No fluff definitions. Each term gets the short answer first, then what it means in practice when you're cutting ads from creator footage.
A-roll is the footage that carries the words, usually a person talking to camera. B-roll is the footage you cut to while the words play: the product in use, the close-up, the reaction. Most ads are A-roll audio with B-roll on screen.
A creative strategist decides what ads to make and why: the angles, the hooks, the creators, the briefs, and what the data says to do next. Editors make the ads; the strategist decides which ads are worth making. Most of the job is finding and combining footage that already exists.
A brand brief tells the AI what matters in your footage: what you sell, who it's for, what to watch for and what to ignore. It's built from your website and category, and it's why a cookware brand's library tags "food release test" instead of "product in use".
A creative library is a searchable system for a brand's ad footage and finished ads, organized by moment (hook, demo, testimonial, b-roll) and searchable by what's said, shown and who is on camera. It replaces folders per creator or per campaign.
A hook is the first 3 seconds of a video ad, the line or shot that decides whether someone keeps watching. In creator footage, the best hooks are usually unplanned reactions buried in the middle of a long take.
A proxy is a small, low-resolution copy of a large original video, used for browsing, searching and previewing so the multi-gigabyte original never has to stream. The final cut uses the original; everything before that uses the proxy.
A retake is a creator repeating a line or an action because the first attempt didn't land. Raw creator clips are full of them. A footage library marks retakes so the clean take surfaces first and the stumbles stay out of search results.
A segment is one moment inside a video clip: a hook, a demo, a testimonial line or a b-roll action, with a start and end time, its transcript, a visual description and labels. Segments are the unit you search for; files are just where they live.
A talking head is a person speaking directly to camera with no product action: the testimonial, the explanation, the founder story. It's the A-roll of most creator ads, and the part where the words matter more than the picture.
Semantic search finds footage by meaning, not by exact words: "skeptical at first" finds "I honestly didn't think this would work" and the visual of a raised eyebrow. It combines what's said, what's shown and who's on camera, and returns the segment playing from the right second.
UGC is video or photo content made by a creator or customer in their own style, usually on a phone, that a brand then uses in ads. In practice most "UGC" is paid creator content made to look unpolished on purpose.
Verbatim search finds the exact words a creator said, across every transcript, and plays the take from that second. It's for claims, compliance and "the line where she says X". Semantic search finds the same idea said differently.