Review and approval
Timecoded video comments:
the note is attached to the frame, and it travels into your timeline.
A timecoded comment is not a sentence with a number in it. It is a record stored against the film at a position in seconds, with a done state, a round it belongs to, and a route into your edit as a marker. Here is what that buys you, what it costs the person reviewing, and the one case where an email is still the faster move.
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Updated September 2026
What it stores
A timecoded note is a record,
not a sentence with a number in it.
The phrase gets used loosely, so it is worth being exact about what is stored. A note here is written against the film at a position measured in seconds. The position is a field on the note, not text inside it. Everything useful follows from that one design decision.
A position, in seconds
The note knows where it belongs on the film. Opening it seeks the player to that moment, the list sorts in playback order rather than in the order people happened to type, and the same number is what a timeline marker is written at later. Nobody reads a time out of a sentence and scrubs for it.
A drawing on the frame, optionally
The reviewer can draw on the image and the drawing is saved with the note. That removes the hardest part of written feedback, which is describing which thing on screen is being talked about. A circle is unambiguous in a way that the lower third on the left never is.
A thread, and a done flag
Replies attach to the note, so a question about a note does not become a second conversation. Each note carries a done state, which is what turns a pile of reactions into a list you can work down and close. The round is finished when the last flag is set, not when the replies stop.
A round it belongs to
Notes group into review rounds. Round two is its own set rather than more messages appended to round one, so nobody has to work out which of forty notes were already addressed last week. Approval sits alongside this, recorded per version and by name.
None of that is exotic. It is simply the difference between feedback stored as data and feedback stored as prose. Prose has to be interpreted by whoever reads it, every time it is read, and the person doing the interpreting is always the editor.
What editors actually receive
Four other ways notes arrive, and
each one loses something specific.
Almost nobody starts with a review tool. Notes arrive as a paragraph, a phone call, a spreadsheet or a screen recording, and all four are free and all four work well enough once. The question is what each one fails to carry, because that failure is paid for in your hours rather than theirs.
The email paragraph. The cost is ambiguity about the frame. A line that reads “around 1:42, the thing with the door” is a search task handed to the editor: scrub, find the door, decide whether the note is about the cut point, the sound or the grade. There is also no state on any of it. When you have worked through six of nine notes, the only record of which six is your own memory, and the email looks identical to how it looked before you started.
The phone call. The cost is that nothing survives it. You take notes while the client talks, which means the record of the round is your transcription of somebody else’s live reaction. Nothing is timecoded because the client was not watching with a timecode in front of them, nothing can be marked done because there is no shared list, and when round two contradicts round one there is no artefact to point at.
The spreadsheet of times. This is the serious client’s attempt to do it properly, and it is a real improvement. The cost is that the times were typed by hand from whatever player the reviewer had open, so they drift by a second or two, and they are relative to a file rather than to your sequence. The done column only works if somebody maintains it, which means two people editing one document and a version of the document per round. It also does not travel: a column of numbers is retyped into the timeline like any other list.
The screen recording. Precise while it plays and useless afterwards. The timecode is inside the video rather than in text, so you cannot sort the notes, count them, mark one done or hand three of them to an assistant. A ten-minute recording of a two-minute film has to be watched at least twice, and the second round arrives as a second recording.
All four of the other methods are free and all four work. The rows are not a scorecard of effort for the reviewer; they are what each method asks of the editor after the note arrives. For one change on one cut, the email wins outright, because opening anything at all is the slower move.
Not a differentiator, and worth saying so
The payoff
The note arrives in your timeline,
not read out of a browser.
A note that lives only in a browser tab gets retyped into a notepad, and things get missed in the retyping. The point of storing the position as a number is that a program can put the note where it belongs without a human reading it. That is what the panel and the script do.
Install the panel or the script
A Premiere Pro panel and a DaVinci Resolve script are both downloadable. The Premiere panel is a signed extension, which is what lets it install as a normal panel rather than as a folder you drag somewhere and hope about.
Point it at the room
The panel pulls the room's notes over the network. It is reading the same notes your client left, in the same order, at the same positions, so there is no export step and no file to keep in sync.
Get native markers, colored by state
Each note is written as a native timeline marker at its position. Red means the note is open, green means it has been marked done, so the state of the round is legible on the timeline without opening anything. Work the reds.
Refresh without collateral damage
The panel tags its own markers. On a refresh it updates those in place and leaves every marker you set yourself untouched, so pulling the latest notes mid-edit is safe rather than something you do once and then avoid.
Two honest limits on this. The marker carries you to the frame and to the note; the drawing the reviewer made stays with the note in the room, which is where you look at it. And the Premiere panel’s signature is our own, which is what makes it install cleanly, rather than any kind of endorsement from Adobe. The Premiere Pro walkthrough and the Resolve walkthrough cover the install and the refresh step by step.
When not to bother
For a one-note change, send the email;
timecoded notes earn their keep from round two.
If the client has one change, and it is unmistakable, an email is faster than opening anything. Write the sentence, send it, cut it, done. Uploading a version, sending a link and asking somebody to click into a room is more process than a single change deserves, and pretending otherwise is how tools get abandoned in week three.
The arithmetic flips at the second revision round. That is the point where you need to know which of last week’s notes were addressed, which are still open, which cut each note was written against, and who said yes to what. Every one of those questions is free when the answers were stored as fields and expensive when they were stored as prose. It flips harder again when more than one person is reviewing, because two paragraphs from two people about the same three seconds are indistinguishable in an inbox and are two notes at the same position in a room.
The other honest limit is that a timecoded note is a note about a moment. Feedback about the whole film, the brief or the direction is not improved by being pinned to a frame, and pinning it there tends to hide it. Send that in prose, in the same email you were going to send anyway, and keep the room for the things that have a position. The review and approval guide covers the rest of the workflow: versions, approval records and what happens to the files after the yes.
Questions
Frequently asked
What makes a comment timecoded rather than just mentioning a time?
Where the number lives. In an email the time is inside the sentence, so a human has to read it, interpret it and scrub to it. Here the position is stored as seconds against the film itself, as a field on the note rather than as text in it. That is what lets the note be sorted in playback order, seek the player when you open it, and be written out as a marker at that exact position.
Does the client need an account to leave a timecoded note?
No. The share link is the authentication: no account, no password, no invitation to accept, and a reviewer never consumes a seat on any plan. This is not unusual in the category. Frame.io, Filestage and ReviewStudio all let outside reviewers comment without signing up, and any tool that fails this test should be struck off your list rather than argued with.
Can the reviewer point at something rather than describe it?
Yes. A reviewer can draw on the frame and the drawing is saved with the note, so a circle around a lower third replaces a paragraph trying to say which lower third. Replies thread underneath the note, so a question about a note stays attached to that note instead of starting a second conversation somewhere else.
What stops round two from being confused with round one?
Two mechanisms. Every note carries a done flag, so a closed note is visibly closed rather than buried under later replies. And notes group into review rounds, so the second pass is its own set rather than an addition to the first one. The round closes when the last open note is checked off, which is a state you can look at rather than a feeling you have.
Do the notes come into Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve?
Yes. A Premiere Pro panel and a DaVinci Resolve script are both downloadable, and both pull the room's notes over the network and write them as native timeline markers at the right position. Open notes are red, notes marked done are green, so the state of the round is visible on the timeline without reading anything.
Will the panel touch the markers I set myself?
No. The panel tags the markers it creates, and on a refresh it updates only those. Markers you placed yourself are left exactly as they are, which is the difference between a tool you can run mid-edit and one you run once at the start and never again.
Does leaving a note after approval change anything?
It does, deliberately. Approval is recorded per version, by name, and posting a new note on an approved cut revokes that approval. It stops a film sitting in an approved state while an unread note contradicts it, and it means the approval record is worth something six months later when somebody asks which cut was signed off.
Send one cut and watch where the notes land
Timecoded notes, drawings on the frame, threads, done flags and rounds are on every plan, including the free one. The person reviewing needs no account and never costs a seat.
Sources
- 1.Frame.io pricing: share links for outside collaborators (share links do not require outside collaborators to sign up or log in; fetched 8 September 2026)
- 2.Filestage pricing: unlimited reviewers ("Unlimited reviewers" and "They don't need to make an account to give feedback"; fetched 8 September 2026)
- 3.ReviewStudio pricing: guest reviewers ("All our plans allow you to share your Reviews with an unlimited number of guests"; fetched 8 September 2026)