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.
There’s generally transcripts made of all those speeches.
Of course. However, this 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.
Perhaps there are databases made available to them through a third party or perhaps their production companies?
It’s easy and cheap to transcribe audio today (e.g. look at whisper). You can automatically create subtitles, which means that you conveniently get timecodes for the audio, too.
If you now build a database, you can link audio and video to a searchable full text database that also gives you corresponding timestamps to the search term you entered. Now cross-reference it with other data like who is talking/present in this video and you get even filters for words/phrases said by a person. This is way less work than you imagine.
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! 😅
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.
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.
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Depends on what exactly they want; just audio or both audio and video.
Tools like the Adobe suite, specifically Premiere, After Effects, and Audition are made to manipulate video and audio.
There’s open source options as well. I’d recommend looking into those if you’re interested since they’re typically free and not made by a garbage tech giant. Audacity is a good one for audio. Idk off the top of my head what open source video editors are good. I’m sure someone else will mention one. Davinci Resolve maybe?
If there’s a really common clip someone uses, they can just save it somewhere and drop it the tool in when they want it. How someone organizes their media is probably just personal preference. There might be an industry standard.
I understand on an individual basis how to search transcripts and find the cuts one is looking for. There’s a variety of applications and indirect ways to achieve this even for a small time content creator. However, this 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.
Perhaps there are databases made available to them through a third party or perhaps their production companies?
Thinking about sound effects specifically, there are libraries, both paid and free, that you can find online. Those contain a whole bunch of various audio clips. The same general thing applies to graphics, video, and other stuff. That’s usually why you might hear the same effects in different media. Some video game devs might buy the same audio library and you’ll hear the same sound effect in their games. This goes way back to where you would buy CD packs of stock sounds or earlier.
Just doing a quick search online for “sound effects library” took me to https://freesound.org/. I’ve never used it, but it might be good. There’s content all over the internet.
“B-role” would be the term to use if you wanted stock video clips.
Exactly. I’m so very curious if something like this exists for processing high profile figures like politicians and celebrities. A catalog of things they’ve said, actions and insinuations, and etc.
I mean, maybe there’s a team that manually looks up every single time X politician mentions or is seen eating McDonald’s. Or… perhaps there’s this awesome database that maintains this kind of info.
You never know when you need a reference every time X politician talks about grabbing 🐈.
That sounds a bit more specific, so it’ll be harder to find. It’s probably out there somewhere. Or maybe you could start one.
When in doubt, there’s probably a YouTube video that’s a compilation of stupid shit a politician said. Download it with yt-dlp and cut it up, lol.
