Searching video used to mean decomposing every file into frames, audio tracks, transcripts, and separate embedding spaces, then orchestrating six tools to answer one query. It was slow, fragile, and expensive.

Multimodal models remove the decomposition pipeline entirely. In this talk I build a video analysis agent live, contrast it with the multi-step pipeline, and show how an agent-based architecture makes video search production-ready, plus when decomposition still wins.

Outline:
• The 500-Hour Problem
• Why Decomposition Fails
• The Multimodal Shift
• Building the Video Agent
• When to Use What and Resources