An anniversary video is a retrieval job before it is an editing job. Before you cut anything you need a list: source file, roughly where in it, and one line on why that moment is in the video. How you build that list depends almost entirely on one thing, which is whether the moments were marked at the time or not. If they were, you are assembling. If they were not, you are searching hundreds of hours, and the methods below differ a lot in what they cost.
Start from what already got marked
Clips your viewers made, your own highlight saves, anything a moderator pulled during the stream. This is the cheapest material you have, and it is biased toward the things that were funny in the moment rather than the things that matter looking back. The first hour of the first stream nobody clipped, because nobody was there.
Worth pulling this pile first anyway. It gives you a spine, and it tells you which streams are worth going back into.
Ask chat and your community
Post the question. Regulars remember dates and often remember the stream title, which turns a search problem into a file-open problem. This costs nothing and works better than most people expect for a channel with a stable audience. It also scopes what the video should be about, since the moments people volunteer are the ones they will recognize.
The limit is obvious. You get what your audience remembers, not what you were looking for.
Scrubbing the archives by hand
Open the recordings and drag. For a handful of streams this is fine, and it is the only method that catches a moment you cannot describe. Past a certain number of hours it stops being a plan. If the archive is large, a smarter version is to scrub only the streams that chat, view counts, or your own memory flag as candidates, which is really the same triage step described in working through a single long recording.
Transcripts of the VODs
If you talk through your streams, transcribing them once gives you text to search, and text search is fast and exact about words. It finds the bit where you said the thing. It cannot find the moment where you were quiet and something happened on screen, which for gameplay and reaction content is most of them. Transcribing a multi-year archive is also the expensive part, not the searching.
Searching the recordings by description
The other route is to put the recordings into a layer that indexes them once and then answers questions about their content, so you describe a moment and get back places to open. This is the only method on the list that works retroactively on footage nobody annotated. The costs are real: the material has to be uploaded and indexed, searches draw on an allowance, and results are candidates that you still confirm yourself.
Vivu indexes each recording once when it goes in, and a search afterwards comes back as time ranges you can open, each with a line explaining the match. A broad pass tells you which recordings are worth opening at all, without landing on the moment itself; a narrower one takes longer to run and gets closer to the seconds you want, which for an anniversary cut is usually the pass worth waiting for. There is no importing from a channel or a link, so anything you want searchable has to be downloaded from the platform and uploaded as a file first, and that download step is the part to check before you plan around it.
One thing worth knowing about any description-based search: relevance is a judgment call, and it hands you the judgment. A search for a moment of nerves will return the interview where someone discusses it and also the aside where they admit it mid-performance, and it may return the reflective bit about how long it took to get comfortable on stage. Whether that third one belongs in your video is not a question software answers.
When you don't need any of this
If the channel is a year old, or the video is two minutes long, or you already know the eight moments you want, skip all of it and go open the files. Tooling for this only earns its place when the archive is large enough that you genuinely cannot remember what is in it. Same if you have been saving highlights consistently the whole time, since your past self already did the retrieval. And if the anniversary video is mostly new material with a few callbacks, the callbacks are the easy part.
The question to settle first is whether your problem is choosing or finding. If you can name the moments and just have to locate the files, community memory and your own clip archive will get you there in an afternoon. If you cannot name them, and the good ones are sitting in streams you have not thought about in three years, then you need something that reads the recordings rather than something that reads your notes about them. That choice sets the whole timeline for the project, and it is worth making before you open the first file. The general shape of pulling moments out of long recordings is covered in getting highlights out of hours of stream.
FAQ
Do I need the original VOD files, or can I work from the clips?
You need the original recordings for anything you want to search or re-cut. Clips are already trimmed, often re-encoded, and frequently cut a second after the good part starts, which shows badly in a compilation. Keep the clips as an index of where to look, then go back to the source recording for the actual footage.
What if my old streams were never saved?
Then that period exists only in whatever your viewers clipped and whatever you exported at the time. Most streaming platforms delete past broadcasts after a retention window that depends on the platform and your account tier, and once that window closes there is no recovery path. If you are planning a multi-year anniversary video for the future, the useful action now is to turn on local recording or archive exports, not to buy a search tool.
Can I use clips where other streamers or guests appear?
Ask them. Collaboration footage sits in a grey area that varies by platform terms and by whatever you agreed at the time, and a compilation video is a republication rather than a clip. Most people say yes and appreciate being asked. The same applies to any game, music, or third-party content in the recording, where the rules are set by the rights holder and not by your archive.
How do I know a search result is actually the moment I remember?
You open it and watch. Any search that works by description returns candidates with reasons attached, and a reason that reads right can still point at the wrong moment, especially when what you remember is a tone rather than an event. Treat the output as a shortlist of places to check, and plan for some of them being near misses.