Now in Beta: Search panel finds the shot faster with visual search

[Jessica Nuñez]

Now in Premiere Pro (beta), AI-powered Media Intelligence automatically identifies visuals such as people, objects, location, camera angles, and more across thousands of clips in seconds. With the new Search panel, use natural language to find these visuals, plus spoken words in transcripts or clips with embedded metadata like shoot date, location, or camera type – all at the same time. The media intelligence analysis is faster than real time and runs locally on your computer, there is no internet connection required. Your media and searches are never used to train Adobe’s AI models. 

Search Panel in Premiere Pro

This new search can help you at any stage of your edit, whether you’re diving into organizing hours of new footage, or you need to quickly find that one shot you know you’ve seen before.  

Visual Search Results in Premiere Pro

How to get started: 

1. Import your footage into a new project or open an existing project. 
2. Open the Search panel by clicking the magnifying glass button in the upper right corner of Premiere Pro app or under Window > Search. 
3. Let the background analysis process finish. When the analysis is finished you should see ‘Visual analysis complete’ in the Search panel. 
4. Type in the search field. Visual search can give better results the more specific you are in describing the scene. 

Search Icon

Progress Panel Status

 How media intelligence visual search works: 

1. Premiere Pro analyzes your footage using on-device models. You have settings to control caching of the analysis. You can turn off analysis altogether in Preferences > Media Analysis & Transcription. 
2. The analysis from each clip is collected into an index for your project. You’ll see this as a new .prin file next to your project file. 
3. When you type into the Search panel, your text is analyzed by the same models and then compared against all the analysis collected in the index to find the best semantic matches. 

Read more about Media Intelligence search and check out the Frequently Asked Questions. 

While Search panel is in beta your feedback is invaluable – please give it a try and share how it went for you: what worked, what needs work, and what you’d like to see us do next with media intelligence. 

Once you’ve tried out the new search, let us know what you think in this short survey: https://forms.office.com/r/r0nxuQkPZH – Thank you! 

[AndrewTheGreat]

"use natural language to find these visuals"

Tried the word крест which is cross in russian - no results found. So no russian language support then?

Also I'm not seeing some previews. These are the default Premiere Pro videos:

[alexander-riss]

Thank you for your feedback - the current beta version only supports english search queries.

Could you give some details about the file format used for the files that did not show a thumbnail? do they show a thumbnail in the project panel? Search should show you the point in time inside the clip as a thumbnail.

Best regards,

 Alexander

[AndrewTheGreat]

The default Premiere Pro videos, Premiere Pro is installed with. 

The thumbnails are shown everywhere except for the Search panel

[Zbyszko Rylec]

This is awesome! It would be great if the panel worked like a normal bin in thumbnail view. I'd like to be able to use the keyboard to navigate between thumbnails, +/- to enlarge thumbnails,  enter to open a clip in the source window, be able to assign shortcuts for reveal in the Project/Finder (the same that works for revealing clips from timeline).

I found that sometimes, when I open old project Media Intelligance Analysis won't start. If I import the same media to a new project it works fine. It would be nice to have an option to manualy force software to start analysis for selected clips.

[KennyEzPZ]

This is cool. Is there an easy way to clear the results to start it over?

[alexander-riss]

Thank you for your feedback.

The search information is stored per file and per project. At least in theory you dont need to reset these as they are dynamically updated. E.g. if you use a clip in a sequence it will automatically show up in the search results.

If you want to clear the index you can e.g. delete the media side car file .prmi / .prin , to re-generate them.

Best regards,
 Alexander

[KennyEzPZ]

Thanks for the reply. I am sure that I know the anwser to this, is there a recommended compression for the video files to maximize results, especially for offline?

[alexander-riss]

We do not analyze the video frames at the full resolution, so compression shound not have a significant effect at the search result precision unless you could spot the difference in thumbnail view.

[Rollan Banez]

Thank you for this, will definitely try it and provide feedback on it.

[Grant34943213rnh0]

Hi Jessica, are there any demo videos showing the process? And secondly, will it be possible to search an entire footage library on a local drive/NAS (rather than only imported clips)?

[alexander-riss]

Thank you for your feedback.

Currently you can only search clips in your currently open projects. What you can do is e.g. use AME to analyzer all your clips up front, and then add them to your projects, so you can start searching them immediately.

Best regards,
 Alexander

[Grant34943213rnh0]

Thanks. In order for it to be far more useful in a professional use case, it would need to be able to search and filter the results of an entire footage library, typically stored on a NAS.

[yanga18281014]

I was thinking - wouldn't it be awesome if AI could help us quickly flag problematic shots in our footage? Like, when you've got multiple takes of the same scene, the AI could automatically identify which ones have camera shake or when something accidentally blocks the frame. Maybe it could use color coding to highlight the best takes among similar shots. This would be a huge time-saver for video editors when they're looking for the perfect clip to use

[MyerPj]

Oh, thank you! I like it. 🙂

[theok8577996]

I tested with some footage with interviews and close up shots of people.

"Interview" does not give good results, while that should be easy to detect with clip length and close up angle

Also "Close -up" does not seem to work or "close up people"

[alexander-riss]

Thank you for your feedback! The search works best the more details you use to describe a scene and generally has its lowest precision if using a single word for searching. E.g. instead of "interview" , a search for "person speaking into the camera" should return better results. We are aware that this is very different from what people are used to searching when e.g using regular search engines - but it also comes with a much stronger power of expression.

Best regards,
 Alexander

[cgrado]

Is there a plan to return only parts of clips in the search results, or at least a timecode reference? I have hours of dance competition footage to look through, and getting the result for "person spinning" as almost every single clip (generally 30-90s long) isn't very useful. Instead I would like it to return a clip (since premiere is non-destructive and just points to sources anyways), that points only to the section of the media during which that action is happening. 

[Alexander Riss]

Thank you for your feedback. The search already tries to split each clip into sections of similar content. If you search, you should already get the part that the engine considers very siminar.

Depending on you camera distance, details about the movement of the person might be too small for the ai to pick up as we only look at a thumbnail sized version of each scene for performance reasons

[Piotr Gardecki]

I made a first attempt, imported photos instead of videos, so as not to overload the system. The engine read everything and indeed then I could search for people or a street and create a sequence from them on the timeline.

[AndyAndyAndy]

This looks great!! I really hope there are plans to extend the global search interface to include results from manually added labels and markers. I'd also like the option to ONLY search for user-added identifiers.  

Then please refine the interface for addding labels / markers so we can select clip ranges, add notes and keywords;

- using only the keyboard.

- without stopping playback.

The closest we've had to this is the long-dead Prelude. I miss it every day.

Finally (!) Can we have Production-wide search? This would be amazing for documentary.

[MyerPj]

I'm with Andy, ah... Andy, er...Andy on this. Especially the productions. I do miss Prelude.

I have something good to report on this search: I've got a bunch of clips of birds, (my own stuff, not for a client), so it's not documented as well as it could be... :-), But I put in my first search, 'many birds sitting on a wrought Iron fence' and wow, it found the exact clips I was looking for, and very quickly.

So, thank you very much, this is a cool new feature! 🙂

[nbechere]

Thank you for that feedback. Noted on the interface refinement 🙂 

As for productions - there's some good and some slightly less good news. The good news - the search panel already works on all open projects, not just the active one. So if it's feasible for you to have the source media project open alongside your editing project you can already search across (parts of) your production projects while editing. 

That said - we are aware editors would like to search through production projects without opening them. But this requires additional effort. Since we need some of the information from the project there is really no good way to search through projects without opening them at least once (+ of course analyzing the footage). But we are aware of that request and might come back to it in a future release.