Software that maintains a database of drive contents?

What you’re looking for a media or video content management system. Panopto is one vendor here. There are alternatives.

You might have better success asking this question over in the Final Cut Pro area too, given some of the folks over there can also have lots of videos.

If you are inclined to write your own, starting with Claris Filemaker Pro would be a common choice.

The direct answer to your question here is Spotlight, which maintains a database of metadata. (For details, see the mdfind command line command, and the available Spotlight search keywords.) It’s not a good approach for maintaining a video library, though.

I wouldn't look to track the entire contents of the known universe. I'd look to maintain your own library of media files, whether that library is located on one storage device or spanning multiple storage devices or arrays. Track your own stuff. (I'd be inclined to use EXIF or similar metadata to insert a tracking tag into the files involved, too. That way, you have a path to rebuild your database, and a path to detect at least some file duplicates.)

Why not track everything in the known universe of your file system? Do you really want to have to keep track of the immense number of files within macOS (a chunk of a million, when last I checked), and the immense number of files in apps such as Xcode, and in other not-small apps. And consider that these lists of files also shift with app and system updates, and with restarts, and with normal system activities. If nothing else, you're going to be re-scanning a whole lot of storage (beyond /Users) fairly regularly, and this for files you really don't care about. Why track all that?

WillDoo wrote:

Yes. I would only want to track my external, non-app/OS related, drives.

Keep it to just your media files. Tracking everything is going to cause you issues, no matter how much you want to make this a more difficult and complex and larger endeavor. (An approach which I'd again encourage you to avoid.)

Inserting EXIF is beyond my knowledge level, but I'll look into it. Thanks.

For one of the common tools here: https://exiftool.org/