[Ltru] Tagging of silent films

John.Cowan jcowan at reutershealth.com
Thu Sep 29 15:03:45 CEST 2005


L.Gillam scripsit:

> If there is a silent movie in a different language, what does a lip reader do?
> Would the audio identification be used to transform the lip movements in the
> video stream? Certainly an interesting technology.

FWIU, the words being mouthed by the actor tended to be in the actor's native
language (it's easiest to emote when you know what you're saying), which might
or might not be the same as the language used by other actors or the language
of the placards.  It didn't necessarily even agree with the placard content
semantically, since that might not be settled until the film was edited.
In normal circumstances, it simply isn't part of the movie's content at all.

> That aside, assuming a split of video and audio streams and a desire to analyse the
> audio stream in isolation, what does one analyse in "silent English"? At this
> level of tagging, I agree with Peter - "no linguistic content". "silent", for me,
> feels like a description alongside "director" or "running time". 

So incorporating "silent" into the audio-stream language metadata is a kludge.
It's not our kludge and it doesn't affect what we do.

-- 
A rabbi whose congregation doesn't want         John Cowan
to drive him out of town isn't a rabbi,         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
and a rabbi who lets them do it                 jcowan at reutershealth.com
isn't a man.    --Jewish saying                 http://www.reutershealth.com


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