Need ideas on embedding info in old home movies
I recently digitized some old home movies from my grandparents and looking through the film I realize I recognize almost no one. This got me thinking, I should go through this with my mother to help me identify family members as she's probably the last person who knows who anyone is.
Obviously I can just make a document with notes ex: 2:53 screen right, great uncle john"
But I'm hoping there's a more elegant solution in which I can keep info with the file and not some auxiliary document that dosent live in the same place.
I could just dump all that info into Metadata but that's maybe the lowest quality solution.
The xray function of Amazon prime video is the example of the best solution in a perfect world. (if you don't know, when you pause or bring up the context menu on prime video, there's a bar that identifies everyone one scene with a matching headshot)
I actually looked into it and there's an API that amazon uses for this called "RecognizeCelebrities" and uses images to train the program to recognize faces and populate it's menu. I'm not sure if it's open source but even if it was, it's over my level to use it practically I think.
The last option I can think of is using a video markup platform like frame.io but that's not really a long term solution.
Any ideas?
My first instinct is to use a subtitle file like .srt and just have time stamps for peoples names etc. or further info. That way modern players can turn it on off.
I thought about this for my home videos for use with Plex. Just name the srt the same as the file with some metadata.
Now that you said it, it seems like such an obvious solution! I maintain a plex server as well, it's how all this came about (sharing a home movies library with family).
I've never tried to make my own subtitles but I assume it can't be that complicated. Any idea on a utility to sue for this? Would be great to be able to have custom positioning like I see soemtimes with European subtitles.
I've found Subtitle Edit to be the best subtitle creation tool out there.
Checking it out right now, thanks!
Glad I could help! It might force me to actually do it myself ☺️
Do it, you never know how much time anyone has left. Once that knowledge is gone... It's gone forever. That's what's motivating me on this
Yes, I think using a .srt would be a decent hack to annotate with some convention like listing people in frame from left to right at particular time stamps. Creating this by hand for a long video would be a lot of work, though. .srts are separate files, by design, which is good. This is the difference between “standoff” annotations which are loosely coupled to the data vs. “inline” annotations that tightly couple the annotations to the data. I don’t think there are any widely adopted standards for inline video annotations. There are annotation tools that would let you textually mark up bounding boxes in video frames, but you’d then need to keep that tool around to view the annotations. For example: v7labs
A video annotation tool like this one may let you bake your annotations into the video itself. This would only be useful if you wish to do the annotation as a onetime/write-only operation (you’ll be writing out a totally new video file, separate from the original). (Disclaimer: I haven’t used these tools I’ve linked to myself.)
The annotation tool you linked is essentially the same thing as frame.io but now that I'm thinking of it, if I was to go this route I might just bring the video into after effects and do some nice clean annotation.
I like the 7labs AI driven tool you linked, that has some nice potential but ill have to research a bit more, thanks!
Like others have already, I would also recommend simply using .srt subtitles too, especially since it's a widely adopted standard. But another option not mentioned yet is uploading the videos to YouTube and using their built in subtitle and "cards" system. Doing that has its own drawbacks, but their interface makes manually adding subtitles and "cards" (links shown at certain points) easy, and it would also allow you to easily share those videos+subtitles+cards with friends/family by setting the videos to private + sending people invites, or as unlisted + simply sending them the video link.
That's not a bad idea honestly but I would much rather not have to rely on YouTube. I used to host home movies in private on YT before I built a plex server, but if the reddit fiasco has taught me anything its don't rely too heavily on entities with corporate intrests. That's not to say plex doesnt, but at least it's my own hardware so I can take my mp4 and srt and go elsewhere if I go that route as you also suggested.
Maybe Obsidian with a plugin for notetaking around media?