Splice Now

Whatever you think of the remote controlled drones the US is using in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, they generate a huge amount of video — 24 years worth so far. Predator drones employ only one camera, but the newer Reapers use ten. The Air Force has thousands of people watching these feeds in real time, but making effective use of that much material presents fundamental problems, and the military is turning to techniques used in sports broadcasting to annotate and categorize it all. With newer drones expected to carry either 30 or 65 cameras, the scale is unprecedented, and I suspect it’ll soon be driving basic research in high-volume storage, access and organization. This NY Times article provides the details.

This entry was posted on January 11, 2010 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Media and Society. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.