Building Video-based RAG with VLM Run

Traditional video analysis tools struggle with long-form content, often forcing developers to manually split videos and stitch together results—especially for anything over an hour. VLM Run eliminates these limitations, letting you process entire keynotes, documentaries, or multi-hour events in a single API call. By fusing time-aligned audio transcripts with rich visual scene descriptions, VLM Run turns hours of footage into a fully searchable, multimodal knowledge base. With this technology, you can build advanced video search and retrieval systems that understand both the spoken word and on-screen visuals—opening up new frontiers for corporate training, media archives, education, and more.

What You Can Do

Extracting insights from hours of video content has traditionally required complex workflows, manual segmentation, and expensive processing pipelines. This process is slow, fragmented, and often out of reach for teams without specialized video analysis expertise.

VLM Run changes the game: With a single API call, you can now process, search, and analyze entire video libraries—no engineering heavy-lifting required. Our breakthrough technology brings multimodal video intelligence to your fingertips, so you can explore, prototype, and validate use-cases in minutes.

Video RAG in Action

Watch how VLM Run answers complex video questions with precise, context-rich results:

Query:

Retrieved Result:

Answer:

Query:

Retrieved Result:

Answer:

🔗 Learn More: Video Processing Guide, Multimodal Search, Time-aligned Retrieval

Real-World Applications

🏢 Corporate Training: Search across quarterly reviews, training sessions, and all-hands meetings to quickly find specific discussions, policy updates, or training materials.

📺 Media & Entertainment: Index documentaries, interviews, and archive footage for rapid content discovery and clip generation.

🎓 Education: Transform lecture libraries into searchable knowledge bases where students can find specific topics, explanations, or examples across hours of content.

⚖️ Legal & Compliance: Quickly locate specific discussions in depositions, hearings, and regulatory meetings with precise timestamps and context.

🔗 Learn More: Corporate Use Cases, Media Indexing, Educational Applications

How It Works

VLM Run simplifies video intelligence into three powerful steps:

1. Upload Your Video: Submit long-form content directly to VLM Run's API—no splitting or preprocessing required. Handle videos of any length, from short clips to multi-hour events (up to 6 hours).

2. Get Multimodal Analysis: Receive synchronized audio transcripts paired with detailed visual scene descriptions, automatically segmented into ~20 to 30-second chunks for optimal processing.

3. Search & Retrieve: Use semantic search to find exact moments across hours of content, combining what was said with what was shown on screen. This step is typically paired with a semantic text-embedding model on the audio and visual transcriptions, in order to enable powerful searches like "product announcements" to surface relevant segments even when speakers don't use those exact words.

Get Started

Ready to build your own video intelligence system? Check out our complete technical cookbook for step-by-step implementation details, or start experimenting at app.vlm.run.

Join the conversation on VLM Run Discord for community support and updates.