uncompressed.io vs NAGRA NexGuard
Forensic watermarking, without the sales call.
NAGRA’s NexGuard is the specialist enterprise incumbent in this category, and it deserves to be read straight: a dedicated forensic-watermarking product, sold the enterprise way — no published pricing, every button on the product pages a contact form. This page is about the other route to the same category of capability: an invisible, per-person forensic watermark at a published flat price, self-serve today, inside the review platform your clients are already in.
How ours works
Two watermarks on every frame. One traces to a person.
Vault a master and every stream of it carries a visible session mark — the viewer’s identity burned into the frame — and an invisible forensic one: a per-person fingerprint woven into the pixels themselves, with no overlay to crop out.
The session mark — visible, in the frame
The forensic mark — invisible, per person, in the pixels. Nothing to screenshot here: that is the point.
When a copy leaks, here is the trace.
A copy leaks
A file surfaces somewhere it should not be — re-encoded, downscaled, recompressed, maybe re-graded. The marks are built for exactly that abuse.
Align it against your master
The leaked file is lined up against the master you vaulted. No special export was needed — every vault stream already carried the mark.
Read the mark out
The invisible per-person fingerprint is recovered from the frames. Even if up to three recipients combined their copies to wash it out, the trace still points to one of them.
One person, bounded doubt
The readout identifies a single recipient, with a mathematically bounded false-accusation rate — and the tamper-evident audit chain corroborates who had access, and when.
The mark is one layer. The vault is five.
Forensic watermarking works best when it is the deterrent of last resort, not the only control. A vaulted master goes dark on the web — no playback, no share page, no download — and review happens in the macOS app, wrapped in all of this:
Invisible forensic watermark
A per-person fingerprint on every vault stream — no visible overlay. Survives re-encoding, downscaling, recompression and a re-grade; collusion-resistant up to three combined copies; mathematically bounded false-accusation rate.
Session watermark, burned in
The viewer's identity on every frame — in the frame, not overlaid on a page. This is the answer to the one attack no software can block: a phone pointed at the screen.
Screen capture blocked at the OS
The playback window is excluded from the capture stream itself — screenshots, QuickTime, ScreenCaptureKit, Zoom and Teams shares all composite black, fullscreen included.
AES-256-GCM encrypted at rest
Footage is stream-encrypted as it arrives on the viewer's machine, with a device-bound key. There is never a plaintext copy of your file on their disk.
Short-lived signed links
Signed URLs expire in minutes, so a forwarded link is dead long before it reaches anyone it was not meant for.
A tamper-evident audit chain
Sign-ins, opens, plays and capture attempts are recorded in a SHA-256 hash chain — each entry sealed against the one before it. Altering a record breaks the chain, detectably.
The honest edges
What we do not claim.
Security marketing rewards overstatement, which is exactly why it is worth being precise about the edges. On a forensic-watermarking page, precision is the product.
Nothing stops a camera pointed at a screen. Capture blocking defeats software recording; it cannot defeat physics. And a phone-of-screen capture degrades the invisible forensic trace from evidence to investigative-lead grade. That is what the visible session watermark is for — it converts an unpreventable leak into an attributable one.
A downloaded original is not marked. When you allow a download, the file that leaves is your file. It is attributable through the tamper-evident audit chain — who pulled it, when — not through a watermark.
Collusion resistance has a stated bound. The mark is validated against up to three recipients combining their copies to wash it out — the trace still points to one of them, with a mathematically bounded false-accusation rate. We state the bound rather than implying infinity.
FairPlay DRM is still on the roadmap, not shipped. When a vendor lists a feature you cannot test, assume it is a slide. Everything above is in the product today, and you can verify it yourself in about a minute: vault a clip, then try to screenshot it.
How this is normally sold
The capability is real everywhere. The price is a negotiation.
Hollywood-grade forensic watermarking is normally an enterprise purchase. NexGuard publishes no pricing at all — every CTA on the product pages leads to a contact form, and buying means talking to sales. Frame.io gates its own forensic watermarking behind Enterprise Prime, which is also quote-only. Vault publishes the number.
Read from vendor pages, August 2026. NexGuard: no public pricing of any kind on the NAGRA product pages — all CTAs lead to a contact form. Frame.io: forensic watermarking and DRM-based capture blocking are Enterprise Prime only, and the session watermark is an Enterprise Select paid add-on — all quote-only tiers. The wider secured-review field — MediaSilo, Flow Capture — is on the security page.
The published-price route
One number, everything included.
Vault is $250 a month, additional seats $175 a month — 2 TB hot and 2 TB cold storage included, each extra seat adding 1 + 1. No sales call, no quote, no minimum seat count, and you can verify every claim on this page yourself before paying anything.
THE VAULT
For the masters nobody sees before their time
Vault a master and the web goes dark: no playback, no share pages, no downloads. Review happens in the dedicated macOS app — the file sits encrypted at rest (AES-256, device-bound key), the window is excluded from screen captures and Zoom/Teams shares, and every frame carries two watermarks that trace to a person: a session mark, and an invisible forensic one that survives re-encoding — even when copies are combined to wash it out (validated to three combined copies).
- ✓End-to-end encrypted vault — device-bound key
- ✓Secured review in the macOS app only
- ✓Screen-capture and recording blocking
- ✓Session watermark on every frame
- ✓Invisible forensic watermark — per person, collusion-resistant
- ✓Live-from-camera ingest (cameras that support Wi-Fi or Ethernet)
- ✓Team seats — each with their own identity, their own watermark
Inside the review platform
Not an integration project. A tier of the tool you review in.
The watermarking lives inside the same platform that carries dailies, review, colour and final delivery — and securing the footage does not lower its quality. Vault review happens in the macOS app, which plays camera originals natively — R3D, BRAW, N-RAW, and ProRes up to 8K 4:2:2 HQ at 60 fps — while the Hollywood review suites hand your client a proxy.
uncompressed.io — R3D, BRAW, N-RAW, ProRes up to 8K 4:2:2 HQ at 60 fps
Frame.io — 4K H.264 proxy playback, maxes out at
Vimeo Enterprise — 4K re-encode, maxes out at
The uncompressed.io macOS app plays RAW camera masters at their full data rate — against the proxy ceilings of the Hollywood review suites, August 2026.
Timecoded comments, drawings on the frame, versions and formal approvals are the same platform too — the review room runs on the master itself, and the vault is the switch you flip when a project must not leak.
Questions worth precise answers.
What is forensic watermarking?+
An invisible, per-person mark embedded in the video frames themselves — no visible overlay. If footage leaks, the leaked file is aligned against your master and the mark is read out, identifying which recipient's copy it came from. On uncompressed.io, every vault stream carries one automatically: it survives re-encoding, downscaling, recompression and a re-grade, and it resists collusion — if up to three recipients combine their copies to wash it out, the trace still points to one of them, with a mathematically bounded false-accusation rate.
How much does NAGRA NexGuard cost?+
NAGRA publishes no pricing of any kind for NexGuard — every button on the product pages leads to a contact form, and buying means talking to sales. That is normal for the category: Frame.io also gates its forensic watermarking behind Enterprise Prime, which is quote-only. Vault takes the opposite position: $250 a month, published, everything included, additional seats $175 a month.
Does the invisible watermark survive re-encoding?+
Yes — it is built for what leaks actually endure: re-encoding, downscaling, recompression, a re-grade. It is also collusion-resistant: if up to three recipients combine their copies to wash it out, the trace still identifies one of them, with a mathematically bounded false-accusation rate.
How is a leaked vault copy traced back to a person?+
By aligning the leaked file against your vaulted master and reading the invisible per-person mark back out of the frames. Alongside it, every frame also carried a visible session watermark, and the tamper-evident audit log — a SHA-256 hash chain of sign-ins, opens, plays and capture attempts — shows exactly who had access and when. Together they turn an anonymous leak into an attributable one.
What does forensic watermarking not catch?+
Two honest edges. A phone camera pointed at the screen degrades the invisible trace from evidence to investigative-lead grade — the session watermark burned into the frame is the answer there. And a downloaded original is attributable through the audit chain rather than marked. Nothing stops physics; the system is built so an unpreventable leak is still a traceable one.
Do I need a separate integration to use it?+
No. Forensic watermarking is part of the Vault tier of the review platform itself — vault a master and every stream of it carries the per-person mark, alongside capture blocking, the session watermark, encryption at rest and the audit chain. There is nothing to integrate, no sales call, and no minimum seat count: subscribe, vault a clip, and verify the claims yourself.
The category, opened up.
If your organisation is scoping an enterprise deployment, NexGuard is the incumbent to talk to — respectfully, that market is theirs. If you want invisible per-person forensic watermarking on your masters today, at a price you can read before you buy, that is Vault.