How to find a spoken phrase in CapCut

Shorts and clips often hinge on one particular line from a long recording. In CapCut desktop you can find it through auto captions or text-based editing, but only in a video that's already in your project.

Search by speech00:00:00:00

With auto captions

Auto captions turn speech into text on the timeline, which shows you where everything was said.

  1. Add the video to a project and to the timeline.
  2. In the left toolbar, open Captions (the speech-bubble icon) and choose Auto captions.
  3. Pick the audio source and the spoken language, then click Generate.
  4. Scroll through the captions on the timeline to find the line.

With text-based editing

CapCut can also edit by transcript: select the clip and switch it on from the menu (CapCut's own page on the feature gives the path as Menu › Layout › Transcript-based editing). The transcript has a word search, and deleting text cuts the matching piece of video. Some CapCut features are Pro-only and the list changes over time, so check in your version.

Where it gets awkward

Both methods work on a video inside the project. With lots of recordings, each one has to be imported and transcribed before you can search it, and then searched on its own. For a podcast on three cameras, that's three transcripts of the same conversation.

The same in Rescanzo

Rescanzo searches for the line across the whole folder of recordings before anything reaches CapCut, and it understands Russian and English speech. Only the moments it found go into CapCut.

  1. Add the folder of recordings to Rescanzo and let indexing finish.
  2. Switch to Pro mode and type the line you remember.
  3. Add the results you want to a collection and choose the CapCut export.
  4. Rescanzo cuts each moment into its own MP4 file and opens the Video Search folder inside Movies (Videos on Windows).
  5. Drag the clips into CapCut or add them with Import media.

If you need a shot, not a line

CapCut has no picture search at all. In Rescanzo you find a shot by description in Low or Mid mode, for example "guest laughing" or "city view from a rooftop", and it's cut into separate clips for CapCut the same way.

Questions and answers

What does a search like this cost?

A Pro speech search costs 2 tokens plus 1 for every started minute the cloud checks. The app shows the exact price before you run it, and a new account starts with 50 tokens.

Which languages does search support?

Russian and English, for both queries and speech.

Can I stop the export halfway?

Yes, Rescanzo shows the progress and lets you cancel.

Try it on your own footage

A new account gets 50 tokens: that's 25 searches in Mid mode.

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