Actor Face Swap for Film and TV Work
Drop a headshot in as the source and a scene still or a clip as the target. The actor face swap engine reconciles head angle, lighting direction and skin tone frame by frame.
Putting a face into footage that does not exist yet is an old production problem. Art departments have solved it with paint, prosthetics, photocopies and, for the last twenty years, a compositor billing by the hour. An actor face swap collapses that step into a single upload: you hand the model a headshot, you hand it the frame you want that head in, and it rebuilds the face region until the join disappears. It is not a finished shot. It is the picture you needed half an hour ago, while the argument about the lead was still circling.
The angle on this page is production work rather than novelty. A headshot is lit flat, shot against a grey seamless, framed dead centre and graded for print. A scene still is none of those things: practical light from one side, grain, a three quarter turn, a grade pushed towards teal. Every actor face swap here has to bridge those two worlds, and that bridge is exactly where cheaper tools give up and hand back a bright oval floating on a dark neck.
Read this part closely, because it decides what the tool is for. There are no preset faces here and no library of real people to choose from. You upload the source face and you upload the target, so every actor face swap that leaves this page is one you assembled and one you answer for. That is a deliberate constraint rather than a missing feature, and it is the line between a previsualisation tool and a machine for dropping strangers into pictures they never agreed to.
What an Actor Face Swap Has to Get Right
Headshot into a lit plate
The most common actor face swap in production carries a studio portrait into a frame from an existing show. The engine relights the transplanted face to the target's key and fill, instead of pasting a flat print exposure onto a moody interior.
Clips, not only single frames
Feed it an MP4 up to 100MB. Every frame gets its own detection and blending pass, so the result survives a head turn or a dolly move. A video actor face swap costs 30 credits and normally lands in one to five minutes depending on clip length.
The whole FaceFusion parameter set
The advanced panel exposes the real controls: swapper model and weight, pixel boost, detector model, size, score and angles, landmarker choice, selector mode and reference position, occluder and parser models, mask types, regions, blur and padding, plus output encoder, scale, FPS and quality. A difficult actor face swap is usually one parameter from working.
Enhancers for archive footage
Toggle face enhance to run a restoration model over the swapped region and recover skin texture the codec threw away. Add frame enhance to upscale the whole plate. Neither costs extra credits, only extra minutes, and both keep an actor face swap photographic.
Nothing leaves your account
Uploads land in presigned private storage scoped to your account, and every actor face swap stays in your own job history. Unreleased casting material is never published, shown to other users, or fed back into training data. Downloads carry no watermark on any plan.
An Actor Face Swap in Three Steps
Upload the headshot
Pick a sharp, front facing shot of the face you are casting. One face in frame, both eyes clear, no sunglasses. Detail in the source drives the whole actor face swap, more than resolution anywhere else.
Upload the plate
Add the scene still or the clip you want that face to sit in. Images up to 10MB, video up to 100MB. The target fixes the pose, the lighting and the framing.
Render and download
Press swap and watch the credit counter. A still actor face swap costs 10 credits and returns in seconds, while a clip runs one to five minutes. Preview it, then pull the full resolution file.
Every account starts with 10 welcome credits and picks up 10 more each day, which covers an actor face swap or two before a paid plan is worth it.
Where This Earns Its Place
An actor face swap is a format, not a purpose. These are the jobs it genuinely does, and every one of them starts with material you already hold the rights to.
Casting mockups
Three shortlisted headshots, one scene still, three versions of the same frame. A casting actor face swap answers the question a mood board only gestures at, and it answers it before anyone books a camera test.
Look tests and continuity
Try a period haircut, a scar, an ageing pass or a wig against real set lighting instead of a white studio wall. An actor face swap gives hair, makeup and costume something concrete to argue with.
Character recasting
Sequels, reshoots and long running series all outlive their casts. Placing a new face into an existing frame shows a producer what a recast costs visually, well before the decision reaches a budget meeting.
Showreels and pitch decks
A reel needs the performer inside the genre they are pitching for, and a deck needs one page that reads as a film. An actor face swap into a frame you built beats shooting a scene nobody has funded.
Fan edits and parody
Recasting a favourite scene out of comment or affection is the oldest use of this format. Keep the intent legible, label the file as edited, and it sits inside a tradition far older than the software.
Getting a Result That Survives a Grade
Match the angle before you touch anything else
The strongest predictor of a usable actor face swap is the angle between your two faces. Headshots are shot square to camera and scene stills rarely are. Hand the model a frontal portrait and a three quarter turn, and it must invent a cheek and an ear it has never seen. Invented geometry is what a director notices without naming it. Spend two minutes finding a source in roughly the target's pose, and most of the troubleshooting below never happens.
Expression carries almost as much weight in an actor face swap. A wide open smile grafted into a closed mouth plate gives you a jaw that disagrees with the lips, because the process replaces the face region and inherits the target's mouth interior. If the plate catches a line of dialogue, a still portrait will fight you. Pull a frame off a self tape instead, or soften the join with mask blur and keep the shot wide.
Resolution works in both directions
Everyone assumes bigger is better, then pairs a six thousand pixel headshot with a 720p grab off a screener. The mismatch buys nothing, because the swapped region is resampled down to the plate and the extra detail gets discarded. What helps instead is a source where the face fills a decent share of the frame. Four hundred pixels of face in a modest photograph beats a hundred and twenty pixels of face in an enormous one, every time.
When the plate is the weak link, that is what the enhancers exist for. Face enhance rebuilds texture inside the swapped region and frame enhance lifts everything around it, so a finished actor face swap does not sit suspiciously crisp inside soft archive footage. Both cost processing time rather than credits. The one good reason to leave them off is deliberate: you want the grain of the original plate, because the grain is the look.
When it looks wrong, change one parameter
A visible seam along the hairline or under the jaw of an actor face swap means the mask is too tight, so raise mask blur and the transition softens. A face that reads as pasted on rather than lit by the room means the lighting gap was too wide, and no slider repairs that after the fact. Go back and find a source shot under comparable conditions. Correcting light downstream is the most expensive habit in this workflow.
If the engine grabs the wrong person in a crowded plate, switch the selector out of many faces mode into reference mode and set the reference position to pin it to one head. On a clip, an actor face swap that flickers between frames usually means the detector score sits too high for that footage, so drop it slightly and let the model track through motion blur. Change one thing per render, or you never learn which change worked.
A Thirty Second Check Before You Spend Credits
Nearly every disappointing actor face swap traces back to the input rather than the model. The engine is FaceFusion running on RunPod GPUs, the same code professionals bench against, and it does not quietly get worse between one render and the next. What changes is the material handed to it.
Run this list before you commit credits to an actor face swap. It takes half a minute, and it saves the three or four wasted renders most people burn while learning these lessons the slow way, usually on a deadline.
- Source headshot is sharp, frontal and unobstructed
- Head angle in the source roughly matches the plate
- Expressions agree, especially open or closed mouths
- Key light falls from a similar direction in both
- Target is under 10MB for stills or 100MB for video
- You hold rights to both files and consent for the face
The Rules, Because This Part Matters
There is no roster of real people on this page and there never will be. The source face is always something you upload, which means every actor face swap made here is authored by you and answered for by you. Sexual content built on a real person's likeness without their consent is prohibited outright, with no exception for how private the file stays. So is any output engineered to pass as a genuine unedited photograph or recording of an event that never happened, which is a separate matter from an edit that reads as an edit.
What the format is for is parody, commentary, fan work, pitch and production material, and your own likeness. Label edited media as edited once it travels past the people who watched you make it. The legal ground is moving quickly too: likeness and publicity rights, non consensual intimate imagery statutes and election related synthetic media rules now carry real penalties in a growing number of jurisdictions. Accounts used to harass, sexualise or defraud a real person lose access, and takedown requests from the people depicted are honoured.
Actor Face Swap Questions
Is the actor face swap free?
Every account gets 10 welcome credits once, then 10 more every day at no cost. A still costs 10 credits and a clip costs 30, so a daily look test is covered while heavier production use needs a paid plan. No output carries a watermark on any plan.
Can I pick a working performer from a list?
No. There are no presets, no name tagged thumbnails and no library of public figures. You upload the source headshot and the target yourself. That is a design decision we intend to keep, not a feature still sitting in the backlog.
How long does a clip take?
Usually one to five minutes, driven by length and frame rate, because every frame gets its own detection and blending pass. The page polls while a video actor face swap runs and gives up at fifteen minutes. Long or high frame rate footage sits at the slow end.
What can I upload?
The source face has to be an image. The target can be an image up to 10MB or a video up to 100MB. Common formats work: JPEG, PNG and WebP for stills, MP4 and MOV for video. Anything else is rejected before it costs you credits.
Is unreleased material safe here?
Uploads go to presigned private storage only your account can reach, and the results of each actor face swap stay in your job history for you to download. Nothing is published, surfaced to other users, or used to train the model.
Why does my actor face swap look fake?
In order of likelihood: the head angles disagree, the source face is too small in frame, the light arrives from different directions, or the mask blur is too tight for the hairline. Work down that list one render at a time before opening the rest of the advanced panel.
Can I use the result commercially?
That depends on the rights behind both files rather than on the tool. A headshot you shot or licensed, placed into a plate you own, with the performer's written consent, is yours to use. Anything short of that needs a lawyer rather than a slider.
Other Face Swap Tools
The same actor face swap engine, pointed at a different kind of source material.
Start Your Actor Face Swap
Upload a headshot and a plate, and today's free credits cover your first actor face swap.
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