Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

Last year, I made a YouTube documentary series showcasing the prolific corruption in a small city government. I downloaded all the city government meetings, used Whisper to transcribe them, and then set up a basic RAG so I could query across a decade of committee meetings (around 1 TB of video). Once I got the timestamps that I'm interested in, I then have to embark on a tedious manual process of locating the file, cutting out a few seconds/minutes from a multi-hour video, and then order all the clips into a cohesive narrative.

These seem like problems that LLMs are especially well-suited for. I might have spent a fraction of the time if there was some system that could "index" my content library, and intelligently pull relevant clips into a cohesive storyline.

I also spent an ungodly amount of time on animations - it felt like "1 hour of work for 1 minute of animation". I would gladly pay for a tool which reduces the time investment required to be a citizen documentarian.

hey, thanks for sharing about your documentary series. would love to check it out if you don't mind linking it!

we don't yet support that volume of footage (1TB), however if you'd like to try this at a smaller scale, you can already do this today with the Rough Cut tile — simply prompt it for the moments that you're interested in (it can take visual cues, auditory cues, timestamp cues, script cues) and it will create an initial rough cut or assembly edit for you.

I'd also recommend checking out the new Motion Graphics tile we added for animations. You can also single-point generate motion graphics using the utility on the bottom right of the timeline. Let me know if you have any questions on that.

Absolutely - the channel is called "Dolton Documentaries" on YouTube. I'll definitely check out the features you mentioned, and am super excited to see where this goes!

An additional suggestion for OP, working with large video archives:

- Batch transcribe your videos to smaller proxy files preserving the same file names (to allow easy re-linking to full quality media later) - Upload proxys to Mosaic - Do your Agentic rough-cut with Mosaic - Export EDL or NLE project file - In NLE, Re-link proxy media to full-quality video & render locally.

To Mosaic:

I need to look deeper at your project, but support for EDL export (Avid, Premiere, Final Cut compatible, as well as commercial grading and conform software workflows) and upload/management of proxy media could be helpful additional features.

Hey there! We already support XML exports to DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, and Premiere Pro!

We also do transcoding of all uploaded files to lower-res proxies, which can be re-linked when brought back into a more traditional NLE.

you should check mixedbread out. we support indexing multimodal data and making data ready for ai. we are adding video and audio support by the end of the year. might be interesting for the OP as well.

we have couple investigative journalists and lawyers using us for a similar usecase.

curious how does this compare to something like Memories.ai when it comes to video in particular?

Gemini 3 would rip through that problem, but equally you could slice the video with existing open source tooling such as FFMPEG then combine with blender for the video curation. Gemini 3 could probably write you the workflow as well.

What part would Gemini do well at? What would you feed it?

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