Anything undetectable by humans would still be useless to AIs. A bit a smoke? Could have been a gunshot 3 minutes ago, could have been a cigarette, could be fog, could be a vape.
Actually, an AI could determine the difference between those, based on shape, location, and opacity, etc.
At that point, just feed the entire video to the AI and have it tell you when it sees guns or puffs of smoke or hears screams.
Is there a point where one technique works better than another technique? Sure. I’m not arguing that. But if you’re dealing with a very long time, you’d still want to do a binary search first.
Binary search is useless when you can just have a machine watch the entire video in one sitting over the course of five seconds and tell you when the interesting thing happens.
Depends on how long that tape is, which is what was being originally discussed by the OP.
A binary search assisted by AI in determining the point in the tape where the effect happened quickly is still a very fast way of doing so (assuming the tape duration is very long), as alluded by others in other topic trees in this topic.