From search to screen: How Facial Recognition, DaVinci Resolve, and Automated Custom Actions accelerate content creation

See every face. Cut smarter. Deliver anywhere.

It’s always something urgent that throws off your day. A producer needs every clip of the quarterback from Sunday's game by yesterday. Your news director wants a montage of the mayor's appearances over the past three months. The brand team needs that executive's conference speech edited and distributed across six platforms before 5pm, GMT.

So you dig. You search. You scroll through terabytes of footage, manually scrubbing timelines, cross-referencing notes. You finally find what you need, wrestle it into your editing suite, cut something great, then… export, transcode, rename, and upload across publishing platforms, all while somehow remembering which version went where.

By the time you're done, half your day is gone, and you haven't even started on tomorrow's project.

Your workflow shouldn't work against you.  Every hour lost hunting, adjusting, or re-exporting is time not spent creating. Multiply that across a global team, and you start to lose business opportunities. Three new Iconik features now eliminate those gaps, creating a continuous flow from asset discovery to delivery.

Introducing three ways to move faster from idea to audience

Three powerful capabilities are now live in Iconik: Facial Recognition, DaVinci Resolve Integration, and Custom Actions in the Automation Engine.

Individually, each feature saves you time. Together, they create something even more powerful: a connected workflow that accelerates your media production engine.

Let's walk through realistic examples across industries that show how these three capabilities work together, and what they can unlock for your team.

The workflow: From search to screen

Step 1: Find every face in seconds with Facial Recognition

Gone are the days of manually tagging and logging every appearance of a person across thousands of hours of footage. Iconik's Facial Recognition detects faces in images and video across your entire media archive, wherever the original assets live. Iconik then creates profiles of the people it identifies for future uploads.

Think of it like the facial recognition you use in your phone's photo library, but built for professional media workflows. Once you confirm a face, Iconik links all appearances of that person together, making them instantly findable.

What this means for you: Type a name, get every photo and clip. No more scrubbing through hours of footage hoping you didn't miss something (or someone).

Real-world impact:

• Sports teams instantly pull every shot of a player for post-game highlight reels or scouting analysis
• News producers assemble story packages on recurring public figures in minutes instead of hours
• Corporate communications teams surface every appearance of executives for town halls, recruitment videos, or training materials
• Entertainment editors locate specific contestants or celebrities across hundreds of hours of raw footage
• Archivists unlock hidden value in legacy libraries by identifying recurring figures in historical content

Step 2: Edit with Iconik’s DaVinci Resolve integration

With Iconik's DaVinci Resolve integration, you can pull those neatly organized and identified clips directly into your timeline—metadata intact, no export-import dance required.

Open the Iconik panel inside DaVinci Resolve. Search for the person you need. Add them to DaVinci Resolve via the Iconik Agent. Drag assets into your timeline. Start cutting. All without leaving the edit suite.

Your editor doesn't need to think about where files live. They could be editing in New York while you're in London. The files could be on-prem, in a cloud bucket, or distributed across multiple storage locations. None of that matters. The complexity happens behind the scenes. The Resolve editor just pulls the files in and starts working.

When they’re done, your editor can render the finished edit and send it back to Iconik for review, collaboration, and the next phase of your workflow.

What this means for you: Less time wrangling files, more time shaping stories. Infrastructure complexity disappears, so editors can focus on craft.

Real-world impact:

• Context stays intact. Metadata travels with your clips, preserving crucial information about usage rights, shot types, or interview subjects; editors don't lose critical details when media moves between systems
• Access without overhead. Teams working with 4K, 6K, or 8K footage can pull exactly what they need
• Geography doesn't matter. Remote teams collaborate as if they're in the same room, accessing the same media regardless of physical location or storage infrastructure

The Davinci Resolve integration joins Iconik's existing deep integrations with Final Cut Pro and Adobe Creative Cloud products, giving editors flexibility to work in the tools they’re used to while staying connected to a single source of truth.

Step 3: Automate everything after "export" with Custom Actions in Iconik’s Automation Engine

Here's where things get interesting. You've found your clips with Facial Recognition. You've edited them in DaVinci Resolve. Now you need to deliver.

With Custom Actions in Automations, Iconik becomes the hub that triggers your downstream workflows automatically.

Think of it as your smart handoff, automating what comes next. When you click a Custom Action in Iconik, it sends information to another service, whether that's a transcoding platform, a CMS, a notification system, quality control software, or an archive destination. Whatever comes next in your workflow, Iconik kicks it off. 

And now, Custom Actions work inside Iconik's Automation Engine, the no-code workflow builder that lets you automate repetitive tasks without writing a single line of code. Just set your trigger event/s, choose your custom action as the automated response, and let Iconik handle the rest automatically. You could even connect your automated workflows to platforms like Zapier, Make, n8n, and more, extending your automations above and beyond what was possible before. 

What this means for you: Finished edits don't stall in handoff limbo. They automatically move directly into the next phase of production or distribution – no manual exports, no waiting.

Real-world impact:

Let's say you've just finished your DaVinci Resolve edit and need to distribute it once the export lands back in Iconik. You could set up multiple Custom Actions that automatically trigger once the file hits your Iconik collection:

• Trigger a HiScale workflow that transcodes the master file into multiple delivery formats (social media, broadcast, web)
• Push approved cuts directly to your content distribution network
• Send proxy versions to your marketing team's DAM
• Notify stakeholders via Slack or email that the final deliverables are ready

All of this happens automatically. No manual exports. No file wrangling. No waiting.

The outcome: From workflow chaos to creative flow

Individually, each feature saves time. Together, they connect the dots between discovery, editing, and delivery. The result? Fewer bottlenecks. Fewer manual handoffs. More time spent on the work that actually matters.

Smarter search. Native editing workflows. Automated delivery.

It’s the natural next phase for Iconik, as we develop into a single, intelligent ecosystem connecting every step of the content lifecycle.

The old way: Search here. Edit there. Review somewhere else. Distribute manually. Every handoff is a potential bottleneck, every transition an opportunity for something to get lost or delayed.

The new way: One platform. One flow. From the moment footage lands in Iconik to the moment it reaches your audience, everything stays connected. You find what you need faster, wherever it lives. You edit without friction. You distribute without having to spend time manually hit the triggers. 

The compound effect: Each feature saves you minutes. Together, they give you back hours that you can spend on your craft. The result isn't just faster turnaround. It's increased capacity. More content. Better stories. 

Who benefits?

These features make life easier for any team working with video. From sports to news, marketing to entertainment, and archives to enterprise media, every team that works with video moves faster when discovery, editing, and delivery live in one flow.

Start cutting time-to-story

The best way to understand how these features transform your workflow? Try them yourself.

Facial Recognition, DaVinci Resolve Integration, and Custom Actions in Automations are live in Iconik today. Whether you're looking to speed up discovery, streamline editing, or automate delivery, these tools give you the infrastructure to do it.

The fastest way to tell your next story starts here.

Discover how Iconik brings every face, every frame, and every workflow into one creative flow.

Start your free trial today.