ClipVault turns messy video and photo drives into a visual production library
using lightweight previews, metadata and AI-assisted search — while your original media stays
untouched and local.
ClipVault Local, Visual Search. Sample library shown — imagery is generated
placeholder artwork, metadata and search behaviour are the product's own.
The archive problem
Your best footage should not disappear into a folder tree.
Every production company ends up with the same thing: drives full of material
nobody can find, named by whoever was offloading that night.
Years spread across drives
Project after project, offloaded to whichever external drive had room, with no index across any of them.
Filenames that mean nothing
A001_C023_0611XY.mov tells you nothing about what is in the shot, and the folder above it rarely helps.
4K and RAW are slow to review
Scrubbing log footage and opening RAW frames to find one moment costs hours and pins the machine while it happens.
Great footage forgotten after delivery
The material that did not make the cut is the material nobody ever sees again.
The same searches, over and over
Editors re-open the same archives every time a pitch, recut or social deliverable needs something familiar.
No safe way to reorganise
Building selects usually means copying, renaming or moving originals — and breaking every project that references them.
ClipVault is a layer, not a migration.
It sits over the archive you already have: your folders keep their structure, your files keep
their names and their paths, and ClipVault builds a searchable index beside them. Nothing is
uploaded, nothing is moved, and nothing is rewritten.
Proof before download
Search a real sample library before you download.
The live demo runs the ClipVault workflow in your browser against a packaged
sample archive — browse, search, filter, inspect keyframes and build a project board.
It never touches your computer's files.
demo.dgtl.movSample LibraryBrowser Demo
22 sample assets · video and RAW photo ·
full metadata, keyframes, tags and filters — the same screens the desktop app uses.
Three steps, and none of them touch your originals.
01
Connect
Point the desktop app
at a local folder or an external media drive. ClipVault opens it read-only and leaves it
exactly where it is.
02
Index lightly
ffprobe and ExifTool
read the technical metadata; FFmpeg writes a small thumbnail per asset and a handful of
keyframes per video. RAW previews come from the JPEG your camera already embedded, so no
RAW decode runs during a scan.
03
Search creatively
Search by scene,
subject, camera, format, orientation, rating, tag or project — and by visual meaning,
using embeddings computed from those small derivatives.
Stays put
Original media
4K log video, RAW stills — opened read-only
→
Generated
Small derivatives
512px thumbnails, 5–12 keyframes per video
→
On your machine
Local intelligence index
SQLite, metadata, tags, embeddings
→
What you use
Searchable library
Find the shot, then open the original in place
Core features
Built for archives that are too big to scrub.
Everything below ships in the current build unless it is marked as in
development.
Visual search
Describe the shot instead of remembering the filename. OpenCLIP embeddings over your
keyframes and previews rank the library by what the frame actually shows.
Smart indexing
Codec, container, resolution, frame rate, duration, orientation, camera, lens, exposure
and colour profile — pulled with ffprobe and ExifTool, including Sony ARW.
Keyframe intelligence
A long clip is understood through a handful of representative frames, so a 4K log file
never has to be decoded in full to be searchable.
Creative inspector
Keyframes, full technical metadata, tags with their source and confidence, ratings and
quality signals in one panel.
AI creative summaries and
suggested uses are in development
Project boards
Selects, collections and production bins that reference assets by index — so building a
bin never copies, renames or moves a source file.
Studio and Grade
Studio turns a long clip into a vertical cutdown — transcribe, find moments, reframe to
1080×1920, export an EDL. Grade gives a live WebGL preview and batch stills export. Both
reference library assets rather than copying them.
Who it is for
Find your workflow, then try the query.
Each role below links straight into the live demo with the search already
filled in.
Rediscover what you already shot
Pitches, treatments and campaign recuts usually need footage you already own. ClipVault
makes the back catalogue answerable in the meeting instead of after it — search by what the
shot shows, sort by rating, and pull a shortlist without opening a single 4K file.
Filter years of footage by camera, frame rate, orientation and rating, drop the keepers on
a project board, and go back to the original file in its original location when you cut.
The board holds references, not copies.
Filter to vertical clips for a reel, horizontal for the cutdown, product shots for the ad.
Orientation, frame rate and creative-use tags are indexed, so a brief becomes a filter
rather than an afternoon.
ClipVault reads ARW, CR2, CR3, NEF, DNG and more, and builds its previews from the JPEG the
camera already embedded — so indexing a RAW archive is fast and never decodes a full-size
frame. Search by subject, lens, exposure or tag.
Connect a drive, run a fast scan for an instant index, then let a standard scan fill in
metadata and previews. The filesystem underneath stays exactly as it was — including the
parts other software depends on.
This is not a policy promise bolted onto a cloud product. ClipVault is a
desktop application with a local database; there is no ClipVault account to create and
nowhere for your media to go.
No media upload by default. Nothing leaves the machine unless you explicitly connect a source that requires it.
Originals are read-only. The app never deletes, moves, renames, overwrites, or writes metadata into your source media.
No automatic reorganisation. Collections and boards are index references, not file operations.
AI runs on small derivatives. Embeddings and tagging work on ~512px keyframes and previews, never on full-resolution 4K or RAW.
The index stays local. Database, previews, keyframes, tags, projects and exports all live in ~/.clipvault/ on your machine.
It works offline. Scanning, searching, grading and browsing need no internet connection at all.
No telemetry in the app. The desktop application ships without analytics.
Optional read-only cloud sources. If you point ClipVault at your own S3 bucket, credentials go to the macOS Keychain and the client can only read.
On your machineOriginal media — untouched, in place, opened read-only
On your machineDerivatives and index — thumbnails, keyframes, metadata, tags, embeddings, project boards
Leaves only if you askYour own cloud sources — read-only S3 access you configure, byte-budgeted, credentials in the Keychain
NeverYour media, to DGTL — there is no ClipVault server that receives your files
Explore first. Start the clock when you are ready.
ClipVault is currently a free developer preview with no licensing system in it
at all, and no public installer. This is the model we are committing to for the 1.0 release,
published now so nothing about it is a surprise later.
01
Install it, free
Installing does not start a trial and does not ask for an account.
02
Open the sample library
Explore every screen with the packaged sample archive. This does not start a trial either.
03
Connect your first real library
Point ClipVault at a folder or drive when you are ready to index your own material.
04
Start the 30-day Pro trial
You choose this explicitly. This — and only this — starts the clock.
05
Full access for 30 days
Every feature, on your own archive, for the full period.
06
Buy and activate
A licence unlocks the installation you already have. No rescan, no re-index, no re-import.
What starts the trial
Only activating ClipVault for real use. Not downloading it, not installing it, and not
opening sample mode.
What happens when it ends
Your library, index and project boards stay on your machine and stay browsable. Trial
expiry never deletes, encrypts or locks your data, and a valid licence restores paid
functionality immediately.
Every asset keeps the path it was indexed from — hand it straight to your NLE.
Every asset knows exactly where it came from.Benefit: hand the original path to your NLE and cut from the real file.
Questions
Straight answers.
No. Scanning, indexing, previews, search and grading all run on your machine, and the
application ships with no upload path for your library. The one exception is a source you
configure yourself: if you connect your own S3 bucket, ClipVault reads from it — with
read-only access and a byte budget — and still stores everything it derives locally.
No. Originals are opened read-only. ClipVault does not delete, move, rename, overwrite or
write metadata into your source files. Derivatives are written to
~/.clipvault/cache/, separately from your media.
Under the planned 1.0 model, only when you explicitly start it — after connecting your
first real library. Downloading, installing and browsing the sample library never start
the clock.
To be exact about today: the current developer preview contains no licensing, trial or
activation code at all. It is free to use while it is a preview.
Your indexed library, previews, tags and project boards remain on your machine and remain
browsable. Expiry never deletes or encrypts your data. Entering a valid licence restores
paid functionality immediately, with no rescan.
Yes. Everything except a cloud source you configure yourself works with no network
connection. The planned licensing system will need occasional connectivity to validate a
licence, not a permanent connection, and it will never transmit the contents of your
library.
Every listed extension is indexed. How much technical metadata comes back depends on what
ffprobe and ExifTool can read for that specific format.
macOS 12 Monterey or newer. The window wrapper is built for Intel and runs on Apple
Silicon under Rosetta 2. There is no Windows or Linux build, and we are not implying a
date for one.
It scales with the library, not with the size of your footage, because it stores small
derivatives. As a measured reference point: a development library of 17,488 assets
(13,248 photos and 4,240 videos) uses a 168 MB index and a 500 MB preview cache.
The licensing system is not built yet, so there is nothing to move today and we will not
promise mechanics we have not implemented. Transfer between your own machines is a
requirement we are designing for, and the terms will be published on the pricing page
before licences go on sale.
No. A licence unlocks the installation and index you already have. That is a hard design
requirement for the licensing work, not an afterthought — rescanning a large archive is
exactly the cost this product exists to remove.
No. The demo is a static page with a packaged sample manifest. It cannot read your
filesystem, cannot open a file picker, has no upload endpoint, and keeps its project board
in memory only — a refresh resets it.
No, by design. There is no upload control, no drag-and-drop handler and no endpoint that
accepts media. Indexing your own material is what the desktop app is for.
Delete ClipVault.app, then delete
~/.clipvault/ to remove the index, cache, exports and
logs. To reset the library but keep the app, delete
~/.clipvault/index.sqlite. Your original media is never
affected by either.
Your best footage is already there. Find it.
Search the sample library now.
Then tell us about your archive, and we will bring you into the preview.
DMTV_PERFORMANCE_B_CAM_014.mov
BACKSTAGE_MOMENT_048.mov