How to Share a Screener Without It Leaking

The single biggest improvement is to stop handing anyone a copy. A file sent by WeTransfer, Dropbox or email is gone the moment it lands — you have no idea how many copies exist, where they are, or who has them, and no way to withdraw it. Every later precaution is decoration if the first step was to give the footage away.

Streaming-only review keeps exactly one authoritative copy, under your control, revocable at any moment.

No software can stop a phone pointed at a screen. Accept that, and change the incentive instead: burn the viewer’s name and session into the frame itself, so any recording — screen or camera — carries the identity of whoever was watching.

This is the most effective control on the list, and it is behavioural rather than technical. People do not leak things that are obviously traced to them. The watermark has to be burned into the video, though, not drawn over it in a web page, where it can be removed with an element inspector.

In a browser you cannot. There is no web API that prevents screen recording; anything claiming otherwise is detecting a recorder, not blocking one, and detection is trivially bypassed.

A native macOS app can, because the operating system will exclude a window from the capture stream entirely. Done properly, screenshots, QuickTime, ScreenCaptureKit and every video-call share composite black where the video is — including in fullscreen, which is the case most implementations miss, because macOS creates a new window for it that does not inherit the setting.

A share link that works forever will eventually be somewhere you did not put it. Signed URLs measured in minutes mean a forwarded link is usually dead before it arrives. Pair that with per-person access you can withdraw the moment someone leaves the project.

Test this yourself before trusting any tool: copy a share link, open it in a private window an hour later, and see whether it plays.

If footage does get out, the first question is who had access and when. A list of views is useful; a list that could have been edited afterwards is not evidence.

A hash-chained log — where each entry is sealed with a SHA-256 hash of the one before it — makes tampering detectable. Remove or alter an entry and the chain no longer verifies. That is the difference between a record you keep for yourself and a record you can put in front of a studio.

In uncompressed.io this is one switch. Vaulting a video takes it dark on the web — no playback, no share page, no download, no embed — and moves review into the macOS app, where capture blocking, AES-256-GCM encryption at rest, per-session watermarking, short-lived links and the tamper-evident log all apply together.

It is per-video, so the rest of your work still plays in a browser like normal. And because the app plays camera originals natively at up to 15,000 Mbps, the secured copy is the full-quality one — the same file you would grade and deliver from, not a locked-down proxy.