Editors lose absurd amounts of time scrubbing footage for that one clip they half-remember. Brolly indexes the whole library on the Mac itself and lets you search it four different ways at once: what is in the scene, text that appears on screen, words that were spoken, and whose face is in frame.
Everything runs locally on Apple Silicon. Footage never leaves the machine, which matters when the library is client work.
How it works in practice:
- Point it at folders or external drives and it indexes in the background, drive-aware, so unplugged disks come back gracefully.
- Type “rooftop sunset b-roll” or “clip where he says distribution”, get ranked moments, not whole files.
- Drag a result straight into CapCut and it lands as a native clip on the timeline.
The drag hand-off is the feature I fought hardest for. It failed silently for weeks because drops on browser-owned windows were being ignored by design, no log, no toast. The lesson made it into the journal.