Importing footage without speech
B-roll, music videos, ambience — footage with no clear dialogue imports fine, it just arrives without a transcript.
Storylines transcribes footage on import so you can edit by text. But plenty of great material has no clear dialogue — drone shots, ambience, music performances, silent b-roll. That footage imports fine: it lands on your board as a B-roll source with the note "imported without a transcript — no clear speech detected."
What that means in practice:
- You can still use it everywhere — drag it into timelines, let agents place it as b-roll coverage, crop and grade it.
- Text-based editing won't see it — with no transcript there are no segments to search or quote. Cue it from the source card or the timeline instead.
- It may take a few extra minutes — the pipeline first tries hard to find speech before falling back, so don't worry if the card sits in processing a little longer than a talky file.
If your footage does have speech and still arrives transcript-less, the audio may be too quiet or in an unexpected language — re-import with the exact language set, or tell us.