I recently wrapped a project that would have broken me a year ago.
Ten interviews. Hours of footage. The deliverable? A five-minute piece that needed to tell a cohesive story.
If you've done this kind of work, you know the math. Each interview runs 30-45 minutes. That's roughly six hours of raw footage to watch, re-watch, scrub through, and somehow distill into five minutes that actually flow together.
The old way? I'd spend the first two days just watching everything, taking notes in a spreadsheet, trying to remember where that one great soundbite was. "I think it was the third interview... or maybe the fifth? She was talking about her childhood, and then she said something really good..."
You know the feeling. Scrubbing through timelines. Playing things back at 2x speed and still missing stuff. That creeping anxiety that you're going to leave the best moment on the cutting room floor because you simply can't hold six hours of content in your head.
The shift
This time, I ran all ten interviews through Vindexr before I even opened my timeline.
Within an hour, I had searchable transcripts for everything. But more importantly, I could actually find things.
"Show me moments where someone talks about failure."
"Find emotional peaks in interview 3."
"Which interviews mention the product launch?"
Instead of hunting, I was pulling. Instead of scrubbing, I was searching.
What actually changed
Day one used to be: watch everything, take notes, feel overwhelmed.
Now day one is: search for themes, pull selects, build a rough structure.
I found the emotional anchor of the piece in the first 20 minutes. A moment I might have missed entirely in a traditional watch-through because it was buried 38 minutes into interview seven.
The connections between interviews became obvious once I could see them side by side. Subject four's story about doubt paired perfectly with subject nine's breakthrough moment. I never would have made that connection watching linearly.
The numbers
Old workflow: 4 days minimum. Probably 5 if I'm honest.
New workflow: 4 hours to rough cut. Another few hours for polish.
I'm not a faster editor now. I just stopped doing the part that wasn't actually editing—the tedious footage hunting.
The real win
Here's what I didn't expect: the final piece was better.
When you're not exhausted from the search, you have more creative energy for the craft. I tried more things. I experimented with structure. I wasn't just trying to finish; I was actually editing.
That's the part nobody talks about with these tools. It's not just about speed. It's about showing up to the creative work without being depleted by the tedious work.