Video deliverables checklist
for a client project.

Audio is where a delivery list quietly stops being complete. The stereo mix is the obvious item and almost nobody forgets it, but it still needs its channel order named, because a swapped pair or an accidental mono sum is invisible in an edit suite and obvious on the client’s site.

Split stems are the second item and the one that turns into an argument. Dialogue, music and effects as separate tracks are close to free while the session is still open, and expensive once it has been bounced, flattened and archived. Ask at the quote whether the client needs them. If the answer is that they might, price the conform now rather than absorbing it later.

The third item is the loudness target, and it is the one this page will not put a number on. Broadcasters, cinema, streaming services and social platforms each publish their own target and their own true-peak ceiling, and they do not agree with one another. The destination dictates the number, so get it in writing alongside the rest of the spec, mix to it, and state on the delivery which target you mixed to. A mix delivered without that line gets normalised by whatever it lands in, and the client hears a film you did not make.

Captions are a separate deliverable from audio, and they are a file, not a burn-in, unless someone specifically asked for a burn-in. Captions here download as .srt and .vtt, and only those two formats. They are generated by a speech-to-text model, which means they are a first pass and not a delivery: the owner edits them before anything ships, and a reviewer can submit a correction for the owner to apply. Generation is metered in minutes per month by plan, and the free Starter plan includes 20 minutes a month. One deliberate limitation is worth knowing before you plan a workflow around it: a master held in the vault refuses caption download. Captions for client work goes through the editing pass in detail.

Music licence documentation is the item most likely to come back. A licence has a term, a territory, a set of permitted media and an invoice, and a client who repurposes the film into a paid campaign two years later is relying on paperwork they may never have been sent. Deliver the licence itself, not a line in an email saying the track is cleared. If the licence excludes broadcast, or expires, or covers one territory only, say so in the delivery note in one sentence. That sentence is cheaper than the conversation it prevents.

The project archive is an ownership question disguised as a storage question. Name who holds the project file, media, LUTs, graphics, fonts and audio session; name for how long; name what a restore costs. If the client is paying for the archive, they should be told where it is. If you are holding it as a courtesy, say that it is a courtesy and give it an end date, because an unstated courtesy becomes an assumed obligation.

The approval record is the one deliverable that is entirely yours to produce and the one most often left as a chat thread. It answers a single question: which cut was approved, by whom, and on what date. Without it, a revision request that arrives after delivery has no baseline, and the argument about whether it is a fix or a new round has no evidence on either side. In a review room the approval is recorded per version and by name, and the film sits in one of three states: reviewing, changes requested, or approved. Posting a new note on an approved cut revokes that approval, which is the behaviour you want, because an approval that survives new notes is not a record of anything.

Two habits make the rest of it easier. Bump the version for every export the client sees, so a note and the frame it points to never drift apart. And treat each cutdown as its own film with its own link and its own approval, because a sign-off on the long form is not a sign-off on a shorter edit that someone still had to make choices in. Delivering social cutdowns covers that half, and the studio handoff covers what happens to the master itself.