How to Find Every Clip a Person Appears In

Person search is the highest-value thing in FrameQuery and the thing most people set up last. It costs a few minutes per project and pays back on every search you run afterwards.

Turn biometric analysis on first

Face and voice detection is opt-in. Nothing is detected until you enable it, which means a fresh library has no people in it and @ has nothing to match.

You enable it in the People tab of the manager. It is the first thing the tab offers, along with a note on what is stored and where. Videos processed before you turned it on will not have faces or voices until they are analysed, and there is a Scan for Faces action for exactly that case.

Name people once, search forever

Once analysis has run, FrameQuery groups faces and voices across your library into identities. What it cannot do is know whose they are. That part is yours, and it happens entirely in the People tab.

The flow is short:

1. Add Person and give them a name.
2. Work through the Unassigned IDs list and Assign each face or voice that belongs to them.
3. That is it. @thatname now works everywhere.

From that point on the name applies across footage from other shoots, other projects, other years. You are not tagging clips one by one. You are naming a person, and every clip they were ever in follows.

Two shortcuts are worth knowing:

• Naming a speaker while you watch. Open a clip, and in the transcript panel right-click the speaker tag beside any line to assign or reassign it to a person. It is often the fastest way to name someone, because you are hearing them as you do it.
• Jumping straight to their footage. Right-click a person in the People tab to search your videos for that face or voice, which drops you into search with the mention already filled in.

On screen and on mic are not the same search

@sarah returns clips where Sarah is visible, and clips where Sarah is speaking, including the ones where she is not in frame at all.

This distinction gets glossed over, and it is where most of the value sits. Consider what it finds that a face-only search does not:

• The interviewer asking the question from off camera
• Sarah's reaction line while the shot holds on someone else
• Anything shot over her shoulder
• The director talking to camera operators between takes
• A voice on a speakerphone in the middle of a meeting

If you have ever needed the line and not the face, you have needed this.

Combine a person with everything else

On its own, a person search returns too much. Everything they were ever in is rarely a helpful answer. @ earns its keep in combination.

You want

The exact thing Maya said about the funding round

Type

@maya "the funding round"

Person plus exact phrase. Lands on the second she said it, not the top of the file.

You want

Maya talking about money, however she phrased it

Type

@maya talking about raising money

Person plus meaning. Use this when you remember the subject and not the sentence.

You want

Usable close-ups of her for the cutaway

Type

@maya shot:close-up

Person plus framing. Turns hours of coverage into a shortlist you can look at.

You want

Her, in 4K, so the shot is deliverable

Type

@maya res:4k

In a mixed library this quietly removes every proxy and every phone clip.

You want

Anything with her that is not from the weekly standup

Type

@maya -standup

One recurring meeting will otherwise dominate every person search you run.

You want

The two of them together

Type

@maya @dan

Both present. Two-hander coverage in one query.

Names with spaces go in quotes: @"Maya Fernandez". Without them the search only takes the first word.

Fixing thin results

If someone's results look too small, their faces and voices are almost certainly spread across more than one identity.

They get separated by real things: a haircut, glasses on and off, a hat, a dramatic lighting change between a lit interview and a handheld corridor shot, or simply a camera angle far enough from the others. Voices separate for the same sort of reason, mostly recording conditions.

There are two fixes in the People tab, depending on what you find:

• The extra identity is unassigned. Assign it to the existing person, the same way you named them in the first place.
• You accidentally created two people. Use Merge With on one of them. Every identity moves onto the person you keep, and the duplicate is removed.

Either way you are not correcting a mistake so much as telling the tool that two things it kept apart are one person. A person's card shows how many identities are linked to them, which is the quickest way to spot the ones still missing coverage.

A person returns clips from one shoot and nothing from another

The second shoot produced its own identity. Find it under Unassigned IDs in the People tab and assign it to the person you already created.

Try@maya, after assigning the second identity

The same person exists twice in Known People

Use Merge With on the duplicate. Its linked identities move across and the duplicate is deleted.

Try@maya, after merging

@fullname returns nothing but @firstname works

An unquoted mention stops at the first word, so @Maya Fernandez searches for the person Maya plus the separate term Fernandez.

Try@"Maya Fernandez"

Nobody appears in the People tab at all

Biometric analysis is off, or those videos were processed before you turned it on. Enable it, then use Scan for Faces on the footage you need.

Tryenable analysis, then @maya

Results include the right person but useless coverage

Person search is broad by design. Add a framing filter or subtract the recurring event that is crowding the list.

Try@maya shot:medium-wide -standup

Practical workflows

Pulling one person's selects. Search @person, add the framing you need, then work down the results by score. What used to be a full pass through the dailies becomes a review of a shortlist.

Assembling an interview. Search @person plus a description of the topic for each beat of your paper edit. You get a candidate soundbite per beat in the order you want them, with timecodes.

Checking release coverage. Search @person across the whole library to see exactly what footage of them exists before you promise it to anyone, or before you clear it.

Finding the conversation, not the person. @a @b plus a topic finds the specific exchange, which is far quicker than finding the meeting and scrubbing it.

A note on what is stored

Biometric analysis is off until you turn it on, and the People tab tells you what it stores before you enable it. The names are yours: they stay on your device, you assign them, and nothing about who is in your footage is published anywhere by searching for them.

If people-related data matters for your work, whether that is client footage, minors, or anything covered by biometric privacy rules, read the privacy detail on people matching before you build a workflow on top of it.

Where to go next

The main search guide covers the other six ways in. If most of what you are looking for is spoken rather than seen, searching dialogue is the more useful next read.