How to find a spoken phrase in Premiere Pro

With Premiere Pro alone

Speech has to be transcribed first. It's easiest to switch on automatic transcription once in the settings, so new clips are searchable as soon as they're imported.

1. Open Preferences › Media Analysis & Transcription, turn on Automatically transcribe clips and choose Auto-transcribe all imported clips. Set the default language or language auto-detection on the same page.
2. For a clip already in the project, open the Text-Based Editing workspace, double-click the clip in the Project panel, and click Transcribe in the Text panel, choosing the language.
3. If your language is missing, download its pack: Window › Text, the Transcript tab, Create transcript, then the download icon next to the language. English is built in; Russian and other languages download separately.
4. To search one transcript, type in the Search field of the Text panel and step through matches with the arrows.
5. To search every transcribed clip in the project at once, open the Search panel (the magnifying glass at the top right of the window) and type the line: matches from speech show up among the results.

Limits

Transcript search looks for an exact text match and doesn't support Boolean operators, so a line you only roughly remember takes some guessing. And it only searches clips already imported into the open project and transcribed: for a big archive that means bringing everything into the project and waiting for transcription first.

The same in Rescanzo

Rescanzo searches speech in Pro mode across the whole footage folder, before anything is imported into Premiere Pro, and understands Russian and English speech.

1. Add the folder of recordings to Rescanzo and let indexing finish.
2. Switch to Pro mode and type the line. The app shows the cost before you run it: 2 tokens plus 1 for every started minute the cloud checks.
3. Add the results you want to a collection and choose export to Premiere Pro: Rescanzo saves the timeline as XML (the xmeml v4 format).
4. In Premiere Pro choose File › Import and pick that file: the found moments land on the timeline at their source timecodes.

Which to use

If one project's footage is already imported and transcribed, Premiere's own search is usually enough, especially since Speech to Text covers 18 languages. Rescanzo wins when there are lots of recordings spread across folders and you don't want to pull them all into a project to find one line.

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