Structure your tag hierarchy
Tags teach the AI what it can't work out by watching your footage: which campaign a clip belongs to, who's on camera, where it was shot. That context makes its choices better, and lets you find the right clip later without scrubbing through everything.
Unlike a folder, which can only hold a clip in one place, a tag can sit on as many clips as it needs to, and a clip can carry as many tags as apply to it. A clip from your Berlin shoot that ran in two different campaigns can carry both campaign tags at once, so it turns up under either one.
Build your structure before you upload
It's worth setting your tags up before you bring your library in.
Tags with auto-tagging switched on are applied as footage arrives, so a few hundred clips can land already sorted. Upload first and you're left doing it the slow way: working through what's already there, selecting clips in batches and applying tags to each group by hand.
What's worth tagging
Focus on what the AI can't see for itself.
Solid already scans your footage and describes what's visibly in it, so a clip showing a car is understood as showing a car without any help. That description is stored in the clip's smart metadata, which you can read any time by opening the clip.
What's worth your tags is context:
- Marketing campaigns, which nothing in the footage itself reveals
- Shooting locations and events
- The people appearing in the video
- Product variants, especially ones that look alike. If the product name is printed clearly on the packaging the AI can often pick it out by itself, but a tag gives it something firmer to go on when variants are hard to tell apart
Create a tag
- Open the Tags section. In the left menu of Assets, find Tags and click the plus icon beside it. The Create a tag dialog opens.
- Give your tag a name.
- Write a description. Say what the tag is for and when to use it. The AI reads this too, so a clear description helps it apply the tag correctly, not just you finding it later. Click AI tips beside the field for guidance on writing one well, including how to describe what should never match.
- Decide whether to auto-tag. It's off by default. Switch it on and the AI applies the tag for you as footage comes in. That works when the tag matches something visible and consistent, like a product name printed on packaging. Leave it off for anything the AI would have to guess at, a campaign being the clearest example, and apply those yourself while uploading.
- Set a parent tag, if it belongs under one. Optional, and it's what turns a flat list into a structure: a broad tag holding specific ones, like Product with each product beneath it, or Campaign with each campaign. Search for an existing tag, or browse the list, to pick one. You can go five levels deep.
- Click Create. Your tag appears under Tags in the left menu. If you change your mind, click Cancel or the X in the top right corner.
Where your tags pay off
Once your structure is in place, tags earn their keep in two places. Search and filter your library yourself, and a tag narrows hundreds of clips down to the handful you actually want. Or hand a search off to our AI ad assembler: point it at a tag and it pulls matching footage for you, so a clean structure gives it something precise to reach for whenever you choose to use it that way.
Next, tag your existing assets so everything already in your library catches up too.