On dialogue-heavy work — interviews, docs, panels — the edit lives in the words, and finding the words is the slow part. You remember a line landed somewhere in a two-hour session, and you scrub for it. Multiply that across every string-out and every selects pass and it's hours you never get back.
Sequence turns a clip's spoken audio into a searchable transcript automatically. Transcription runs as a background job — you don't wait on it. Select a clip with audio, open the transcription panel in the inspector, and click the Transcript tab. If the transcript is ready, it appears as timed lines; if a job is still running, the text fades in when it finishes. Because it runs on the project, once a clip is transcribed everyone with access sees the same transcript.
What you get#
Jump by reading
- Click any line to move the playhead to that moment
- Go straight to a spoken beat instead of scrubbing for it
- Timed lines stay in sync with the clip
- Read alongside playback in the inspector
Search the words
- Find within a transcript (Cmd-Shift-F)
- See the current match and total, like 1 / 4
- Step through matches with the arrows or Enter
- Locate a quote or a phrase in seconds
Runs in the background
- Queued as a background job, like uploads and exports
- The transcript fills in when the job completes
- Shows Waiting for transcription job to start until it does
- Reports No transcript when there's no speech to transcribe
Knows who spoke
- The Characters tab lists detected speakers and faces
- Each shows detection counts and total speaking time
- Unidentified speakers appear as Unnamed character
- Shows No characters detected when none are found
How it fits your pipeline#
Transcription is a finding tool, not another app to open. It sits in the inspector next to the media you're already reviewing, so the transcript is one click from playback. On an interview cut, scan the text for the soundbite, click the line, and you're on the frame — the transcript becomes a navigation layer over the footage instead of a separate document to manage. And because it's shared with the project, an assistant's selects and the editor's search land on exactly the same text.
Who it's for#
- Documentary and interview editors hunting soundbites across long recordings.
- Assistant editors doing selects and stringouts who want to scan dialogue by text.
- Story producers locating quotes and moments without opening the timeline.
- Distributed teams who need one shared, searchable transcript per clip.