
30 years of family videos in an AI archive - yarapavan
https://blog.google/products/photos/30-years-family-videos-ai-archive/
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azinman2
As someone literally doing the same thing right now, I feel like the author is
missing the point. Perhaps she's too young for the full impact of these tapes
to hit.

Yes there are some pretty cool things she described. Finding significant scene
transitions, doing audio transcription, etc. can help enhance the project. But
I take issue with this statement: "You can only watch old family friends open
Christmas gifts so many times"

I've now digitized probably over 50 VHS tapes with more to go. What's
particularly striking to me is how old cameras were used. They were used for
long continuous captures because they weren't "on you," were ergonomically
suited towards it, had no expectation of sharing/editing, and were such a
hassle to pull it out you really had to want to use it. That means that unlike
today, you might get 30 minutes straight of that "opening of Christmas gifts"
and the banal conversation that follows. It really is a snapshot in time who's
length lets you fully appreciate the era and the people, along with their
essence and personalities.

I'm guessing that most people in the author's life are still alive. She's
young enough to not be as sentimental. But as you get older and many important
people pass, watching the entirety of this archive is of great value. It's
almost like the people in them are still alive by capturing the plainness of
the moments instead of just the exceptional.

I wonder if she digitized all those hours at once, or had a service do it for
her. If so, then receiving such a large chunk might feel daunting. I've
written my own software to automate this with a high end VHS player, but the
captures still occur in real-time. It's been my quarantine project. And as
such, I've watched far more of this archive than I originally ever thought I
would because of the forced serial nature. Each tape brings its own bag of
wonderful surprises. And my family couldn't be any more appreciative...
everyone watches nearly every video as I send them out, and then shares
comments back by email. It's been an amazing gift to my entire family from the
past.

I wonder what she plans to use all that machine learning for in the end. Is
she really going to be searching for such moments on a frequent basis? I'm
guessing not. To me it's not a search problem -- it's a long discovery process
about how your own life has unfolded and changed over time.

~~~
kemiller2002
"You can only watch old family friends open Christmas gifts so many times"

It is unbelievable sad and tragic how many people realize how untrue this is
until it's too late.

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mark_l_watson
That was very cool. My Dad who will be 99 in a month, had a video camera as a
teenager (his father was a minister in Iowa, and there was basically no money
for things unless my Dad worked for it - as a teenager he made nitroglycerine
and blew up tree stumps for farmers; a major profit center for him and paid
for a photography hobby).

About 7 years ago my Dad digitized all the video he had, including childhood
material of his family in Iowa, my brother and I, family friends, etc. He
distilled this all down to two 90 minute videos that my Mom narrated. A huge
effort but much appreciated.

I have always appreciated search on Google photos. My daughter and son in law
lost all their digital photo assets from a crashed computer and unusable
backups. It took me about 10 minutes with my cellphone to restore a lot of
pictures for them by doing search on Google photos of just first name for each
of our grand kids, then daughter, then son in law, then the name of their old
dog. That created 5 photo albums that I shared with them and that they
downloaded to multiple devices, etc.

Whenever I take a picture as soon as I am home and on wifi my cellphone
uploads new pictures to Google, Apple, Microsoft OneDrive photos. I only
rarely backup everything to local USB drives.

I would like a custom system like Dale wrote about. I have almost 7 years of
deep learning experience, and I am now retired so there is no real excuse
except that I have a silly project RecipeGAN where I am trying to generate
recipes and someone who used to work for me challenged me to also generate
pictures in addition to an ingredient list.

It is an amazing world when people like the article author (Dale) and I can do
stuff like this as a hobby. Awesome, really.

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tastroder
The post links to the authors technical write-up that's a little less of a
simple ad for Google Vision: [https://daleonai.com/building-an-ai-powered-
searchable-video...](https://daleonai.com/building-an-ai-powered-searchable-
video-archive)

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curiousllama
Oh my GOD, this is incredible. This NEEDS a GUI wrapper. Even just being able
to search a keyword ("wedding") and getting a list of locations ("File 22,
0:52:36 - 1:36:22") to guide a search would be so huge. Depending on the
situation, I'm not sure there's a price I WOULDN'T pay to let my parents do
this.

I guess I found my next project. Wow. THIS is valuable.

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totetsu
This reminded me of this [https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/29/21113812/google-
super-bow...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/29/21113812/google-super-bowl-
ad-
loretta-2020?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter)

------
ed25519FUUU
Really cute. Makes me a little misty knowing that my little ones are going to
grow up so fast. They're younger than the girl in this video. Life is so
short.

