Just as no one person can be expected to remember every tiny
detail of a TV show—production locations, original air date, every member of
the cast and crew—no one person can be expected to recall every single detail
or interaction of a real-life event. But, thankfully, saving the day in both situations is metadata.
Metadata is the answer when having to notate huge amounts of
footage with various attributes. As
thousands of seconds of video footage is turned in to the FBI, someone must
catalog it so it can be retrieved later. And that’s where the metadata comes in.
The video footage received by the FBI is combed over by
trained specialists. They note and tag how many
times people walk past the camera. What
they are carrying—and all the same information for when that person passes by
the camera again.
No longer does one person have to sort these facts and
details in their head or on a chart. The
metadata input can now be searched, cross-referenced, or analyzed across all
the other metadata collected in the countless other hours of observation.
So when an FBI investigator wants to know something about a
specific incident or time, it’s already cross-related to all other incidents
happening at that time. Or, an
investigator can pinpoint a certain article of clothing and do a search for it
throughout the entire video database.
Much in the same way, a viewer looks for programming via
metadata. Finding the scraps of
information they’re looking for, then interrelating them to find the program they
seek.
And
nobody takes metadata—even the entertaining kind—more seriously than FYI.
Post a Comment