Merge duplicate characters

Duplicates are normal. A script that calls someone MRS. HOLLIS early and MOTHER later produces two characters; so does a name change between drafts, or a typo in one scene heading. By the time anyone notices, both entries usually have work on them.

Merging is the fix, and the reason it exists is that deleting one would throw away its continuity.

What merging does

Merge one character into another. The target keeps its name and identity; the source disappears from the cast list.

Everything from both sides survives:

• Scenes are combined. The surviving character plays in every scene either of them did.
• Looks come across intact — each keeps its own photos, details and continuity scenes, and lands in the right department on the target.
• Scene photos and notes stay attached to the scenes they were taken in, under the surviving character.
• The quick image rebuilds from the combined set of photos.

Nothing asks you to pick a winner for the content. The only thing that "wins" is the name.

General looks fill gaps rather than combine

Each department's general look — the character's baseline appearance — is carried across per department, and the rule is different from everything above:

• Where only the source had a general look for a department, it comes across.
• Where both had one, the target's is kept and the source's is not merged into it.

So merging a character whose makeup baseline is filled into one whose makeup baseline is empty gives you the baseline. Merging two that both have a hair baseline keeps the target's — its photographs and its description — and the source's is dropped rather than appended.

That is the one place a merge can lose content, and it is worth checking before you commit: if the source has the better photographs or wording for a department the target has already filled in, copy them across first.

Which direction?

Merge into the entry you want to keep — the one with the name the production actually uses, and the one whose general looks you would rather keep where both are filled.

Everything else combines regardless of direction, so this is mostly a naming decision, not a data one.

Do it early

The cost of a duplicate is not the duplicate — it is the continuity that accumulates on both halves. Two characters with a handful of scenes each merge cleanly in seconds. Two with a shoot's worth of photos and looks merge just as cleanly, but by then someone has probably been photographing the wrong one for a fortnight.

The cast list is worth a proper read after the first import, and again after any revision that renames people.

The thing that is not obvious

Merging is not undoable. The source character stops existing, and while none of its content is lost, there is no button that splits them back apart.

If you are unsure whether two entries are really the same person, look at their scenes first. Two characters that appear together in a scene are not the same person, whatever they are called — that is the quickest disproof available.