The AI B-roll finder that reads your script and lines up your footage.

Every long-form YouTube creator knows the rhythm. You finish the script. You record the voice. You sit down to edit, and realise you don’t have the visuals.

Now you spend the next two or three hours searching YouTube’s relevance algorithm for “DSLR camera close up,” “city skyline cinematic,” “person scrolling phone” — opening tabs, scrubbing for the right second, downloading clips with a third-party tool, dragging them into your editor.

That’s the workflow Clip Research replaces. You paste what you wrote. The AI does the searching, ranking, and matching. You spend the saved time on cuts, sound design, and colour — the parts that actually move the needle.

A beat is the unit a film editor thinks in: a single self-contained idea inside the narration that warrants its own visual. “Last year YouTube changed completely” is one beat. “Now anyone can generate a video in an hour” is another beat. “The algorithm rewards retention” is a third.

When we split your script into beats, we mirror exactly the pacing decisions a good editor would make. Then for each beat we generate three kinds of search queries: a specific visual that matches the literal subject, a broader cutaway that fits even if the specific one misses, and a visual metaphor for abstract lines that don’t have a literal subject.

That last one is the difference between a B-roll tool that works and one that doesn’t. “AI as an amplifier” isn’t a thing you can film. But “robotic hand reaching to human hand” is — and it’s the visual every editor reaches for when that line comes up. We generate the metaphor automatically.

A talking-head video about your topic is useless as B-roll — you can’t cut to someone else’s face mid- narration. We rank candidates with that in mind:

• Stock footage compilations with titles like “Free B-Roll · Camera Equipment” or “Cinematic City Drone 4K” rank highest. These exist precisely to be reused.
• Archival reels for historical beats (e.g., “Edison phonograph 1877 archive footage” for a beat that mentions Edison).
• Cinematic cutaway scenes from documentary-style channels that ship clean visual shots inside otherwise narrated videos.
• Talking-head explainers — tutorial videos, opinion pieces, top-10 lists — are explicitly excluded even when they match the topic. They’d be useless on your timeline.

• Video essayists & documentary creators — long narrated scripts mean hours of B-roll research per upload. Clip Research turns that into one paste.
• Faceless YouTube channels — your channel’s entire visual identity is B-roll. You need a deep, varied library of cutaways that match whatever the AI narrator is saying that week.
• Sponsored read producers — every sponsor spot needs visuals. A 60-second ad has 8–12 cuts. Clip Research fills the slot for every line.
• Explainer and educational channels — concrete visuals make abstract concepts stick. The metaphor query slot covers the abstract lines a literal search would miss.
• Short-form creators (Shorts / Reels) — vertical content moves fast, every second needs a cut. Six matching clips per beat means you have a curated shortlist before you open the editor.

Stock footage subscriptions (Artgrid, Storyblocks, Envato) give you licensed footage but require you to do the search yourself, and the libraries are limited to whatever the platform has commissioned. Clip Research searches the largest video library that exists — YouTube — and surfaces b-roll compilations that anyone has published as “no copyright” or free stock.

Manual YouTube search is what most creators do today. It works, but it’s slow. A typical 10-minute essay takes 2–3 hours to research. Clip Research does the same work in about a minute.

AI video generation (Sora, Runway, Veo) lets you make the B-roll instead of finding it — but it costs orders of magnitude more per clip, output quality is still hit-or-miss for “real-looking” footage, and you can’t generate archival material (1882 Pearl Street power station footage doesn’t exist in any training set). Clip Research is faster, cheaper, and works today.

Descript’s “Storyblocks integration” and similar in-editor tools require you to be in their editor. Clip Research is editor-agnostic — download the clip, use it anywhere.

We surface clips so you can review them. We do not provide legal advice. Whether a particular use qualifies as fair use, requires a license, or needs permission from the creator is your call.

That said, the ranking is biased toward sources that are explicitly designed for reuse: titles containing “no copyright,” “free stock,” “b-roll,” “free footage,” or “royalty-free.” For archival material we surface public-domain reels and historical footage. For commentary-style use of named content, fair use frameworks apply — but check the source before publishing if you’re unsure.

When in doubt: click through, read the channel’s description, and verify the license. The download itself is your call, made with full information about the source.

Clip Research is a Pro feature. VidPickr Pro is $9.99/month or $99.99/year (saves 17%) and includes 60 script researches per month — enough to cover the busiest weekly publishing schedule. Cancel anytime.

Open Clip Research → See Pro pricing