Send a rough cut to a distributor.
What to send, who gets a link, and what security actually buys you.

Build one slate card, eight to ten seconds, black, before frame one. It carries the title, the date of the cut, the running time, and two short lists: what is locked and what is temporary. Then put the same two lists in the email, because the executive watching on a phone between meetings will skip the card.

Be specific about temporary. The words “temp music” are not enough on their own. Say which cues are temp and whether a composer is engaged. Say whether the visual effects are grey-box, previz or final, and how many shots are outstanding. Say whether the picture is graded, one-lit or straight from the camera. Say whether the sound is a stereo work mix and whether dialogue levels are final. A viewer told that the mix is temporary hears a temporary mix. A viewer told nothing hears a bad one.

If the film is under an embargo, put the date on the card as well as in the email. Most early press damage is not malice. It is somebody assuming the embargo had passed.

The last quality decision is really a framing decision. Most cuts that read as flat were watched on laptop speakers with a work mix. You cannot fix the speakers. You can write one line in the email saying the mix is a stereo work mix and dialogue levels are not final, which is the difference between a note about your sound design and a note about your scenes.

The reason is arithmetic. Eleven people on one link and a copy in the wrong place gives you eleven suspects and no way to narrow them. Eleven people on eleven links gives you one. A watermark, a forensic mark and a view log all resolve to a session, and a session is only useful if that session belonged to exactly one named person when you issued it.

Be honest with yourself about the cost, because this is where people quietly give up. A round of fifteen sales agents is fifteen links, fifteen NDAs matched to fifteen names, fifteen expiry dates, and fifteen rows in a document recording what was sent and when. Budget an afternoon for the first round and about an hour for each round after it. No product removes that hour. What a product can do is make each of the fifteen links carry its own identity so the hour pays out later.

It is also why the default sharing model of most video platforms does not fit this job. Vimeo’s help center describes an Unlisted video as one that “can be accessed and shared by anyone who has the video’s unique URL”. That is the vendor describing a transferable link, accurately. A transferable link is a fine way to show a finished film and a poor way to run a controlled round on an unreleased one.

The screen recording question deserves a plain answer, because it is the one people are sold hardest on. You cannot prevent a viewer recording their own screen in a browser. The specification usually invoked here is Encrypted Media Extensions, and the W3C’s own text says it plainly: “This specification does not define a content protection or Digital Rights Management system. Rather, it defines a common API that may be used to discover, select and interact with such systems as well as with simpler content encryption systems.” It is a way to talk to a protection system, not a protection system.

The rest of the browser surface says the same thing. MDN’s Screen Capture API page documents how a page asks the user to share a screen and the consent model around that, and documents no mechanism for a page to keep its own content out of a capture. The one output-protection lever a web application gets is a query asking whether keys would be usable at a given minimum HDCP version, and MDN describes that as a check about the connection between the machine and a display, run against a hypothetical key. It is a question, not a block.

So the honest position is this. Capture blocking on uncompressed.io belongs to the Vault’s native macOS path, where the operating system exposes that control to an application. It is not a property of a link you paste into an email, ours or anyone else’s. And a phone on a tripod in front of a monitor defeats all of it, everywhere, permanently. Plan for attribution and for consequences, not for prevention.

Read those two facts together and the conclusion is not dramatic, just clear. The link travels, by Vimeo’s own description. And the analytics that would tell you who watched are documented for logged-in team members, which the outside sales agent you sent it to is not. So on a plain unlisted link handed to a distributor you have a copy that can be passed on and a record that cannot name who passed it. For a finished film that is fine. For an unreleased one with a deal in play, those are the exact two things you needed.

One question is worth asking every time, in writing, before a link goes out: who inside your organisation will watch this. Get those names into the delivery record and issue them their own links. It takes a minute and it removes the conversation that otherwise begins with “we only shared it internally”.

A short film going to a festival with no commercial embargo needs none of the above. Send a link, be pleasant, get the screening. The worst case is a stranger watching your short a few weeks early, which is not a business problem. Spending your energy on watermarks there is spending it in the wrong place.

The friction is also real and it costs you viewings. Asking a busy sales agent to install a native macOS application to watch a rough cut will lose you some of them, and the ones you lose will not tell you why. That is a genuine trade, not a detail, and you should make it deliberately rather than because a feature list impressed you. As of 9 September 2026, Sundance’s own Submit page states no screener security requirement at all, so do not invent an industry rule to justify the friction. Ask the person you are sending to what their terms are.

Who genuinely needs the full programme: an unreleased feature with a sale in play, a project under a studio or streamer embargo, a film where a competitor knowing the content changes a negotiation, a round going out to more than a handful of parties at once, and anything where a leak reduces the price rather than merely embarrassing you. In those cases the hour of administration per round is cheap and the burn-in is normal.

The middle path is usually right. Run the ordinary recipients on a plain private link with one link per person, a short expiry and the paperwork done, and reserve the Vault native path for the two or three parties where the exposure is real, or for anyone who has already been careless with something of yours. If you want the full menu of controls with what defeats each one, that is in secure screener sharing.