In this paper, we propose a design of the metadata engine of the video recording system to minimize the retrieval time. For this purpose, the proposed metadata engine stores the XML metadata as a separated fragment and construct a hierarchical indexing scheme based on the contextual and structural properties of metadata. The hierarchical indexing scheme is consisted of a node index for basic searching and a group index for advanced searching. In this way our approach can minimize the number of indexes and thus the retrieval time. Our simulation results show that the response time of our proposed system is shorter than that of the previous works.