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I indexed 669 GB of my GoPro videos using my M1 Max computer and local ML models
TLDR: I had 2,207 GoPro videos, and I need to rewatch them to find interesting moments from my cycling journey. I built a project to index them locally on my M1 Max using open-source ML models, search for those moments, and send the best clips straight to my DaVinci Resolve timeline. I indexed 628 videos (668.68 GB, 15h 13m 18s of footage duration), more details in the metrics table in the last section of this article.
Full article: https://iliashaddad.com/blog/i-indexed-669-gb-of-my-gopro-videos-using-my-m1-max-computer
- lgats 4mo agothe link https://iliashaddad.com/blog/i-indexed-669-gb-of-my-gopro-videos-using-my-m1-max-computer https://iliashaddad.com/blog/i-indexed-669-gb-of-my-gopro-vi...
- iliashad 4mo agoThank you
- rho138 4mo agoThis would fit most best as a “Show HN:” post :)
- Beijinger 4mo agoDoes it work for porn collections too?
- pduggishetti 4mo agoYou'll need a lora for this, porn content rejection is heavy. Or you'll need a abliterated model, not sure if vision also works. You might want to add something like yolo finetune to detect scenes + face recognition too.
- vorticalbox 4mo agoVision still works perfectly fine in abliterated models.
- pduggishetti 4mo agoNever tried any of this for porn, just speaking out how I would go about it tbh!
- avadodin 4mo agoJust because they don't refuse it doesn't mean they are useful. I found a few pornographic pictures on the web to hand to Abliterated Gemma4 12B(literally just to test this) and it needs pushing just to accept that people can be naked. It didn't refuse but it also didn't provide useful descriptions such as "this is a pornographic picture of a woman". > G4: There is a person lying down in a scientific context, if I had to guess they are a biologist in a classroom > me: Is she wearing any clothes? > G4: No. Also, it is obsessed with penises —seeing them in compositions where there is only a female. I suppose it's been trained to ban dick pics or something. Prompting may help some but 12B seems to be a bit worse than E4B with the vision/audio model at voice and text reading so maybe that one would do better.
- dotancohen 4mo agoFor GP's purpose, can face recognition techniques be repurposed for, um, other body parts recognition? Sometimes the actresses are facing away from camera. There are exposed lips, if that helps.
- fennecfoxy 4mo ago
- iliashad 4mo agoI would love your feedback and suggestions for new improvements or features you wanna have, either in the source available version, the desktop app or blog post itself?
- WarOnPrivacy 4mo agoI was surprised to learn that the M1 Max CPU is an ARM/SoC, comparable to an 11th gen Intel i9 Do I have it right? Would Windows ARM performance be similar for those cpu? ref: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4585vs4245/Apple-M1-Max-10-Core-3200-MHz-vs-Intel-i9-11900 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4585vs4245/Apple-M1-Max...
- pachouli-please 4mo agoIt's also a bit apples (heh) to oranges for a handful of reasons, but most impactful - "unified" ram makes all the system ram available as VRAM - dedicated ai coaccelerator thingy Both of these reasons allow the apple silicon chips to crush conventional cpus in these kind of AI model workload stuffs No idea about what the windows arm stuff is capable of. I know they use Qualcomm snapdragon chips though.
- owldown 4mo ago“Comparable” is maybe true if we are talking about single core performance, but for memory bandwidth, the M1 Max is about 8 times faster. Wider bus, lower latency, not even close.
- iliashad 4mo agoTo your question, I can’t deny or confirm that because I didn’t tried it this project over a Windows machine yet or a machine with this config
- voidmain0001 4mo agoNo comparison. M1 Max has 400GB/s RAM bandwidth while Snapdragon X2 Elite, the latest and greatest , has 228GB/s RAM bandwidth.
- Rohansi 4mo agoI don't disagree with your conclusion but the comparison of max bandwidth between the two SoCs is not enough. Neither of them will use all of that bandwidth doing AI work because the GPU will be compute limited. That's why dedicated GPUs perform so significantly better without having significantly higher bandwidth.
- fl0id 4mo agoit is possible to use apple gpu with containers. either with podman + runkit + recent mesa or with recent vllm-metal from docker https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-model-runner-vllm-metal-macos/ https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-model-runner-vllm-metal-m...
- iliashad 4mo agoI was looking for a solution for this issue of running docker containers over MPS and utilizing their GPU power. I think this project will be the solution for it, I’ll try it very soon and add support for it. Thank you, much appreciated
- m3kw9 4mo agoGrab frames, lower res, classify, combine meta data. Write to sql
- iliashad 4mo agoNot really. Grab frames, lower res, classify, combine metadata, transcribe the audio, convert those data (text, visual and audio) to embedding, save them over a vector DB and SQL DB. Which helped me to do semantic search, RAG, search using a screenshot of the video to find the exact the moment in the video plus search using an audio file as well. And other features unlocked with vector DB
- ingvay7 4mo agoReally cool work and workflow. strongly prefer this kind of local, open pipeline that i control over a dependency on Adobe tools and lock ins.
- iliashad 4mo agoI agree with that, thank you for your feedback. Also, maybe you're not a video editor and you just wanna search your videos. The video editing integrations are optional and you have full control. You can switch between Adobe Premiere Pro, Final cut Pro or Davinci Resolve
- knightops_dev 4mo ago[flagged]
- robrain 4mo agoDaVinci 21 has indexing built-in (AI IntelliSearch). Not to diminish the work you did, but this is now available to many users (probably only Studio users since it has AI in the name)
- iliashad 4mo agoYes, I didn’t look at it. But does it upload your videos to the cloud or process them locally? And does it allow to provide custom faces data to help labeling faces in your videos ? I think Adobe premiere pro have it as well but cloud processed
- teovall 4mo agoThe AI features in DaVinci Resolve are all processed locally. It does not currently have face tagging.
- iliashad 4mo agoThat’s great to know, thank you!
- robrain 4mo agoHaven’t tried it yet, and I don’t know if it matches OP’s requirements, but the blurb says “You can even search for individual faces” https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/whatsnew https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/wha...
- Schiendelman 4mo agoThis is what took me from free to paid user, and it was well worth it.
- iliashad 4mo agoThat's good, also the Davinci resolve integration works with the Free and Studio version the same way.
- asenna 4mo agoFunny this is almost EXACTLY what I did a few days ago on the same machine using very similar techniques and was on the front-page of HN as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222733 https://blog.simbastack.com/indexed-a-year-of-video-locally/ https://blog.simbastack.com/indexed-a-year-of-video-locally/ I wasn't familiar with your project though, interesting stuff. I'm trying to add more photography related features to Framedex but yeah there's so much we can do locally, exciting times.
- iliashad 4mo agoThat's great, I checked your article when it was in front page because someone mentioned my project in the comments. Good job for the article and the project. That's great, yes local models are getting better and better
- pfannl 4mo agoApparently M1 Max video indexing is the new sourdough starter
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- knightops_dev 4mo ago[flagged]
- WhitneyLand 4mo agoI’d like to see embedding of actual video clips become practical in this type of workflow. Frame level embedding it covering a lot, but can miss out on a lot of action related searches.
- iliashad 4mo agoSure, I'm using (https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen25-vl https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen25-vl) which can help me understand action like falling down, because I can provide for example 5 frames (down scaled to 720p) to understand what is happening in this part of the video
- nyxtom 4mo agoNow this ^^ is an awesome use case!
- iliashad 4mo agoThank you, would like to know your use case for this kind of project and which prompt you want to genearte ?
- tontonius 4mo agoif anyone is interested in searching large video collections local and offline I suggest taking a look at Jumper https://docs.getjumper.io https://docs.getjumper.io comes with some nifty features like NLE- integrations, people search, MCP, API etc Disclaimer: one of the co-founders
- dotancohen 4mo agoThe link just timed out for me. I'm in Israel, connecting via residential WiFi. All other sites that I regularly use connect just fine.
- tontonius 4mo agohmm weird works for me.. what about https://getjumper.io/ https://getjumper.io/?
- dotancohen 4mo agoThey're both working now.
- ____tom____ 4mo agoYour docs say you integrate with Davinci resolve. Other comments mention davinci resolve has this built in. How would you compare the two?
- MaxGL 4mo agoJumper is significantly more accurate
- wferrell 4mo agohttps://iliashaddad.com/blog/i-indexed-669-gb-of-my-gopro-videos-using-my-m1-max-computer https://iliashaddad.com/blog/i-indexed-669-gb-of-my-gopro-vi...
- cake-rusk 4mo agoI have an RTX 5090 card but it only has 32 GB RAM, can something like this work on my machine?
- iliashad 4mo agoYes, and it’ll result in much faster results than the ones that I did with my computer
- justinram11 4mo agoSomething I've enjoyed more than I expected is Google and Apple photos sending me photo memories and compilations of various things in my life and my kids lives over the last decade. I'm really bullish on taking more video of my kids, with the thought that it will become easier and easier for AI to put them into little compilations I can enjoy later.
- iliashad 4mo agoThat’s good to hear, open source ML models are getting better and better. I did a small experiment to generate a Spotify year in review like video here is a preview video https://github.com/IliasHad/edit-mind/tree/expirement/year-in-review#year-in-review-video https://github.com/IliasHad/edit-mind/tree/expirement/year-i...
- JMiao 4mo agodo you use android and ios, or is there another benefit to having personal media with both?
- goodmythical 4mo agoYou don't mind Google using your kids to train their models and advertising algorithms? Years from now they'll be getting "hey look at BIKE BRANDS' NEWEST CHEAP BIKE REMEMBER WHEN YOU USED TO RIDE BIKE BRAND BIKES"
- esjeon 4mo ago> Then, run the frame analysis pipeline, which will divide the video into separate video scenes (1s each, or 1fps) > (…) > Frames analyzed 57,537 Aha, it makes total sense. This number sounds much more reasonable than “669 GB”, since the actual total size of processed frames would be like 10-30 GB. (Not downplaying anything. Doing-at-home always requires some math on practicality) > Total compute time 67h 40m 42s I’m just curious tho — is there any paying options that can accelerate this kind of process? Just spin up GPU instances?
- iliashad 4mo ago> Aha, it makes total sense. This number sounds much more reasonable than “669 GB”, since the actual total size of processed frames would be like 10-30 GB. The reason why is “669 GB” is the total raw footage size when I'm doing the video processing, I downscaled each frame to 720p to make the video processing much faster and I don't need full original quality in order to get accurate results (as far as I know and experiment with). > I’m just curious tho — is there any paying options that can accelerate this kind of process? Just spin up GPU instances? For now, I found that NVIDIA GPU for example RTX 3060 with 12GB Vram was much faster than my M1 Max. (still working on optimizing for speed and accuracy).
- ngai_aku 4mo agoWhat PAYG providers do people here recommend? Most powerful machine at home is an M1 MBA (16GB), so I too am interested in short term options where I can still benefit from the privacy of local models
- villgax 4mo agoRunpod
- fennecfoxy 4mo agoSeconding runpod. They were having availability issues with GPUs (of course) but especially their UI where you'd customise a template only to try to start a pod, the GPU be unavailable and the UI reset forcing you to make the changes all over again. But they have fixed that since, now starting a pod is more from a live page where as GPU availability status changes it updates in realtime/if your deploy fails you just try again - your customised env vars etc are still there. Plus they also addressed the GPU availability problem as something they're working to fix and it's understandable seeing as nobody can get their hands on GPUs atm.
- PreownedPlaid 4mo agothis is really cool. was looking to do something similar on mbp 64gb
- iliashad 4mo agoThat's really great, thank you!
- asdfasgasdgasdg 4mo agoCool build but the example videos you provide at the end are . . . not what I would hope for when thinking about the highlights of 2000+ videos of biking? For example the dog barking video only has one scene repeated two or three times and it's five seconds long?
- iliashad 4mo agoFair enough, what would like to see as an example video and I would make it. For the dog barking videos, those are only the video scenes that I have a dog barking sound in the video. I'll keep adding more prompts and example videos, keep an eye for that
- asdfasgasdgasdg 4mo agoI don't have any preconceptions about specific content I want to see. I'd just think that so many hours of such cool adventures would have greater variety. It made me wonder if your AI really did such a good job of indexing it. It made me think maybe the tech isn't quite ready yet? Did you ever visit crazyguyonabike.com? A long time ago I had the pleasure of following the journey of a friend of a friend of a friend on that site: https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?doc_id=2405 https://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?doc_id=2405 Stuff like that I guess?
- dadachi 4mo ago[flagged]
- Mawr 4mo ago> Many of the videos I captured amazing moments, and sometimes it's kind of hard to watch the full videos to get those moments. Yep. I had the same problem. > Then, run the frame analysis pipeline [...] I have a face recognition plugin using my custom faces data, object detection, on-screen text, shot type, and scene description [...] we will have three vector DB collections that have all the information about our videos, like video location metadata, camera name, faces recognized, objects detected, on-screen text, transcription, description of each scene, and many more [...] we can get better indexed data if you use the advanced mode indexing to use the Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct model to understand and describe your video much better, but at a slower indexing speed Yeah, uhm... ok :) If anyone else has a similar problem, the real solution is as follows: 1. When recording, if you witness an interesting moment worth saving later, press the power button — this will mark the current moment in the video as a chapter. 2. Find the chapters later when editing and cut them into clips. 3. You're done :) This has two main benefits over the insanity above: 1. It's trivially simple instead of insanely complex and inefficient. 2. It will reliably catch all the stuff you find interesting, since you're the one doing the marking. The downsides: 1. Doesn't work retroactively. 2. It may miss interesting stuff if you miss it at the time as well. 3. Only works for this use case. 4. Nerds won't salivate over your usage of cutting edge tech.
- Noumenon72 4mo agoWhat tool has this "press power to mark chapter" feature?
- tredre3 4mo agoThe GoPro, it's called HiLight Tag.
- synergy20 4mo agocan vlm be used instead or it's too heavy and slow
- tosief 4mo ago[dead]
- GreenSalem 4mo agoA lawyer I know who specialises in rape, and is excellent at getting the obviously guilty exonerated, lost a case last year because of GoPro videos. Her client was recording while committing the abhorrent crime. The criminal would otherwise have got off. From my perspective, the GoPro camera produced a good outcome. Still, one has wonder why anyone to record their criminal actions.
- Yiin 4mo agoword "her" in this context gave me heavy feelings, what makes one to pick such a career move...
- djmips 4mo ago$
- GreenSalem 4mo agoBeggars cant be choosers. She would rather have done corporate law but did not have the academic credentials or the networks needed for a job at the likes of Latham Watkins or White and Case. Still it is good for society that criminals get the worst lawyers to defend them.
- fennecfoxy 4mo agoWhy? You're being sexist and I hope you can understand why.
- PixComicOS 4mo ago[flagged]
- lee_wc 4mo agohttps://archive.is/O6CLQ https://archive.is/O6CLQ When trying to read this article, the main website was throwing errors to CloudFlare unfortunately
- iliashad 4mo agoCan you check again ? I'm not sure why it's show a cloudflare error
- havercosine 4mo agoWell done! I couldn't understand how you are building reels out of it via the agent. Is it some sort of AI tool calling that takes image links and builds a reel via some video editing tool ? Or +/- time delta around the timestamp returned from the indexed from a given query + join them together?
- iliashad 4mo agoThank you! I'm using RAG, I have every video scene indexed individually in the vector database. When I'm asking the agent, it'll use an Ollama model to understand the request, use the available search tool (searching using transcription text, faces, visual, audio or combined) something like when you use Claude or Chat GPT it'll use the web search tool to find you info online. Then, I can filter out video scenes using the Ollama to better present accurate and unique video scene, then send those video results to Davinci Resolve using their API to create a video timeline using those video clips
- insumanth 4mo agoI will be doing these things with local LLMs Take a fast, small and powerful LLM running locally to index my personal data like images, videos, documents and enrich them and tag with the enriched metadata. Want to group by people - Search tagged metadata and group it What to search an image by description - tagged metadata What to organize by anything - tagged metadata This should (hopefully) put an end to my file clutter
- nitin_flanker 4mo agoI am in no way a tech savy person, don't know coding, don't know networking or AI much either. But I definitely want to have a system like this. An AI powered gallery / video repository that can help me find moments, people, colors, objects from 100s of 1000s of files. Local LLMs sound so cool but I know they won't be easy to setup or use for common joe like me.
- Mashimo 4mo agoImmich can do part of this. For photos it does lm object detection and ocr for text. I think for video is currently only the first frame. It also has face / people detection. And once set up it's easy to use even for non technical people.
- ____tom____ 4mo agoI wonder how long it would take on faster hardware. I have ten times that much footage, but 67 * 10 hours is a lot of processing. I might be better off getting something with a beefy GPU on AWS or Google cloud.
- LeonardoTolstoy 4mo agoWhat models did you use for the stages? I see Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct mentioned as an advanced option, so I assume maybe Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct by default (which is what I also use for a lot of stuff, it is incredibly good at "clean" OCR, but as you maybe indicate not the best at "describing a scene"). EDITED: I didn't realize Whisper was a local model. I never tried transcription before, so I had always figured it was a pay model by OpenAI. I'll have to check it out (although the runtime listed here is a bit daunting). For that project I'll say I don't see much degradation in embedding quality at much much worse quality than 720p (all the way down to 240p), which speeds things up considerably. Although I don't really do face or object detection, just scene embeddings. To me any process whereby it would take longer to process the video than watch it is probably a no go in general. Obviously a challenge for local-first analysis.
- zzsshh 4mo agoRelated article on indexing videos but with a local text description and using Gemma4: https://blog.simbastack.com/indexed-a-year-of-video-locally/ https://blog.simbastack.com/indexed-a-year-of-video-locally/
- volume_tech 4mo ago[dead]
- crakhamster01 4mo agoThanks for sharing! I make videos and often have the same problem as well. Being able to semantic search over your library is useful, but does it solve the review problem? I feel like you would still need to watch the footage back before you know what you're working with.
- iliashad 4mo agoYou're welcome. As of now, the project narrow down your options instead of watching 3-4 videos (5 min each, as an example), you can watch 3 clips from them instead (1s to 2.5s each). It gives you only the video moments that you need to watch for review instead of watching the full videos.
- duncangh 4mo agoWould it be possible to upload them all to YouTube as unlisted and then point Gemini to them? Not sure the limitations wrt unlisted videos. Maybe also could’ve been done with the @google photos operator if uploaded to Google Photos if not a corporate google workspace Gemini instance
- iliashad 4mo agoI'm not sure if it's possible or not, the goal of my project was to utilize local models and your local machine instead of uploading your videos to the cloud. there's couple of cloud services that offer video indexing very well, I could name a few like Tweleve Labs (I'm not affiliated with them but I did a presentation at one of their webinar).
- tj-teej 4mo agoI've been screenshotting twitter since 2016 when Brexit happened and with the goal of one day putting together some kind of art piece. The world and our discourse around it has changed so much over the past ten years and now with this kind of technology I'm so excited to be able to classify these images from my iCloud and start on the project.
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- videodb-kal 4mo ago[flagged]
- iliashad 4mo agoI made part two of this, but this time using RTX 4090: https://iliashaddad.com/blog/i-indexed-37h-of-my-youtube-library-using-an-rtx-4090-and-local-ml-models-in-24h https://iliashaddad.com/blog/i-indexed-37h-of-my-youtube-lib...