Fast Video Cataloger keeps a searchable catalog of your own video files: scene thumbnails, keywords, transcripts, faces. Since version 10.3 it also ships an MCP server, so an AI assistant such as Claude can work with that catalog. You ask for footage in your own words, and the assistant searches, looks at the actual shots and does the filing for you. Your videos stay on your own disks.
What you can ask it
- Which of my videos have someone saying “budget” out loud? It searches the transcripts and gives you the videos and the time it was said.
- Find footage of a dog on a beach. It searches by what the picture shows, with nothing tagged first, using visual search.
- Look at a few scenes from the harbour interview and tell me what they show. It fetches the scene thumbnails and looks at them, instead of guessing from file names.
- Which of these shots would work in a trailer? Put the good ones in a bin called Trailer. It judges the shots and gathers them into a bin you then open in Fast Video Cataloger.
- Tag every clip where Anna appears with “interview”. With an Editor key it can add keywords to videos and scenes.
The connector has 23 tools: searching videos, scenes, transcripts and cast, listing the keywords your catalog uses, reading a video’s scenes, keywords and transcript, fetching a scene image, and tagging, bins and indexing. It cannot delete a video or a bin, take a video out of a bin, play video or drive the player; you do that in the program.
Why a catalog, and not a folder
An assistant pointed at a folder sees file names. Fast Video Cataloger has already done the slow part: it has played through every video, captured its scenes, and stored what was said, who appears and what each shot shows. The assistant searches that, across every drive and every year of footage in the catalog, instead of opening files one by one.
It works alongside your editor, not instead of it. Use it to find and gather the material; cut it in Premiere, Resolve or whatever you use.
What stays on your PC
The catalog, the search index and the video files stay on your machine, and no video is uploaded anywhere. The assistant reaches the catalog through an address on your own computer. What it does receive is what it asks for to answer you: video titles, matching transcript lines and the scene images it looks at. If you use a cloud assistant, that is what goes to it.
You decide what it may do. Each assistant logs in with its own API key: a Viewer key can only search and read, an Editor key can also tag and build bins.
Which assistants work
Any assistant that can start a local MCP server can use it. We have tested and documented the setup for Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Gemini CLI.
Set it up in three steps
- Share your catalog through the Fast Video Cataloger server. The assistant talks to the server, not to the desktop program. In the program, open the start page’s Server section, click Setup and follow the wizard. The server is included with every licence and runs as a Windows service, so the assistant works even when the program is closed.
- Create an API key with Manage Users in the same Server section. Choose Viewer or Editor.
- Add the connector to your assistant. It is
fvc-mcp.exe, installed with Fast Video Cataloger. For Claude Desktop that is a few lines in its settings file; Claude Code and Gemini CLI add it with one command.
The exact settings for each assistant, and a list of questions to try, are in How to Connect an AI Assistant. For the background, and how the connector compares with the REST API and scripting, read Let an AI assistant search your video library.
Try it on your own footage
Fast Video Cataloger runs on Windows 10 and 11. The free 30-day trial includes the server and the MCP connector, so you can catalog a folder of your own videos and ask an assistant about them today.
Download the free 30-day trial
More on the AI features: AI video search in Fast Video Cataloger.