30 years of family videos in an AI archive
As someone literally doing the same thing right now, I feel like the author is missing the point. Perhaps she&#x27;s too young for the full impact of these tapes to hit.<p>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: &quot;You can only watch old family friends open Christmas gifts so many times&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve now digitized probably over 50 VHS tapes with more to go. What&#x27;s particularly striking to me is how old cameras were used. They were used for long continuous captures because they weren&#x27;t &quot;on you,&quot; were ergonomically suited towards it, had no expectation of sharing&#x2F;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 &quot;opening of Christmas gifts&quot; and the banal conversation that follows. It really is a snapshot in time who&#x27;s length lets you fully appreciate the era and the people, along with their essence and personalities.<p>I&#x27;m guessing that most people in the author&#x27;s life are still alive. She&#x27;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&#x27;s almost like the people in them are still alive by capturing the plainness of the moments instead of just the exceptional.<p>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&#x27;ve written my own software to automate this with a high end VHS player, but the captures still occur in real-time. It&#x27;s been my quarantine project. And as such, I&#x27;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&#x27;t be any more appreciative... everyone watches nearly every video as I send them out, and then shares comments back by email. It&#x27;s been an amazing gift to my entire family from the past.<p>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&#x27;m guessing not. To me it&#x27;s not a search problem -- it&#x27;s a long discovery process about how your own life has unfolded and changed over time.