Sort Video Footage by Face: Why We Built Tabor8

This is the film we made to explain Tabor8 in under a minute. It ran on our home page until October 2026. It now lives here, with the full story behind it, because the problem it describes is the reason the product exists.

If you shoot events, weddings, sport or fashion, you already know the problem. The shoot is the easy part. Finding one person in hours of video footage afterwards is the part that eats the day.

What the film shows

The film opens on a line of people: a wedding party, couples, a row of guests in suits. A coloured scan passes over their faces. Then it cuts to an editor at a desk in a dark room, headphones on, a wall of sticky notes behind him, looking for a shot.

That is the "before". Everyone who edits video for a living has been that editor.

Then the film moves to a fashion show. Models walk a white runway, one after another, in suits, gowns and a wedding dress. This is the kind of shoot that produces a huge amount of footage of many different people, all at different moments.

The narration makes the point in one line:

"Before you even touch your timeline, imagine having your entire catalogue's worth of shots already organised by each person's face."

You see the Tabor8 project screen next: a list of people down the left, a grid of clips in the middle, a player on the right. Pick a person and their clips are there.

The film ends at a wedding reception under string lights, with glowing folders drawn over the room. One folder for each person in it.

The fashion show problem: one model, every outfit

A runway show is a hard job for any footage organizer. Twenty models. Several outfits each. Hours of clips that all look alike at thumbnail size.

Now a designer asks for a reel of one model in every outfit she wore that day. With a normal folder of camera files, you scrub. You open each clip, find her, mark the in and out points, and move on to the next one. For a full show that is hours of work before any real video editing starts.

The film describes the other way to do it:

"You'd just be able to open up their folder, and there you go, there's all their shots."

That is what Tabor8 does. You upload the footage. It matches the faces across your clips, cuts out each moment a person appears, and files those clips into a folder for that person. One model, one folder, every outfit.

The wedding problem: "Can we add more shots of Grandma?"

The second example in the film is a wedding. Every wedding videographer has had this message, usually a week after delivery:

"Can we add more shots of Grandma?"

With hours of ceremony and reception footage, that request used to mean going back through all of it. In the film the answer is "simple as that". Grandma already has a folder, and every shot she is in is inside it.

The same thing applies to the bride's father, the best man, or the vendor who wants clips of their own flowers and their own team. If the face is in the footage, the clips are already sorted. We wrote more about this in how to organise wedding footage and on our page for wedding videographers.

Scrubbing a timeline compared with footage sorted by face

	Scrubbing by hand	Sorted by face in Tabor8
Find one person	Open each file and skim it	Open their folder
Clips	You mark and cut each one	Already cut, one file per moment
A request after delivery	Back through the whole shoot	The folder is still there
More than one camera	Sync or search each card	All cameras land in the same folders
Hand footage to a client	Export, upload, email	One share link

How Tabor8 sorts video footage by face

Here is what happens between the upload and the folders.

1. You upload the shoot. MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV and AVI files, straight from the camera or phone, with no conversion. Photos from the same event can go in with the video.
2. Tabor8 scans it. The software finds the faces in your footage and groups the ones that match. It only compares faces inside your own footage. It never works out who anyone is.
3. It cuts the clips. Each moment a person is on screen becomes its own clip file, not a timestamp you still have to cut yourself.
4. You get folders. One numbered folder per person. You type the names. Footage with no faces in it goes to its own folder, so your scenery and detail shots are not lost.
5. You fix what it got wrong. No face matching is perfect. You can merge two folders that are the same person, remove a clip, or delete a person.

From there you download a person's clips, a selection, or the whole project, and open them in the video editing software you already use. There is also a browser editor for a quick rough cut: trim, split, reorder and export.

To hand footage to someone else, you send one share link. They open it, view the clips and download them. They do not need an account.

A cloud video organizer, not another desktop install

Tabor8 runs in the browser. The scan happens in the cloud, so your own computer is free while it works, and the sorted footage is there from any device you sign in on. There is nothing to install and no graphics card to buy. We compare the two approaches in cloud and desktop video tools.

Who this is built for

We built Tabor8 for people who film a lot of faces and get paid to find the right ones fast.

• Wedding videographers. Guest reels, family requests and vendor clips without another pass through the footage.
• Event and conference videographers. Speakers, sponsors and exhibitors each want the footage of themselves. One conference becomes a folder for each of them. See how to find anyone in event footage.
• Fashion and runway shooters. A reel for each model, each designer and each look.
• Sports videographers. Every clip of one player, ready for a highlight reel. More in highlight reels for sports videographers.
• Corporate video teams. Find the chief executive, the award winners or one staff member across a full day of filming.

There are more examples on the use cases page. If you are weighing up footage organizer software, choosing a tool lists what to look for, and the AI video organizer page covers the category.

The film, word for word

For anyone who would rather read than watch, this is the full narration.

"So you've just filmed a fashion show with tons of faces, tons of models, and now you're about to put it all together. Before you even touch your timeline, imagine having your entire catalogue's worth of shots already organised by each person's face.

So you just shot a fashion show, a runway, where you have gigabytes and tons of footage of different people at different moments in time. Now if you needed to make a reel for one particular model, showing off all the different outfits that they showed off that day, well, you'd just be able to open up their folder, and there you go, there's all their shots.

Or if you shot a wedding, and then the wedding vendors asked, can we add more shots of Grandma? Simple as that. We've got all Grandma's shots already there.

Save time on scrubbing, and more time editing, creating and getting paid more."

That last line is still the whole idea. Less scrubbing. More editing. See why videographers choose Tabor8, read the privacy notice for how face data is handled, or apply for beta access.

Questions people ask