Find and Name Characters
Find Characters works out who is on screen and builds a cast of named characters. The cast is stored outside the project, so once you name someone, every future project recognizes them. The AI makes guesses, and this page shows you where to confirm or correct them.
Run Find Characters
- Open the Process menu and click Find Characters…. You can also right-click files in the media bin.
- Check the files you want. Face-camera files are listed first and already checked. Files a previous run already covered start unchecked, with the note Already analyzed.
- Click Find Characters.
The tool needs video. A greyed-out entry with Requires video means the selection has none. You do not need to run Face Tracking first. Run the two in either order and the app links their results. In a batch run, Face Tracking is ordered first automatically.
The dialog has two main settings. Sample every (seconds) controls the search pace, from 1 to 30 seconds, set to 5 by default: "How often to look for new faces. Lower = more thorough, slower." Only analyze timeline content "Skips portions of the source file no timeline clip uses. Padded by 2s around each used span." The Advanced section holds fine-tuning for how strictly faces are matched and grouped. Leave it alone unless runs keep splitting one person in two or lumping two people together.
The run works in the background, and the status bar reads Finding characters. Progress, cancelling, and failures work like every other tool. See Run an AI Tool.
When a run finishes, the file's bin card shows a chip with the matched character's name, like Stan or Stan +1. If the run found nobody, the chip reads No faces, which is normal for screen recordings and slides.
Open the Characters panel
Everything else happens in the Characters panel. Open it with View → Characters. It has two tabs: Characters, your cast, and Run Results, one card per processed file. Drag the bottom-right corner to resize the panel. It remembers its size.
Review a run
The Run Results tab lists the newest run first. Each card starts with a banner telling you what happened:
- No faces detected. Normal for screen recordings, slides, and drawing captures. Nothing was changed.
- N new people to name. The run found faces that don't match your cast. Name them so future runs recognize them automatically.
- Everyone recognized — Stan, Marco or All faces recognized. Nothing needs your input.
- Nothing left to review. You've handled everything on this card.
Beside the banner, small chips count what the run saw: how many faces it checked, how many it recognized, how many are new, how many it ignored as noise (too blurry or small), and how many frames it scanned. A run limited to timeline content adds a chip like analyzed 2:10 of 8:45.
When the run recognized people, the card shows up to four small face crops as proof. When it learned new photos of someone, a strip reads Learned N new photos of Stan with the new thumbnails and a View Stan's profile → link that jumps to the Characters tab.
Confirm or correct each person
Below the banner, each person the run found gets a row with a status pill. Matches Stan and Added as Stan mean the AI already decided. Looks like Stan (82% match) and Someone new mean it wants your call. Undecided rows carry action buttons:
- Yes, it's Stan confirms the AI's guess.
- Someone else… rejects the guess and lets you pick the right person.
- Name this person… appears when there is no guess at all.
- Ignore dismisses the row. It was a passer-by, a poster, a reflection.
Someone else… and Name this person… open the Who is this? dialog. It lists your approved cast under "Someone already in your cast:", each with an avatar and photo count. Click one to assign the faces to them. For a brand-new person, type their name under "Someone new:" and click Add person. A note confirms the result, like "Added Stan to your cast".
People you ignored collapse into an Ignored as noise (N) section at the bottom of the card. Open it and click Restore on any row that was actually a real person.
Manage your cast
The Characters tab lists every character on the left, with a round photo ringed in the character's colour and a photo count. Click one to open their profile on the right, which shows a summary like 12 photos · from 3 videos · 4 new today and a row of buttons:
- Approve appears on draft characters. New characters start as drafts, with the banner "Draft character — approve once you're sure who this is." Drafts don't learn photos automatically and can't receive merges, so approve a character once you're certain who they are.
- Rename… opens a small dialog with a Name field.
- Recolor… changes the character's colour with a Hex color field.
- Merge… folds another character into this one. Pick the Source character, then confirm. Their photos move over, the source character is removed, and anything that pointed at them now resolves to the merged character.
- Delete removes the character and all their photos. The confirmation warns that it cannot be undone.
Merging is the fix when the AI split one person into two characters. Merge the duplicate into the one with the right name.
Curate a character's photos
The profile's Photos grid shows the first 8 photos, with a Show all (N) button for the rest. A photo can carry a tag: PROFILE is the current profile photo, NEW was added by the latest run, and LOW-RES marks an old low-quality photo that retires by itself as sharper ones arrive.
Hover a photo for three controls. The star keeps the photo forever, it is never removed automatically. The ⊘ button means "That's not this person", which both removes the photo and teaches future runs to reject faces like it. The × button just removes the photo.
Removing a photo happens instantly, with a toast reading "Photo removed from Stan" and an Undo button that lasts about six seconds. After that, "Undo expired — the photo is gone." A character must keep at least one photo, so the last one can't be removed. Delete the character instead.
Photos you marked with ⊘ move to a Not this person (N) section. New faces that match them are rejected in future runs. If you marked one by mistake, hover it and click the restore arrow. Permanently deleting a negative asks for confirmation, since future runs may then re-match that face.