Merton Shale video intelligence
Platform

A domain-agnostic video-intelligence platform

Merton Shale is not “a baseball app.” Baseball is the first narrow wedge that proves the pipeline. The core is a layered, domain-agnostic system; baseball logic lives behind an adapter.

Three layers

1 · Generic video intelligence

Projects, assets, runs, frame artifacts, events, observations, reports, export manifests. Knows nothing about any domain.

2 · Domain adapter

Baseball hitting/pitching: phases, events, proxy metrics, confidence + caveats. A new vertical is a new adapter — no core changes.

3 · Compute / daemon connector

Submits typed jobs to the Windows daemon via the shared Supabase / Merton Compute layer; reads typed results; surfaces honest runtime states.

Data flow

Shale web app (Vercel)            Supabase (shared)             Windows PC daemon
─────────────────────             ─────────────────             ─────────────────
create project / asset    ─▶      shale_* tables
submit analysis run       ─▶      compute_jobs (queued)   ─▶    outbound poll → claim
                                                                video_probe / extract_frames
                                                                sam3_video_plan  (scaffolded)
read typed results        ◀─      compute_jobs (result)   ◀─    write result + artifacts
render timeline/report
export structured JSON

(The user never opens the Compute dashboard. Shale is the product surface.)

Core primitives

Video Project

Groups videos + runs for a subject/dataset, tagged with a domain.

Video Asset

A registered video (uploaded/ingested via the daemon). No bytes stored in Shale.

Analysis Run

One analysis of one video by one domain adapter (e.g. baseball_v0).

Frame Artifact

A sampled/keyframe artifact produced by the daemon; synced on demand.

Event Marker

A detected or human-marked moment, always confidence-scored.

Observation / Metric

A feature value with required confidence + method + caveat.

Report

Confidence-aware narrative + caveats + next actions.

Export Manifest

Self-describing JSON of everything a run measured (and did not).

Future domains (clean seams, not yet built)

DomainWhat an adapter would add
Baseball (v0)Hitting & pitching mechanics — the first wedge.
Other sportsSame primitives, new concept prompts + a sport adapter.
Security / inspectionEvent detection in surveillance / inspection footage.
Industrial videoProcess monitoring, defect/anomaly review.
Education / trainingSkill review with evidence-backed feedback.