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Open In Colab When watching a talk or presentation, it’s common to take notes or share interesting points with others. Often, the content on the slides captures our attention. At VideoDB, we follow many top engineering processes and regularly take notes from talks and conferences, which we share internally on our Slack channel. However, when trying to recall specific parts of these talks, only a few keywords might come to mind. To address this, we built an internal tool that stores all these talks in VideoDB, allowing us to find and share the content on the screen in text form using a search query. Let’s explore the problem: What was on the screen when the speaker discussed the “hard and fast rule” in the following video?
This notebook is a step towards creating a Slack bot that posts valuable engineering practices from top tech talks daily. Stay Tuned!

Introduction

In this tutorial, we’ll explore an advanced yet accessible technique for retrieving visual information from video content based on what the speaker was discussing. Specifically, we’ll focus on finding information on slides in a video recording of a speech. As video content continues to grow in volume and importance, being able to quickly find specific information within videos becomes crucial. Imagine being able to locate a particular statistic mentioned in an hour-long presentation without watching the entire video. That’s the power of multimodal video search! This approach combines structured transcript queries with visual understanding to create a robust, multimodal search pipeline. Don’t worry if these terms sound complex - we’ll break everything down step by step!

Setup

Installing packages

API Keys

Before proceeding, ensure access to VideoDB. If not, sign up for API access on the respective platforms. Get your API key from VideoDB Console (Free for first 50 uploads, No credit card required).

Step 1: Connect to VideoDB

Gear up by establishing a connection to VideoDB.

Step 2: Upload the Video

Next, let’s upload our sample video:

Step 3: Understand Spoken Content and Slides

Build the multimodal workflow in two clear stages:
  1. Create a queryable transcript from spoken content.
  2. Compare slide configurations and prompts before analyzing the full video.

Understand Spoken Content

This function transcribes the speech in the video and indexes it, making it searchable.

Find the Right Configuration for Slide Understanding

Build the slide workflow in two stages:
  1. Compare slide configurations and prompts on extracted scenes.
  2. Analyze the full video with the selected configuration.
To learn more about video understanding, explore Understanding Artifacts and Analyzer Outputs.
  1. Compare Slide Segmentation Configurations
Start with the default scene extraction so there is a visual baseline for comparison.
Conference videos can contain subtle slide changes that the default configuration misses. Lower the shot threshold and compare the extracted scenes again.

Test the Slide Prompt on Sample Scenes

Test the prompt on a few scenes before analyzing the entire video. This keeps the experiment focused while you check that the analyzer describes slide content and returns None when a scene does not show a slide.
The lower threshold and sample prompt results provide the configuration for the full slide-analysis run.

Analyze the Video With the Finalized Configuration

The final slide run uses the selected configuration:
  1. Segment the video into shots with threshold 10.
  2. Sample one representative frame of each shot.
  3. Return a structured slide description for every timed segment.

Step 4: Search Pipeline Implementation

The heart of this approach is the search pipeline, which combines a structured transcript query with slide-understanding artifact records. This pipeline does the following:
  1. Runs a structured transcript query with a text filter
  2. Extracts time ranges from the returned transcript records
  3. Filters slide-understanding artifact records by their overlap with those ranges
  4. Returns the matching slide descriptions and their time ranges

Step 5: Viewing the Search Results

Finally, let’s use our search pipeline:
It returns slide-understanding artifact records whose time ranges overlap the matching structured transcript results. Here’s the result for this particular search query “hard and fast rule”:

The content written on the slide is

Here are some other query outputs using the same search pipeline:

Search for “stripe api review”

API REVIEW CHECKLIST

Search for “Friction Log”

Internal Terminal Dogfooding Instructions

Conclusion

This document has outlined a sophisticated approach to multimodal video search, combining structured transcript queries with visual understanding. The pipeline finds specific visual content, such as slide information, based on what was discussed. This technique has broad applications beyond just searching for slides in speeches. It could be adapted for various use cases where visual information needs to be retrieved based on audio content, such as:
  • Finding product demonstrations in long-form video content
  • Identifying key moments in educational videos
  • Searching for specific visual elements in recorded meetings or presentations
As video content continues to grow in importance and volume, tools and techniques like these will become increasingly valuable for efficient information retrieval and analysis.

Further Resources

To learn more about understanding artifacts and analyzer outputs, explore the following guides:

Understanding Artifacts

Create reusable timed artifacts from video understanding runs.

Analyzer Outputs

Inspect the timestamped records produced by each analyzer.

Get Support

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to us:

Discord Community

Connect with the VideoDB community for support and discussions

GitHub

Explore our open source projects and contribute

VideoDB

Visit our main website for more information