Clip Find: search a creator's video back-catalogue by what was said and shown
Local app that indexes video frames and audio in one embedding space. Paid by YouTubers, podcasters and clip editors.
Crowded · EmbeddingGemma 2 unified multimodal space
Written for: Solo builder
Next step
This week, index 20 hours of one podcast's video with EmbeddingGemma 2 and test 30 real 'find the moment' queries. Then offer free archive indexing to editors in r/NewTubers and r/podcasting.
Why now
Creators with hundreds of episodes lose hours hunting for 'the bit where I held up the product and talked about pricing'. Until now this needed a transcript search plus a separate vision model. An open, efficient unified model makes one local index practical. Descript and Adobe cover parts of this, so the space is moderately crowded, but owned, local search across a whole archive is still thin.
What became possible
EmbeddingGemma 2 is an open embedding model that places text, images, audio, video and mixed inputs in a single space, and reports state-of-the-art results across unimodal, cross-modal and mixed-modal benchmarks. One query can now match a spoken phrase and a visual at the same time without stitching separate models together.
Two ways in
- Clip Find desktop
Point it at a folder or a YouTube export. It samples frames and audio windows, embeds them locally, and returns timestamped hits for free-text queries, with an export to an editor's markers.
- Customer
- YouTubers and podcasters with 200+ episodes, plus freelance short-form clip editors
- Model
- $12/month or a $79 lifetime licence
- Clip Find API
The same index as a self-hosted Docker service for small media teams.
- Customer
- Two-to-ten-person media and agency teams
- Model
- Open core. Paid team features
Competition
The core technology, a local joint index of frames and transcripts with text-to-timestamp search, is already shipped by Jumper and AccuVideo. Several open-source projects do it for free, and OpusSearch targets the exact creator back-catalogue use case.
Full competition notes (13 competitors)
The core technology, a local joint index of frames and transcripts with text-to-timestamp search, is already shipped by Jumper and AccuVideo. Several open-source projects do it for free, and OpusSearch targets the exact creator back-catalogue use case. A new entrant can't win on the search engine alone. The remaining opening is the workflow of a freelance clip editor. That means ingesting a whole YouTube channel or export directly, searching across hundreds of past episodes at once rather than one video at a time, and exporting the hits straight to Premiere, Resolve or Final Cut as markers, all running locally for a per-seat price. Agencies that can't upload client footage to the cloud may also pay for a supported self-hosted version with shared indexes, but technical teams can use the free open-source tools instead. The main risk is that Jumper or Opus closes these gaps quickly.
- Jumper
Offline AI search engine for footage, sold as a Premiere and Final Cut Pro plugin. It finds exact moments by natural-language search over what's shown and what's said. This is the most direct overlap with the desktop idea.
- AccuVideo
Local-first app that finds moments by speech, on-screen content and visuals, using Whisper and vision models on-device.
- OpusSearch (Opus Clip)
Auto-catalogs years of a creator's video back-catalogue and makes it searchable for clipping. Aimed squarely at YouTubers and podcasters. Waitlist access at last report.
- Twelve Labs
Cloud API for searching what's shown, said and on-screen text. It had a Premiere Pro plugin for natural-language search and highlights, now deprecated with a new version announced.
- Vimeo Smart Library Search
Big-platform feature that searches metadata, transcripts and AI scene descriptions, then links to the matching moments.
- Shade
Cloud media storage for podcasters, with AI search that indexes dialogue across a back catalogue.
- Fabric
Users upload a podcast back catalogue and search it by concept rather than keyword.
- Choppity
Imports from YouTube and finds described moments with relevancy scores, but appears to work one video at a time.
- VideoSeek (open source)
Windows-first local video search by sentence, screenshot or dialogue, using ONNX, Lance and FFmpeg. Returns timestamped ranges.
- video-query-rs (open source)
Rust CLI for local semantic video search. Uses CLIP keyframe embeddings and whisper.cpp transcription, stored in SQLite.
- SentrySearch (open source)
Embeds video chunks with Gemini Embedding or a local Qwen3-VL model into ChromaDB, then trims out the top matching clips.
- Cerul App (open source)
Self-hosted Rust and Electron indexer for transcripts and sampled frames, with vector search. Visual understanding is a beta feature.
- OpenCut AI
Local video editor that auto-indexes frames on import through a self-hosted CLIP service, so you can search footage by meaning.
Checked 2026-10-28
Risks
- Confirm the weights are released and the Gemma licence terms allow this use
- Embedding hours of video on a laptop may be slow
- Google or Adobe can add the feature to existing products
Strong team fit; market pull and open space are the weak point (5).
tech 6 · pull 5 · space 5 · fit 8 · build 6
Exposed
Companies that could benefit or be threatened. News and context, not investment advice.
Momentum of its main topic
Sources
Status history
- 2026-10-28 Flagged as buildable