Vicuda

The B-roll pass, in one sitting.

Describe a shot, mark in and out, send the selects to Final Cut, Premiere, or Resolve. Your footage never leaves the Mac.

The whole job. I and O mark in and out, E sends the range to the stack, and the stack leaves for your editor with the selects in order. Recorded in the app, on stock footage.

Measured

What to expect.

A select
25 seconds. Typing the query to a marked range in the stack.
Search
127 ms. Median, on 1,677 shots. Results re-rank as you type.
Indexing
10.5× realtime. Frames and speech together. If anything holds it up it is the drive the footage is on.
Machine
MacBook Pro, M1 Max. A newer Mac is faster. An Air is slower.

Measured on a release build, 7 September 2026.

Details

What it is, exactly.

Requires
macOS 26 on an Apple silicon Mac.
Search
What’s in frame and what was said, from one field. Type a sentence, or a filter, or both. Press M on a result for more shots that look like it.
Filters
Camera, time of day, date, duration, orientation, resolution, frame rate, and whether a shot has been used. Plus what the indexer worked out while it read the card: framing (wide, detail, closeup, overhead), setting (kitchen, beach, office), activity (talking, cooking, dancing), subject, faces, sound, and loudness. Type them or pick them from a menu with live counts.
Labels
The words above are yours. Add your own, switch off ones you don’t use, or turn on a set for weddings, product reviews, interviews, events, commercials or craft. Per project, or across everything. Change them whenever you like; nothing is reindexed.
Speech
Apple’s on-device speech engine. Every transcribed word is a seek target.
Notes
Hold V and say what the shot is. The note makes the shot findable by those words, and travels to your editor as a marker on the clip.
Storage
One SQLite file holds every project, and you can open it yourself. Detach a project and it stays searchable and skimmable with the drive unplugged.
Export
Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve. Several stacks go into one document, a timeline each.
Formats
Tested against Sony XAVC S and H.264. Anything AVFoundation decodes should play, including ProRes and HEVC. BRAW and R3D aren’t supported yet. If you shoot something else, tick the design-partner box when you join and I’ll ask for a card.
Internet
Not needed after the download.
License
One-time purchase.
Status
In development. Everything on this page works today except detach, which is being built.
Not
An editor or an asset manager. It finds shots and hands them to the editor you already use.

Ownership

You own the app and the index.

The index is one SQLite file you can open yourself, and the footage stays on whatever drive it’s on. Unplug that drive and you can still search and skim what’s on it; plug it back in when it’s time to export.

  • One price

    Buy it once and keep the version you bought. There is no subscription and no account.

  • A standalone app

    Vicuda runs in its own window next to your editor and hands the finished stack to whichever one you cut in.

  • Nothing uploads

    Indexing and search run on your Mac’s Neural Engine. The footage stays on your drives.

  • Files untouched

    Vicuda writes to one database file of its own. It never moves, renames, or rewraps a clip.

Who’s building it

Brandon Young.

I’m building Vicuda on my own, as a native Mac app, because the footage I want to search sits on a drive next to me and I don’t think it should have to be uploaded anywhere to be searched. Everything on this page was captured from the build I use every day.

If you shoot with a camera I haven’t tested, tick the design-partner box when you join the list. I’d like a card from it, and you’d get the builds first. Anything else, hello@vicuda.com.

Waitlist

Want the first build?

The first build goes to the waitlist first, at the launch price.