Summary: ClipFinder is the product a video-tool founder actually wants: drop raw MP4s, search a visual moment in English, land on a timestamp and a preview. You do not write an FFmpeg worker, a frame table, and a vector database. You declare Videos and a Frames view. CLIP is an index on the frame. Tomorrow’s insert is searchable without a rebuild. pip install pixeltable.
The Product#
- Ingest an MP4 with
video_id, title, category - Sample the file every second without an FFmpeg script
- Text query → top 5 moments with a preview frame
- A new upload tomorrow is indexed; the old library is not re-embedded
Image-to-video search is the sibling path: find a video from an image. This post is text → moment. The 20-minute kitchen-sink pipeline is video intelligence. Here the receipt is one query.
The Stitch You Delete#
Object store for bytes. A job that dumps JPEGs. CLIP in a GPU box. Pinecone for the vectors. A cron so yesterday’s clip is in the index. That is the Frankenstein stack. Pixeltable is the catalog those joints were approximating.
The Receipt#
frame is the iterator column. One CLIP embedder on that column serves the text query. Insert a row; the view and the index follow. Same file locally and on Cloud:
What This Is Not#
Not a hosted consumer search engine — that is PixelSearch. Not per-moment audio. Not Twelve Labs. Poster-only search is the Photos post; this one is every sampled frame.
People Also Ask#
Do I need Pinecone? No. The index lives on the view.
What fps? 1 is the default for interviews and B-roll. Lower it for long archives.
How do I go to Cloud? Same app.py. PIXELTABLE_API_KEY, pxt://org:db, then pxt db update → pxt schema update → pxt service update.
Search the Moment, Not the Filename#
Declare the table. Apply the file. Insert the MP4. Call find_video_moments. Keep the product. Delete the frame farm.
- Pixeltable on GitHub:
pip install pixeltable - Get started
- CallSense — sales-call auditor
- DocuVision — PDF Q&A
- SnapCatalog — shop-the-look
- SafeStream — UGC gate
- ClaimBot — claims triage
- Pixeltable documentation
