How to Find Any Clip in Your Video Archives on Mac ?
Jul 1, 2025
Your Mac is a digital graveyard of video files.
It's filled with hours of Zoom recordings, client interviews, exported project files, family videos, and screen captures. You know the perfect clip is in there somewhere, the exact moment the client approved the concept, the B-roll shot you forgot to use, the key quote from a two-hour webinar.
So you start the search. You open Finder. You click. You scroll. You guess filenames like final_cut_v4_USE-THIS-ONE.mov.
Giving up, you open the video file and begin the soul-crushing process of scrubbing the timeline, squinting at thumbnails, hoping to spot the moment you need. Hours are wasted. Frustration builds.
This workflow is broken. Traditional Mac search tools like Spotlight and Finder were never built to understand the most valuable part of your videos: the content inside them.
Why Your Mac Can't Find Your Clips
Standard search tools are blind to video content. They can only see the file's name and basic metadata. They cannot see:
What was said: Spoken words and dialogue are invisible.
What was seen: Objects, scenes, and visual cues are a complete mystery.
What was shown: Text on a slide or a shared screen doesn't register.
To your Mac, a two-hour interview and a 10-second cat video are just anonymous blocks of data. That’s why you’re stuck searching manually.
A New Way to Search: Look Inside Your Videos with Fenn
Fenn is a new kind of search engine for your Mac, designed to solve this exact problem. Using private, on-device AI, Fenn doesn't just index your filenames; it watches your videos for you. It transcribes what's said, analyzes what's seen, and reads what's on screen.
Suddenly, your entire video archive becomes a searchable database. You can find any moment by simply describing what you remember.
1. Search by Spoken Words
Forget timestamps. Just type the phrase you remember hearing. Fenn scans its local transcripts and takes you to the exact point in the video.
Search for:
"The part where she says 'Q4 revenue projections'"
"Interview clip mentioning the marketing budget"
"The brainstorm about the new tagline"
Fenn will find the moment in any of your MP4, MOV, or other video files instantly.
2. Search by Visuals
Remember the scene but not the words? Describe what you saw. Fenn’s visual analysis can identify objects, settings, and concepts.
Search for:
"Whiteboard sketch of the new logo"
"Sunset over the mountains"
"Someone wearing a red jacket"
3. Search by On-Screen Text
Fenn uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to read text that appears in your videos—perfect for presentations, screen recordings, and tutorials.
Search for:
"The slide that says 'Project Phoenix Launch Plan'"
"The screen share showing the error code"
"Find the website URL that was on screen"
Your New Workflow: Search, Don't Scrub
Getting started is simple and transforms your process from manual hunting to instant finding.
Let Fenn Index Your Video Folders: Simply point Fenn to where you store your video files (e.g., your 'Exports' folder or an external hard drive). It will securely and privately analyze them in the background.
Search Like a Human: Open Fenn and type what you remember—a phrase, an object, a piece of text.
Jump Directly to the Moment: Fenn displays the relevant clip and its timestamp. A single click opens the video at the exact moment, ready for you to use.
Privacy and Power: You Choose How It Works
For professionals, confidentiality is non-negotiable. But analyzing terabytes of video footage is also an incredibly resource-intensive task that can bring a Mac to its knees, especially during an edit.
That's why Fenn puts you in control, offering two powerful indexing modes designed for different workflows:
100% Local Indexing: For ultimate privacy, all analysis happens directly on your Mac. Your video files never leave your machine, making it the gold standard for sensitive client content or unreleased projects. Your data remains completely under your control, and it works fully offline.
Secure Cloud Indexing: For maximum performance and convenience, you can choose to offload the heavy lifting to our secure servers. This frees up your Mac's resources, allowing you to continue demanding work like video editing without interruption. A game-changer for MacBook users or those with massive archives. All data is encrypted, used only for your indexing, and then deleted.
Both options give you the same powerful search results. The choice simply depends on your priorities for privacy and performance. To help you decide, we wrote an honest guide explaining the pros and cons of each method. You can read the full breakdown here.
Either way, you get the most powerful video search on Mac, on your terms.
The Bottom Line: Your Time is Too Valuable to Waste
Stop scrubbing timelines. Stop wasting billable hours. Stop letting great footage die in your archives.
With Fenn, your video library is no longer a collection of opaque files. It’s a fully searchable database of moments, ideas, and content. You can finally find any clip you need, exactly when you need it.