How to find a clip by what someone says in Premiere

“She said something about the bridge, in one of the Tuesday interviews.” Every documentary editor knows the next forty minutes: scrubbing four clips at double speed with one ear on the audio. Here is how to make that a search box instead, with what each option can and cannot find.

1. Premiere’s Text panel (free, exact words)

Since 2021 Premiere transcribes on your machine. Once a clip or sequence is transcribed (Window → Text → Transcript → Transcribe), the Transcript tab has a search field:

1. Type the word or phrase.
2. Every hit is highlighted; the count shows how many.
3. Click a hit and the playhead jumps to it in the Source or Program Monitor.
4. Select the passage and press Insert to put it on the timeline.

What it is good at: exact words, fast, no extra cost. What it is not: the search runs on the transcript you have open, so “one of the Tuesday interviews” means opening each one. And it matches words, not meaning. If she never said “bridge” but talked about “the crossing,” you will not find it.

2. The plugins that used to do this

For years the answer to “search every transcript in the project” was Digital Anarchy’s PowerSearch, alongside Transcriptive, which transcribed per minute and cut when you deleted text. Both were discontinued on 1 May 2026; existing panels keep working for transcripts you already have, but no new transcription. If you are reading this because that search box went away, the next section is the replacement.

3. Search by what was said, or by what was meant

Verbatim is a Premiere panel that opens every selected clip’s transcript as a tab (timeline selection, project multi-select, or a whole sequence) and searches across all of them at once.

FIND matches exact words as you type, across every tab, and the playhead follows each hit. This is the Text panel search without the one-clip-at-a-time limit.

AI search is the part the Text panel cannot do. Describe the moment instead of quoting it: “the moment someone believed in him,” “where she admits the first version failed,” “any time they mention money.” The matching line is found by meaning and plays in the Program Monitor. It works in the transcript’s own language and can search transcripts in other languages with translation.

Questions are detected and listed, so you can jump an interview question by question, which is usually the fastest way to re-find a story you half remember.

When you find it, you do not write down a timecode. Click the line, or drag across the words you want, and + Add to Timeline puts it on the output sequence as its own clip. If you are hunting for more than one moment, the Build Narrative route lets you describe the whole story and get the cut proposed.

None of this uploads footage. Premiere transcribes locally, and Verbatim sends only transcript text and your query to the AI you chose, or nothing at all with the offline option (Ollama, on your Mac).

What about finding a shot, not a sentence?

Everything above searches dialogue. “The drone shot of the bridge at dusk” is a visual search, a different job: Jumper does that locally inside Premiere, and the comparison page covers the others. For interview-driven work, dialogue is where the time goes, and that is what Verbatim is for. The interactive demo has a real podcast loaded if you want to try the search before installing anything.