An Example from Practice

For a memorial evening honoring someone who'd passed away, footage of them was needed quickly. Whoever gathered the footage into the archive clearly remembered that the moments that mattered had been filmed — recording had gone on for years, across many events — but couldn't find them by hand among everything else.

By that point the archive had already been through full reconnaissance and indexed by the program — the usual few days of machine time, done in advance, before the material was ever urgently needed. When its turn came, the finished catalogue did the work: a search on one confirmed face took about half an hour and turned up ten separate filmed episodes, in each of which the person is clearly identified.

From there, the selection was no longer the program's job but a matter of judgment: in most of what turned up, they were performing someone else's well-known material; for the memorial, what mattered were the rare moments where something of their own came through. With that material in hand, they began the edit.