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How do video creators quickly find and compile specific sound bites? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by GlassHalfHopeful@lemmy.ca to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

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I often see tv shows and video creators quickly put together compilations where, for example, a politician repeats the same word or phrase across many different appearances. How are they able to find and organize these clips so efficiently?

Is there a specific tool, database, or workflow used to index and search video/audio by spoken words or ideas I’m curious what this process is called and where something like this is accessed.

EDIT: Transcripts can be searched, which are accessible through various means, but it is time consuming and most people don't have libraries built up that contain the content for quick access.

I'm thinking more about something like The Daily Show, SNL, or any late night TV show. I can't imagine that they're manually doing all this work independently.

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[–] GlassHalfHopeful@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I don't know. Perhaps it seems like a lot because of how quickly studios can push something out on the most random topics.

Let's pretend we're doing a comedy bit where the celebrity XYZ is talking about hot dogs.

If you don't have a database to search, then you need to start scrapping as many videos from YouTube and other sources of that celebrity. You can leverage YouTube's existing transcription capability with some additional software. Then you need to at store it in some sort of searchable database to automate it. Etc etc.

And then the boss says, "forget hot dogs! Eggplants! I need all the videos where they reference eggplants!"

Or to make it even harder, I've seen so many videos where the person is just gesticulating or making some sort of movement. No words transcribed. It's just physical. And somehow these studios manage to scrounge up a dozen clips referencing that very thing. Then they pump something out in a day.

I just imagine there has to be some sort of system for this in the film and TV industry. Or maybe a private company they rely on.

YouTube content creators obviously don't have this kind of cash, so they're going to have to rely on more manual methods that take time and they're not going to be able to find nearly as much.

🤦🏽

I've been wondering about this for so long. It's so mundane and useless. And yet it's a practical element of studio or online content creation that I've never really understood. And for some reason I keep thinking about it! 😅

[–] elvith@feddit.org 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

One thing to keep in mind is, that your view may also be biased. You only get to see when they successfully pull it off, not their failures. You don't see the constraints like lack of material they had to fight with. If you regularly watch several of those shows, you might see it more often but made from different people. If you watch them (or single snippets/performances) on e.g. YouTube, you may get pushed those and similar clips more often but those may be from an arbitrary time frame (and an arbitrary number of people) and not necessarily new.

As for the industry: Not every event/speech is necessarily covered by each TV station/studio. There are also teams that record them and then sell them. I guess, that those are interested in providing easy access to these recordings and maybe even provide metadata like captions, text search, maybe even marked gesturing and so on.

I recon it's hard if you were to compile those clips from random social media posts.

As for content creators on YouTube: I remember one doing this. They watched, archived and used transcripts of every official video and stream of the devs of a specific game to pick from this material and compile those montages letting the devs announce whatever he wants as a meme. In this case, it probably also helped to keep the scope reasonable by only focusing on one game and only the "official" material.

[–] GlassHalfHopeful@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

I think it ultimately boils down to your last paragraph. For those content creators that get stuff out regularly and quickly, at least. I don't usually see this though. Mostly the big studios.

For the big guys, I figure there are third party services that may exist. Or an internal group that archives and tags things of relevance. Or... a hell of a lot of staff working late. But alas, until I meet someone in that industry, I think this will be a mystery.