pod docs

Using your own images, clips and audio

pod can shoot around what you already have — reference photos of your actors, finished clips, a recorded voice track — and you can swap real recordings into a film even after it's delivered.

Handing pod a folder of assets

Put whatever you have into one folder — photos of the people you want pod to design characters around, a finished clip you shot yourself, an audio file — and point pod at it. Two ways, both equivalent:

❯ produce "my thriller teaser" --assets ~/refs
  (or just say it in plain words)
❯ use the images in my refs folder for the teaser

You don't need to know the exact terminal path. If the folder lives somewhere ordinary — Desktop, Downloads, Documents — pod finds it by loose name, the same way it finds a screenplay PDF. Say "my refs folder" and it works.

The asset review: pod tells you its plan before anything renders

Before pod generates a single image, it shows you the asset review: every file in your folder, who or what pod thinks each one is mapped to, and what it will still generate for everything you didn't supply. Nothing is guessed silently — you see the whole mapping and you can correct it in plain words.

asset review — 3 files in ~/refs
  image-1.jpg  → mapped to: Meena
  image-2.jpg  → mapped to: (unassigned)
  clip-1.mp4   → will be used as-is
pod will generate: Ravi, Basti Street, all remaining locations
❯ image-2 is Ravi
  (remapping is just a sentence — "image-1 is Meena", "image-2 is Ravi")

That's the whole interface: name the file, name the character. pod updates the map and shows it again. When the mapping looks right, you approve and production continues — your images become the visual truth for those characters, and pod designs everything else itself.

Note: in a series, canon wins. If you drop in a new photo for a character who is returning from an earlier episode, pod will not use it — the approved face from the earlier episode keeps the role, so your character looks the same in episode 12 as in episode 1. pod tells you this plainly at the asset review rather than quietly ignoring the file. To actually change a returning character's face, redo the earlier episode that set the canon (see series & continuity).

What happens to each kind of file

Dubbing a real recording onto any shot — even after delivery

This is the house workflow for dialogue films: ship the film first with the AI performance (lips moving, dialogue spoken on camera — see talking to pod), watch it, and then replace the audio on any shot with a real human recording. You don't reopen production; it's one command:

❯ dub my-thriller --shot shot-03 --audio my.mp3
swapping audio on shot-03 · re-stitching the film…

pod swaps that shot's audio for your recording and re-stitches the whole film automatically. The rest of the cut is untouched. Record a line with your actual actor on a phone, drop the file on your Desktop, dub it in — done. (If you're typing this from outside the studio, prefix it with pod: pod dub my-thriller --shot shot-03 --audio my.mp3. Inside the studio's ❯ prompt, no prefix is needed.)

Not sure which shot is shot-03? The final screening gives you a shot map with timecodes, and takes <name> lets you browse every shot's takes. See fixing a finished film for the full toolbox.

Regenerating the voice-over

If the film's narration needs another pass — a different read, a script tweak you made after the wrap — regenerate the voice-over without touching the picture:

❯ vo my-thriller

Voice-over uses your optional ElevenLabs key from setup; if you skipped it back then, login re-runs the key wizard (see keys & setup).

A full dubbed version in another language

Once a film is finished, you can produce a dubbed version of the whole thing in a different language — the classic telugu-original, hindi-dub release pattern:

❯ localize my-thriller --language hindi

This works on a finished film: the picture stays as delivered, the speech comes out in the new language. If you want a film natively in a language from the start, say so in the brief instead ("90-second telugu teaser") or use --language when you produce — that's a different, earlier decision.

Where everything lives

Like everything pod makes, the results save only on your computer, under episodes/<name>/, with the finished film in 07-final/. Your original asset folder is yours and stays wherever you put it. Reference images you supply are sent to the generation service to make your footage — that's how AI generation works — but pod's makers never store your files (see privacy).

Tip: the cheapest way to get a consistent lead across a whole series is one good, well-lit reference photo per main character in your assets folder for episode 1. Episode 1's approved faces become series canon, and every later episode reuses them for free — nothing regenerates, nothing is spent.