How to search what's said in your videos

Video you’ve shot or recorded yourself builds up quickly: customer interviews for a case study, a day of B-roll with a few useful sound bites, screen recordings of product demos, a lecture series, family videos where someone told a story worth keeping. When you need the clip where a customer said the onboarding took ten minutes, the filenames (IMG_4471.MOV, interview_final_v2.mp4) don’t say who spoke or what they said.

This guide covers how people usually find a spoken line in their own footage, where that gets slow, and how to transcribe your video files in Fabric so you can search the dialogue across every clip and open the match at its timestamp.

How people usually find what was said in their footage

The simplest method is scrubbing: open the clip, skip forward in chunks, and listen for the voice you’re after. It needs no tools and works for one short file. With hours of interviews it becomes a day’s work, and the sound bite is easy to skip past at double speed.

Editors often transcribe inside their editing software, since several editing apps now generate a transcript per clip and let you search within a project. That helps during the edit. The transcripts live inside that one project file, so footage from last year’s shoot, or clips that were never imported, aren’t covered.

Others send recordings to a separate transcription service and keep the text files. Search then happens in the text, and the timecode has to be matched back to the original video by hand. The transcript and the footage drift apart as files get renamed or moved.

Step 1: Upload your videos and turn on transcription

Drag video files into Fabric or click Upload a file. Fabric transcribes uploaded MP4, MOV and WebM video, along with MP3, WAV and M4A audio. Transcription needs a paid plan.

Large footage libraries are easier through the Fabric desktop app, which mounts Fabric as a drive on Mac, Windows and Linux. Move clips into it like any other folder. Files on the drive take no space on your computer and stream when you open them, which matters when the archive is bigger than your laptop’s disk. How to access cloud files without using disk space explains the setup.

Video shot on a phone can come straight from the camera roll. The Fabric mobile app backs up the camera roll automatically, either everything or only the folders you pick, and you can also send a single clip from any app through the share sheet. Recordings from a phone then sit in the same library as footage from a camera or screen recorder.

Keep footage in folders by shoot, project or client if that’s how you work. Fabric also writes a summary of each item and suggests tags from its content, so a folder of unnamed clips is easier to scan even before you search.

Step 2: Search the dialogue

Click Search or press Cmd+F (Mac) / Ctrl+F (Windows). Fabric search covers transcribed audio and video, and a result jumps to the exact timestamp, so the clip opens at the moment the words were spoken.

Use quotes for lines you remember word for word or for distinctive terms: a product name, a place, a figure such as “ten minutes”. Quoted text is matched strictly, so you get the clips where that exact phrase was said. When you remember what someone meant rather than how they put it, drop the quotes and describe it; hybrid search matches by meaning too.

For interviews, it’s often quickest to search for a phrase the interviewer used to open a topic, such as “walk me through”, and then step through the matches in a single folder.

Step 3: Narrow it to the right shoot or project

Filters keep a search to the footage that matters. The location filter limits results to one folder, such as a client’s interviews or a single event. The kind of item filter separates video from documents and notes that might mention the same words, such as the script or the shot list. Tags cut across folders, so footage tagged with a person’s name can be searched together wherever it’s stored.

For long-running projects, How to manage video project files covers folder structures that work well alongside search.

Step 4: Mark the moment and ask about the footage

Once you’ve found a sound bite, leave a timestamped comment on the video so the moment is easy to come back to. On video, a comment can include a drawing on the frame, which helps when the useful part is something on screen as well as something said.

Transcripts can be edited. Correct a misheard name or brand once, and later searches for the right spelling will find it.

To pull themes out of a set of interviews, open the folder and ask the AI assistant something like which customers mentioned onboarding problems. Its answer cites the clips with timestamps you can click, so each quote leads back to the footage. Save the answer as a note to keep it with the project.

Frequently asked questions

How do I search for spoken words in a video file?

Upload the video to Fabric so it’s transcribed, then search for the words. Results open the video at the timestamp where they’re said.

Which video formats can Fabric transcribe?

Uploaded MP4, MOV and WebM video, plus MP3, WAV and M4A audio. Fabric also transcribes YouTube, TikTok and podcast links.

Can I search across all my videos at once?

Yes. Every transcribed video is in one library, so a single search covers all of them. Filters narrow it to a folder, tag or kind of item.

Is video transcription included on the free plan?

No. Transcription needs a paid plan. Pricing compares the plans.

Will storing my footage in Fabric fill up my hard drive?

Files on the Fabric desktop drive take no space on your computer and stream when you open them.

Can I correct mistakes in a video transcript?

Yes. Transcripts can be edited, and search uses the corrected text.

Can I leave notes at a specific point in a video?

Yes. Comments on video are timestamped and can include a drawing on the frame.

Can someone else comment on a clip I found?

Yes. Share the video with commenter permission and they can leave timestamped comments, including drawings on the frame. Each comment can be marked completed once it’s handled.

Can AI find quotes across my interview videos?

Yes. Ask the AI assistant within a folder of interviews and it answers from the transcripts, citing timestamps you can click to check each quote.