive requests and relevant catalog context. Encrypted sync is a separate choice. Your master files stay on their drive. The privacy page explains each mode.
Use existing MP4, MOV, ProRes and H.265 footage supported by macOS. Codec support depends on your system. Try a few clips from your camera before processing the full archive.
It depends on your Mac, model, footage and analysis mode. Start with a small folder to check the result and speed. Download the local model on first use; processing then runs in the background and can be paused.
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