AI Video Search for Post-Production Teams | ShotAI
Search thousands of hours of footage by describing any shot. ShotAI indexes every clip at shot level — find the exact moment in seconds, not hours.
H1: AI Video Search for Post-Production Teams
Post-production is a race against time. Editors spend hours scrubbing timelines, re-logging tapes, and hunting for that one shot buried in 200 hours of raw footage. ShotAI eliminates the search bottleneck so your team can spend more time cutting and less time looking.
H2: The Problem Every Post-Production Team Knows
A typical feature film project generates 100–300 hours of raw footage. A documentary might have more. The moment the shoot wraps, a new problem begins: how do you find anything?
Traditional solutions fail in predictable ways:
• Manual logging is accurate but doesn't scale. One assistant editor can log roughly 10 hours of footage per day. A 200-hour project takes three weeks of logging before editing can begin.
• Keyword search only works if the right keywords were entered. Mis-tagged clips are invisible. Untagged clips never surface.
• Memory and experience works for small projects. On large ones, even veteran editors forget where a shot lives.
• Proxy workflows help with playback speed but do nothing for discoverability.
The result: editors default to re-shooting over re-using, and hours of usable footage are abandoned in hard drives.
H2: How ShotAI Works for Post-Production
ShotAI uses multimodal AI to understand your footage the way a skilled assistant editor would — but at machine speed.
Step 1 — Ingest and auto-segment
Drop your footage into ShotAI. The system automatically detects shot boundaries and splits long clips into individual shot assets. A 2-hour interview becomes hundreds of discrete, searchable units.
Step 2 — AI indexing
Each shot is analyzed by two specialized models. OmniSpectra converts the visual, audio, and motion content into a semantic vector. OmniCine labels professional attributes — shot size (ECU, CU, MCU, MS, WS, EWS), camera movement (static, pan, tilt, dolly, handheld), lighting quality, and emotional tone.
Step 3 — Natural language search
Type what you're looking for. "close-up of hands on a piano, warm light" or "wide shot of a crowd at night, high energy". ShotAI returns the most semantically matching shots from your entire library in under 300ms — no keywords required.
Step 4 — Export to your NLE
Found what you need? Export selected shots directly to Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or Final Cut Pro via EDL or FCPXML. One click from search result to timeline.
H2: What Post-Production Teams Say
> "We cut our footage review time by more than half on our last documentary. What used to take a week of logging, ShotAI did overnight."
> — Senior Editor, Documentary Production Studio
> "The shot-level tagging is like having an assistant who actually watched every frame. The camera movement labels alone save us hours every week."
> — Post-Production Supervisor, Commercial Production House
H2: Key Capabilities for Post-Production
Shot-level granularity
ShotAI indexes at the individual shot level, not the clip or scene level. This matters when a 30-minute interview contains one perfect reaction shot buried at 22:47.
Professional cinematic labels
OmniCine was trained specifically on professional film and TV content. It understands the difference between a motivated push-in and a static wide — the vocabulary your editors actually use.
Local-first architecture
Your original footage never leaves your facility. ShotAI processes on your local machine, sends only compressed thumbnails for cloud AI analysis, then deletes them. Full RAW and ProRes workflows, zero cloud storage exposure.
Multi-format support
MP4, MOV, ProRes 422, ProRes 4444, H.264, H.265, and more. ShotAI works with production formats, not just delivery formats.
Similar shot discovery
Search for one hero shot and ShotAI surfaces visually and semantically similar alternatives from across your library. Useful for finding coverage you forgot you had.
H2: Post-Production Use Cases
Documentary editing
Index entire shoot archives. Search by subject, location, emotional tone, or visual style. Find archival moments that match contemporary footage for intercut sequences.
Commercial and branded content
Reuse assets across campaigns. Search by product visibility, talent, or brand color palette. Reduce costly re-shoots by surfacing existing footage that fits the brief.
Narrative film and TV
Track continuity across shooting days. Find matching eyelines, lighting setups, or wardrobe for seamless scene assembly.
Episodic content
Build searchable libraries across seasons. Find the moment a character said or did something specific — across hundreds of hours of episodic footage.
H2: Pricing for Post-Production Teams
ShotAI offers flexible pricing that scales with your project size.
• Free plan: Unlimited shot splitting, manual tags, NLE export. Good for testing on a single project.
• Pro plan: 300 minutes/month of AI video indexing included. Semantic search up to 15,000 queries/month. Ideal for individual editors and small teams.
• Pay-as-you-go: Video indexing from $0.056–$0.116/minute. Semantic search from $0.17–$0.50 per 1,000 queries. No commitment required.
• Enterprise: Multi-seat licensing, private deployment, custom AI models, and dedicated support for large facilities.
A typical feature documentary with 100 hours of footage costs approximately $336–$696 to index in full — a fraction of one day of assistant editor time.
H2: Frequently Asked Questions
Does ShotAI work with footage stored on NAS drives?
Yes. ShotAI supports local filesystem, NAS, external drives, and cloud storage. Footage doesn't need to move — ShotAI indexes it where it lives.
How accurate is the shot detection?
ShotAI's cut detection works on hard cuts, dissolves, and gradual transitions. Accuracy exceeds 95% on standard editorial cuts. You can manually adjust boundaries for complex cases.
Can multiple editors search the same library simultaneously?
Enterprise plans support multi-seat licensing with shared libraries. Team members can search, tag, and export from the same indexed asset pool.
What happens to my data?
Original footage stays local. Only low-resolution thumbnails are sent to the cloud during AI indexing and are deleted immediately after processing. ShotAI does not store, train on, or share your content.
Does it support non-English audio and transcription metadata?
ShotAI's visual semantic search works language-independently. Audio transcription with multilingual support is on the roadmap.