Footage and agentic editing
How to find one line in hours of interview footage
Transcripts make interviews searchable, but only if you can search all of them at once. A setup that works with any editor and any transcription tool.
You remember the line. Somewhere in two days of interviews, the baker said her sourdough starter was older than she was. Without transcripts, finding it means scrubbing. With a transcript inside each edit project, it means remembering which project. Neither scales past a few shoots.
The fix is to treat transcripts as part of the footage: made for every recording, kept next to it, and searchable all at once. Here's a setup that does that with whatever you already use.
1. Transcribe at ingest, not in the edit
Most people transcribe inside the project they're cutting. That's the right place to cut from words, but it leaves every other shoot unsearchable. Transcribe the whole card when you offload it, while you still remember who said what.
- Your editor. Premiere Pro's Speech to Text and DaVinci Resolve Studio both transcribe, and both export captions as SRT. Good when the footage is going into a project anyway.
- A local transcription app. MacWhisper runs Whisper models on your Mac, takes whole folders at once and exports SRT and plain text. Nothing leaves the machine, which matters when the interview is under an NDA.
- A human service. Rev and similar services are worth it when you need a clean, quotable document for a client. You pay per minute, and the footage is uploaded.
Whichever you pick, export SRT. It keeps the timecode, and the timecode is what turns a search result back into a moment you can play.
2. Keep each transcript next to its clip
Save the SRT beside the video, with the same name: C0012.MP4 and C0012.srt. When the card is backed up, copied to an archive drive or handed to an assistant, the transcript travels with it, and any tool can pair the two.
Avoid a separate "transcripts" folder that drifts away from the media. In a year, the folder will be on one drive and the footage on another.
3. Search every transcript at once
SRT files are plain text, so the Mac can search them without any special software. In Terminal:
grep -ri -B2 --include='*.srt' "starter" /Volumes/
That searches every connected drive. For each match it prints the file name and the line, plus the two lines above it, which in an SRT are the subtitle number and the timecode. Open the clip at that time in any player.
If you'd rather stay out of Terminal, export a .txt copy as well. Finder's search looks inside plain-text files on drives that Spotlight indexes.
4. Search the way speech recognition hears
Transcription is very good at common words and unreliable with names. Search accordingly.
- Search distinctive words, not the paraphrase you remember. "starter", "1987" or "Lisbon" find more than "how old the starter is".
- Expect names to be misspelled. Search the words around the name, or a phonetic guess. "Siobhan" may be in the transcript as "Shivon".
- Start with one rare word, then narrow. A dozen hits on one word are quicker to check than an exact phrase with none.
- Fix the transcript when you find a mistake, so the next search works.
5. Log what a transcript can't hear
A transcript records what was said, not how. Keep a few lines per interview in a text file named after the clip: the strongest answers, the laugh, the line repeated because a truck went past. It sits in the same folder and turns up in the same searches.
6. Pull selects as you find them
When a search turns up the line, mark it straight away: a subclip in a selects bin, a marker in a stringout sequence, or the clip name and in and out points in your log. Searching is cheap; finding the same line twice is not.
Where this setup runs out
It works well for one active project and a handful of connected drives. It gets harder as the archive grows:
- Unplugged drives are invisible. grep and Finder only search what's mounted, and most of an archive lives in a drawer.
- Old shoots were never transcribed. Going back means re-running transcription over years of cards.
- Every new card is a step to remember. Skip it once and that shoot is unsearchable.
That's the part we built Grain to handle. It's a Mac app that catalogs your drives in place, transcribes every recording on your Mac as it's added, and keeps unplugged drives in the catalog, so one search covers the whole archive and plays from the line. If the manual setup above already covers your work, keep it. The method is the same either way. How Grain's transcription works.
Checklist
- Transcribe whole cards at ingest, and export SRT.
- Keep each SRT next to its clip, with the same name.
- Search every drive at once with grep or Finder.
- Search distinctive words and expect misspelled names.
- Log what the transcript misses.
- Mark selects the moment you find them.