How to collect client feedback on a video edit
send one link, and let them comment on the frame.

The reason this works is not the feature list. It is that nothing is asked of the person whose opinion you need. A client who has to make an account, pick a password, accept an invitation or wait for a 12 GB download will reply tomorrow, in a paragraph, from a phone. A client who clicks a link and sees the film playing replies now, at 01:14, with a circle around the lower third.

The rest of the job is a record. Six weeks later somebody will ask which cut was signed off and by whom, and the answer has to be a stored decision rather than a memory of a reply. That is the second half of the mechanism, and it is the half that email cannot do at all.

The two editor integrations are the reason the structure matters outside the browser. Both are downloadable, both pull the same notes, and both write markers colored by the done flag. The Premiere extension is signed by this studio. The mechanics of each are in the Premiere guide and the Resolve guide.

One film carries several versions. Approval is recorded against a specific version, with the name attached, rather than living inside a comment thread. The film itself sits in one of three states at any moment: reviewing, changes requested, or approved. Two versions can be compared side by side, either as a slide wipe or stacked, which is how you settle an argument about whether the new grade actually changed the thing that was flagged.

The detail worth knowing before you rely on any of this: posting a new note on an approved cut revokes that approval. It is a small rule with a large consequence. An approval badge that survives fresh notes is decoration, because it can be true and wrong at the same time. Here the state can only read approved while nobody is still writing on it, which is what makes the record worth quoting back to a client.

Read that table for your own situation rather than for a winner. If the people reviewing are colleagues who open the tool every day, per-member pricing is fair and Frame.io is the deeper product; the pillar guide walks through where it wins. If you already pay for Vimeo at Standard or above, its review links are included and adding a second tool for the same job is waste. If your reviewers are clients you will never see again after the campaign, a flat plan is the cheaper shape, and that is the case this product is built for.

One client, one round, one change. Call them. A tool that takes four minutes to set up and a client two minutes to learn is a loss against a two-minute conversation, and pretending otherwise would make this page an advertisement rather than an answer. The same is true for a cut you are showing to somebody sitting next to you.

The harder case is the client who will not open a link. They exist, they are often the one paying, and no product solves them. You handle that person by phone, take the notes yourself while they talk, and type them into the room afterwards so the record exists on your side. What you get from the room in that scenario is not their participation; it is the timecode, the marker in your timeline, and a version history you can point at when round four contradicts round two.

One honest limit on the film itself. There is no smaller rendition here, because nothing is transcoded on the way in or out. The client watches the exact bytes you uploaded, which is the entire point during a grade review, and the cost is that a weak connection buffers rather than dropping to a lower quality. Send a lighter export when the reviewer is on a train and the note you need is about pacing rather than color. When the notes are done and the yes is recorded, the delivery guide covers what ships next.