Source Catcher

What movie or show is this clip from?

Somebody posted forty seconds with no context. Here is how to find what it was cut out of.

Almost every clip going round is a piece of something bigger — a film, an episode, a match, a concert, an interview, a press conference. The account posting it rarely says which, and sometimes deliberately does not. Once you know what it came from, most arguments about it end.

Start hereRead the frame before you search

Thirty seconds of looking usually beats an hour of searching, because it gives you the words to search with.

FacesOne recognisable actor plus one specific detail — a costume, a car, a room — is usually enough to find it.
Corner logosA broadcaster's bug, a streaming service watermark, or a sports graphic tells you where it aired.
Scoreboards and chyronsThe single best case. A scoreline, a team name, a lower-third headline gives you an exact event and often an exact date.
Subtitles and burned-in textAn exact line of dialogue in quotation marks is the fastest search there is.
Aspect ratio and gradeWide and colour-graded means film or prestige television. Flat and bright means broadcast, phone or stream.
A platform watermarkA TikTok handle on a video posted to X means it came from elsewhere — and that account may have posted the source.

ThenSearch the dialogue, not the description

If anyone speaks a full sentence, put it in quotation marks and search it. Scripts, subtitle databases and fan wikis are heavily indexed, so an exact line often lands the film or episode immediately.

If nobody speaks, describe the most unusual thing in the frame rather than the most obvious. "Man in a bear costume at a wedding" will find it. "Man talking in a room" will not.

ThenSearch a frame, not the video

Reverse image search does not work on video, so take stills and search those.

For music

If the clip is a music video or has a recognisable track, identify the song first — Shazam or humming into a search engine — and the video usually falls out of it. Works in reverse too: naming the track often dates the footage, because the release year is a hard floor.

ThenAsk somewhere the question fits

If you have a link and a still, there are people who enjoy this. Choose carefully — communities that sound right often are not.

r/NameThatMovieFor films specifically. Small but on-topic.
r/HelpMeFindLarge and active, though most posts are memory-based rather than link-based.
r/whatisthisthingOnly for physical objects in the frame, not for the footage itself.

Post the link, the timestamp, and everything you already ruled out. A question showing your working gets answered; "what is this" does not.

When the answer is that there is no answer

Some clips were not cut from anything. Somebody filmed it on their phone, or it is an advert made for that post, or a livestream nobody archived. Nothing indexes those, so no tool and no person will name a source — because there isn't one.

That is a finished answer, not a failure. The mistake is assuming every clip must come from somewhere and inventing a plausible film to fill the gap.

Why it is worth doing at all

Naming the source is not trivia. It is the fastest way to settle whether a clip shows what somebody says it shows. Real footage from a feature film, presented as street violence. A training exercise, presented as an attack. A match from 2016, presented as last night. In every case the caption collapses the moment the source is named — and no amount of staring at the pixels would have got you there.

Find what a clip was cut from — free, no sign-up

Source Catcher watches the clip and names what it was cut from, then checks that name against Wikipedia, Wikidata, TMDB, TVmaze, Apple and MusicBrainz so you can see whether anything independent agrees. It says "we could not identify it" rather than inventing a title, and tells you when a clip was not cut from anything at all.